Anomalies and Disorders

Anomalies are status effects (debuffs) applied to enemies after building up elemental damage and Disorder is what happens when you stack another status effect on top of the first one.

There's multiple anomaly types currently available:

• Burn (Fire) - Does DoT (Damage over time) damage for 10 seconds.
• Shock (Electric) - Does additional damage when you hit an enemy that's been shocked, lasts 10 seconds and can proc up to 10 times.
• Corruption (Ether) - Does additional damage when you hit an enemy that's been corrupted, lasts 10 seconds and can proc up to 20 times.
• Freeze (Ice) - Damages once using ‘’Shatter’’ and increases critical damage against frozen enemies by 10%.
• Assault (Physical) - Damages once using ‘’Assault’’ and increases daze buildup against enemies by 10%.

There's some things to keep in mind:

• Anomalies cannot crit,
• They don't accumulate Daze,
• They take character stats at the time of application,
• They are affected by enemy modifiers at the time of damage,
• They have internal cooldowns,
• They can be wasted if applied excessively.
• Character stats, buffs, and multiple characters contributing to the same Anomaly affect the damage calculations.

The stats that affect anomaly application speed are Anomaly Mastery, Anomaly Buildup Rate, and Anomaly Buildup Resistance. Applying the same Anomaly repeatedly on an enemy will gradually slow down the buildup speed.

There's multiple criterias that evaluate how much damage the Anomaly procs will do, for that i'd suggest watching Guobas video which explains it a lot more in detail and shows formulas.

Short version would be that it scales best from ATK%, PEN%, Anomaly Proficiency and Anomaly Master (for faster application), so if you want to skip all the details and just improve the damage done, then keep your eyes out on those stats.

Currently we don't really have anyone that would fully benefit from going full Anomaly build, so it's still best to keep using the normal crit build. There is a good possibility that in due time we will have units that have their kit basically built around Anomaly specifically, like Boothill and Firefly in HSR, who are built around ‘’Break’’.

Now here's the main catch with anomalies, ‘’Disorder’’, it's the bread and butter of ZZZ. The way it works is that if you apply a 2nd status effect aka debuff during a 10 second window, which then applies the 1st element disorder, so if you say applied Burn initially, and then added Shock, it will trigger disorder and activate ‘’Burn Disorder’’. For how much damage it does, this time I would definitely suggest checking out the video linked, but in short, it basically triggers the first applied elements procs instantly, like DoT explosion (so Burn, Shock and Ether only), and then it applies the 2nd status effect. It's a bit different for Freeze and Assault if you want to combine them, it still counts as disorder, but in this case they count as just 2 big hits, like ‘’Shatter’’ and ‘’Assault’’ just triggering one after another, which still is good, but does not bring as much damage as the DoT type status effects.