Daughter of the Yashiro Commission's Kamisato Clan. Dignified and elegant, as well as wise and strong.
-- In-game description for Kamisato Ayaka in Genshin Impact.
Also known as the Shirasagi Himegimi, Kamisato Ayaka is one of the playable characters in the game Genshin Impact. Her banner just returned this patch, and I was lucky enough to invite her over to my team this time to experience for myself how does it feel to be like an Ayaka haver – and I’m pleasantly surprised that the experience is nothing short of amazing after playing with her for about two weeks. Even until now, I’m still somehow in awe for how she seems to be exactly the character that I wanted to play in the game, in a variety of ways. Hence, here’s this blog. A compilation of ideas and thoughts of mine on this character in Genshin Impact. Written and posted just before her banner is gone again for who knows how long. Well, it just got extended, but yep, this blog’s still fresh out of the oven!
This is not meant to be a guide, nor you should treat this as a guide (you think you should trust a guy who just played her un-optimally for around two weeks?). But I do explore some weird ideas that might or might not work with this character, and I didn’t get to try them all. Feel free to try around and tell me how they go! With that being said, let’s get started with the main contents of this blog.
*Note: Hope it isn’t too late, but this blog post contains a few big GIFs that might be annoying for readers constrained by bandwidth or data usage (all graphics combined, they take approximately 40 MB or more). If this annoys you, run – you can come back later!
It might sound strange, but I actually never thought of drawing for Ayaka from the start.
I started playing the game after Kokomi gets released, so I missed Ayaka’s first release (I think?). Throughout the six or seven months of me playing this game, I unavoidably had crafted a list of 5* characters that I wanted to have. The list includes Kokomi, Keqing, Venti, Ganyu, Xiao, and some others, but Ayaka was never on the list. I forgot why, but it’s most likely due to that I never saw her in any game-related media before, even though her first appearance was made very early on in the game's history. So, I never had any thoughts about her. Until recently.
This time, her banner came after her brother’s (Kamisato Ayato) and Venti’s banner, in the same patch. Originally, my plan was to draw for Venti because he’s cute, and continue to save for something in the future – maybe a Kazuha because he’s really broken even at C0, and as much as I don’t care about the meta (I levelled my Xinyan just for the sake of it, I guess this explains...), Kazuha and Venti are often the solution to many troublesome event challenges. So, for someone like me who wants to have an easier life reaping those freebies, that’s a natural choice. However, the first encounter with Ayaka in the main Inazuma storyline let me slow down and rethink a little on my choice on Venti...
...and after finishing her character storyline, I bought a welkin and waited for her banner. Long story short, I got mental diabetes from it. You can assume that it happened literally.
Fast forward a little, I got her immediately after her banner started. And here goes.
The first thing I did after getting her – after going through her list of voicelines in the character info section just like how I did for almost everyone I get – is to experience her alternate sprint.
I never pre-farm materials for anyone I’m trying to get, so when I got her, I have less than 10 Sakura Blooms in my inventory (which I accidentally got while exploring Narukami Island and finding my way through the Yougou Cleansing world quest). So, the obvious decision here is to start farming. When we think about farming, especially when it’s about open world material collection, Sayu is always a top choice, mainly thanks to her speedy rolling elemental skill (hold E) as it helps a ton on traversing the world, allowing you to quickly move from one collection spot to the other. Ayaka’s alternate sprint feels exactly like that, except that instead of being constrained by cooldown, you are constrained by stamina instead. Both Sayu’s rolling and Ayaka’s sprinting also share a same problem of frequently getting stuck on the most normal surfaces in the world. So, just like Sayu, Ayaka’s sprint can get stuck on stairs, tiny bumps, extremely tiny level differences that you can definitely just walk over normally if you aren’t sprinting, and many more. It’s somehow annoying, but it’s definitely not Ayaka’s fault.
To be frank, I would rate Ayaka’s alternate sprint to be more useful than Sayu’s rolling for material farming purposes, as Sayu’s E immediately goes into cooldown after you get stuck, but Ayaka’s sprint can be performed immediately for as long as you need to, as long as you have stamina. It is much more forgiving and flexible, but for the purpose of speed, obviously, I took both Ayaka and Sayu into the team. You can have the best of both worlds... Sayu can still roll when you don’t have stamina, eh?
Ayaka’s alternate sprint also has the cool trait of being able to traverse through water bodies while you are sprinting, and at the end of the sprint, it applies a unit of cryo around the ending area, and it does all the normal cryo things you would expect, including freezing water. So, while it can be a little tricky to perform (Ayaka always performs a little jump forward at the end of her sprint, and the distance is a little unexpectedly further than I logically expected), it is possible to let Ayaka stay on the ice she created at the end of her sprint with some WASD key pressing and continue to perform ice bridging from there. It is extremely useful in reaching remote islands or boats whenever you need to, all you need is just a little bit of practice :) and maybe luck.
There are also some other neat things that I like about her alternate sprint, but that’s for the next section... the section about the main “gameplay” in Genshin Impact.
As much as I hate to say it, a lot of gameplay in Genshin Impact is about the fighting. You pretty much need to fight things to complete most content in the game, be it fighting off some baddies in some storylines, defeating a pack of hilichurls for your daily commissions, or hunting a lot of mobs throughout the entire world for the materials your characters need to level (yes, I’m looking at the things that drop Handguards needed by Ayaka, they have some horrifyingly terrible drop rate). As much as I adore the exploration and lore part of the game, fighting is such a crucial part that it’s hard to overlook.
For me, it’s not just about the practicality (aka, damage) - I always appreciate it a lot when characters are fun to play in combat. Damage can only bring fun for so long before you crave for number inflation, and when you can’t inflate it anymore, it gets boring. Fun characters on the other hand can bring satisfaction for the little things you do right in fights, and it goes a long way. For example, Hu Tao encourages you to perform jump-based animation cancels (at least at C0) and gives very big rewards in terms of character control and stamina costs if you do it right. It only gets better after you master it, as you will be performing those cancels so swiftly that your charged attack looks invisible (it is really cool to see smaller enemies getting knocked back and dying to numbers popping up from literally nothing), and you can time and control your jump cancels in a way so that when you land, you exactly land on where the enemy is going to be after the knockback from your charged attack, or in a way so that you dodge a hit from another enemy as you jump. These small moments give tiny feelings of accomplishments that makes combat more than just “pressing things and enemies die”, and it encourages you to play better as you find your way to clear harder challenges and maximize fun on a character you love. Just trust me with this long paragraph – I really love it when characters are designed to have something like this, and I really mean it.
...and since you are reading this, it should be rather obvious that I am going to write about how Ayaka nails the fun part of battles really sweetly.
When I first started, I remember complaining about the game’s meta on attack string choices for each character. In Genshin Impact, every character has their own unique normal attack sequences, one or more charged attack patterns (Hu Tao, for example, has different charged attack animations for when her E is active or not) and a plunge attack pattern. Putting them together and you can get what we call as an attack string – a sequence of normal attacks typically followed by a charged attack (plunge attacks on the other hand are only considered in attack strings for very few characters, like Xiao), and we denote them in a format like “n4c”, which means 4 normal attacks in the normal attack sequence, followed by one charged attack. Different characters perform differently depending on which attack strings you decide to use, and that adds a lot of things to learn from this game – which are the better attack strings to use and what are the trade-offs between each other? So, instead of mashing the attack button, we ended up researching these attack strings to give us more advantage in the game. Which is, a good thing, right? Strategic value.
So, what am I complaining about? Turns out that, after the maths, a lot of characters that rely on left mouse button-related attacks only have one or two good attack strings to be used viably. We ended up just finding guides for those characters that we want to play, see what attack strings are good, and we just spam that throughout the entire fight. It gets the job done pretty well, and in fact, too well – the opportunity of going strategic with attack strings just goes poof like that.
But Ayaka is a little different.
Her attack strings’ scaling is weirdly balanced, with all of her attack strings that involve a charged attack at the end having really similar DPS values when we do the maths. Paired with her other design approach which gave her attacks deal multiple cuts instead of a single large number (which turns out to be a weakness, I’ll cover that later), Ayaka is actually free to use any and every of her attack strings in any moment of the fight. To make it better, all of those attack strings are useful in a way or two. There is n1c for quick, simple AOE coverage as well as field time filler while you’re waiting for those particles to catch up after using your elemental skill, n2c for decently quick single target attacking, n3c for pairing up your normal attacks with Xingqiu’s elemental burst procs, and n4c for more cryo application when you need it for shields as well as for when you run out of stamina, because n4c spends enough time in normal attack sequences that stamina can start to regenerate. Swapping different attack strings dynamically in a fight in response to what is happening is something you don’t get to do with every character, and that makes on-field Ayaka a really special experience.
The other thing that makes on-field Ayaka feels really fluid to play is her alternate sprint. Unlike normal sprints, her sprint does not suffer from hidden cooldowns. While with other characters you have to stop dashing after two consecutive dashes, characters with alternate sprints such as Ayaka allows you to use the right mouse button whenever you need to. She doesn’t get invincibility for most of the duration of her sprint (she only gets them for a brief moment after the initial cast), but that doesn’t affect a lot – you can just control your direction a little during the sprint and dodge things instead. It provides a different approach to how movement works in battles, and it puts you more in control, especially when you have a clear idea on how the battle should go. The little spin she performs at the end of each sprint is just the icing on the cake – are there any other more fitting animations for someone who confidently sprints straight into her enemies’ close contact range before getting a sweet cryo damage bonus and blowing them all away with the rest of her kit?
Ayaka’s elemental skill (E) is nothing too special (apart from having a terrifyingly high scaling for big numbers), but her elemental burst (the ultimate, or the Q) is what really defines Ayaka for many players, and I totally get why. It is a skill that deals 20 lines of damage in 5 seconds, with a total scaling of over 3.9k% damage at skill level 9. As a comparison, that is slightly higher than doing the n1c combo 10 times at the same skill level. Hence, it is crucial to land this ult properly, and sometimes it is really difficult to do so without the right member support, especially when the enemies are running here and there or they are just not grouped enough but still somehow close enough to all get destroyed by this one cast. Nevertheless, when you do land it, it is a special type of satisfaction – specifically when the enemy in question is frozen or disabled and they have to eat the whole package of it.
Considering how this ult is important, players typically build teams for Ayaka around supporting her to maximize her ult’s performance. The team typically has a cryo battery (Rosaria/Diona) or a cryo buffer (Ganyu/Shenhe), something to freeze the enemies to make them easier to handle as well as improving the 4-piece effects of the Blizzard Strayer artifact set (this normally means a hydro character such as Mona or Kokomi), an anemo character to gather the enemies together and reduce their resistance to cryo damage through the use of the Viridescent Venerer artifact set (this slot is often for Venti or Kazuha because they are so good at this), and lastly, Ayaka herself. Teams like this typically focuses on charging Ayaka’s Q up, freezing the enemies, debuffing (and maybe gathering) them, let Ayaka do her job, rinse and repeat until you’re done. Although this might be the most effective and the easiest way to play Ayaka to her max potential, it is undoubtedly a very expensive setup – an effective and intuitive team for this strategy really requires a lot of limited 5* characters, such as Venti and Kazuha. Without them doing the gathering... Really, it gets significantly less impressive.
Personally, I prefer to let my Ayaka stay on the field, doing her job with Xingqiu as a sub-DPS. Of course, the main reason is that I don’t have Kokomi trained, and without a gatherer, it makes little sense to invest so much on one ult cast (they normally just hit one or two big enemies and nothing else). I often find myself finishing fights faster by hunting those mobs on the battlefield one by one, DPS-ing them down with Xingqiu’s rainswords and Ayaka’s attack strings before moving to the next one and before I know it, they are all gone. Hence, normally, my team is just about Ayaka and Xingqiu, with the remaining two slots for whoever I need – sometimes it’s Zhongli for shield and resistance shred, or Ganyu for cryo damage bonus. In multiplayer where I can only take two members, it’s just this iconic duo. Never really goes wrong. Sometimes I also think about the possibility of using Yunjin as one of the buffers, so that with Zhongli I can get the buff from geo resonance, the normal attack buffs from Yunjin, and the resistance shred from Zhongli. It looks pretty good on paper as I tend to use the n3c combo on Ayaka so there is quite a bit of normal attacks and Yunjin should contribute decently there. However, as my Yunjin is also (!) untrained, I didn’t get to try that out. Would be great if someone can tell me if it is a good idea, though.
Since my team is still a freeze team, I use a 4-piece Blizzard Strayer artifact set. Pretty standard main stats (in fact, the exact main stats as what 
I once thought about using a Favonius Sword as well, since the stats aren’t exactly crappy and the energy recharge stat might be helpful. Luckily, I did not invest in a second Favonius Sword just for this, as it soon became very clear to me that Ayaka does not really need a lot of energy recharge, especially if she’s on-field for most of the time, which is exactly the case for me. With 50+% energy recharge stat solely from artifact substats and Amenoma Kageuchi’s passive effect, her ult frequently got fully charged before the 20s cooldown even runs off, and I didn’t even use a battery in my team. So, even if my team is not built around blowing away enemies with Ayaka’s elemental burst, I ended up being able to use it every time it came off cooldown anyway – the difference is just that since I don’t really use members that help me to effectively maximize the burst, I have to continue attacking on-field to keep up the DPS and maintain the freeze status on targets with Xingqiu’s rainswords after using her ult. It still works, kind of weirdly, but good enough until I build something else that I’m comfortable using.
At some point, me, just like a lot of other new Ayaka havers, thought about the possibility of melt-based Ayaka... maybe, a reverse melt-based Ayaka team? Does it work? And of course, being a nerd myself, I went and thought about it... it seems like, you can do it, it will work, but there is pretty much no reason to do so. And that is quite a weakness of Ayaka.
Some cryo DPS’ in this game can go two paths, the Blizzard Strayer path and the reverse melt path. For example, both Ganyu and Rosaria can pick either path and they can work well, just with different styles – picking Blizzard Strayer means going for a freeze path, which you comfortably freeze enemies and deal damage, while picking reverse melt means that you sacrifice the comfort of freezing in exchange for (probably) more personal damage coming from the melt reaction multiplier. Picking what to go for is mostly a preference issue, but for Ayaka, it doesn’t really work like that.
Mainly because... her important skills deal damage in multiple cuts instead of a single large number.
It matters quite a bit, because in Genshin Impact, there is often a limit to how fast reactions like reverse melt can occur, and how fast other elements can be applied to a target. The details are complicated (and if you are interested, I recommend the document from KeqingMains’ Theorycrafting Library), but in short, as an example, when Ayaka performs a charged attack, only one out of the three hits she performs will gain the reverse melt multiplier. For her elemental burst, out of 20 damage instances, only 7 or 8 lines will get the multiplier. It makes this idea suddenly super underwhelming – first, to play reverse melt, you need to give up the crit rate given by the Blizzard Strayer set and maybe use an artifact piece that gives crit rate as a main stat to cover it up, further losing a possible crit damage stat source. Next, you need a strategy to apply pyro very quickly to catch up with her cryo application speed for the reverse melt procs continue. Solutions are available, such as the Bennett + Jean pyro swirling combo or using Xiangling’s elemental burst with a lot of positioning effort and skill, but they are hardly worth it for the effort involved and member slots taken. Besides that, without freeze, there is indeed a very high chance that your target will just jump out of the area before the damage kills them. That’s quite a lot of things to take care and think about just to proc the reaction for less than half of the burst.
(But... I don’t know, you see, if someone were to use the Bennett + Jean combo to perform pyro application, they can also use Jean to apply the resistance shred debuff. Bennett buffs damage by a lot himself, and it is still possible to slot in a battery or another buffer for the last slot... logically speaking, with enough effort and a non-moving enemy, it might work? I really don’t know, go try that out if you want...)
Anyways, whatever that happens if you ever try it out, tell me about it. I don’t think it will end up being too good or even be barely usable for serious situations, but uh... yeah, I am interested in knowing, lol.
But on another thought, there is indeed a melt-based team that I can build with Ayaka, and it doesn’t suffer from the problems mentioned up there.
Look, I never said that Ayaka has to do the melting... Xiangling can do that instead and we end up with a team that looks pretty close to what a traditional national team is. The only difference here is that instead of Chongyun, we have Ayaka. It looks somewhat promising, and honestly is one of the teams that I am trying to fund up to try (my Xiangling is still suffering from her artifact crisis, so it will still take some time before the team becomes usable on my side). Maybe it will end up being disappointing, or just pointless, since it’s very likely that you will want to play Raiden National instead of something as wack as this, I’m not sure, but I personally don’t mind. If you are curious enough to try this out for me, do let me know!
With how Ayaka is dependent on freeze (and the Blizzard Strayer set), it makes her awkward against enemies where Blizzard Strayer’s 4-piece set only partially works (all boss enemies), or just straight up doesn’t work (all hypostasis enemies). I personally have not met much problems with these contents yet as I have enough firepower to clear them even without the bonus crit rate, but I can foresee myself having problems against them when I am trying out the deeper floors of Spiral Abyss. Personally, I think having a separate set of artifacts ready for such contents can be helpful for when the 4-piece effect of Blizzard Strayer stops working. For example, using a 2-piece Noblesse Oblige set for the elemental burst damage bonus seems to be better than having no crit rate bonus at all when fighting those hypostasis bosses. It’s just a thought, I actually never tried doing so to see if it’s worth it, but I think it’s part of the beauty of this game – there are no hard rules on what you can or cannot bring against which enemies. If something seems helpful, try it. By being wise, intelligent, skilled and with the help of some determination and willpower, you can pretty much do almost anything with any character you want.
And that is quite a summary of how I feel about Kamisato Ayaka.
Thank you for being willing to go through this absurd four-thousand-word piece of writing about a fictional character in a video game. I’m not sure how I made it, but I do enjoy writing it and am thinking of doing more similar things for other characters in the game. If there is a particular character in Genshin Impact that you hope to see me write about (and I happen to have them), tell me in the comments! I’ll see if I can figure something out for them. Xingqiu might be the next one (I also have a lot of thoughts about him, design wise), so maybe that will come next.
Special thanks to my friend who allowed me to use some of his recorded gameplay in this post for scenes that would otherwise be difficult for me to obtain myself due to the lack of characters, investment and computer specs. It really helped a lot! His gameplay might make other “guest appearances” in my future posts as well, so if you see some weirdly meta content with a UID label that is not mine, you know where it came from. Guy deserves better artifact luck for his effort, let’s wish him that!
That’s all for now, and hopefully we’ll meet again soon in the future.
Edit logs
2022/05/07 12:08 - Cropped off some unwanted UIDs, centered GIFs and smaller images.