Setting Up Your 2026 Genshin Impact Build Workbook
A lot of people are building their own optimization spreadsheets for Genshin now. The ones circulating from the main communities tend to be either outdated or written by people who have never actually run through Spiral Abyss on a hard run. This is about setting something up that actually works when you open it at 11pm after pulling the new banner. It is a character build tracker and optimizer. You put in your artifact main stats, substats, weapon, talent levels, and constellation info. It calculates your effective HP, attack, defense, EM, ER, CRIT, and burst/damage multipliers based on the formulas that have been largely stable since version 4.something and carried through the current year. Then it compares sets and tells you which combination gives you the highest score for a given build role. The key thing people get wrong is thinking this is a one-time setup. The whole value comes from tracking improvements across patches. When you pick up a new artifact, you log it. When a balance patch changes a multiplier, you update the formula sheet. That is it.
Building the Spreadsheet from Scratch
Start with a blank sheet and create columns in this order: Character Name, Element, Build Role, Weapon, Weapon Level, Rarity, Constellation, Artifact Set, Piece-by-Piece Main Stats, Piece-by-Piece Substats, Talent Levels (Normal, Skill, Burst), Team Composition, and then calculated fields for Total ATK, Total DEF, Total HP, Effective CRIT Value, Elemental Mastery Total, Energy Recharge Total, Skill Multiplier, Burst Multiplier, and DPC or DPS Score. For the calculated fields, you need the stat scaling formulas. Here is the straightforward version without getting into the weeds: Total ATK equals weapon base ATK plus character base ATK multiplied by the ATK% bonus from artifacts and buffs. Character base ATK is a fixed number per character and changes when they hit certain level thresholds and when constellations that add flat ATK trigger. You can find these numbers in-game under the character info screen by looking at the breakdown.
Total DEF works the same way but uses DEF% bonuses. Total HP uses flat HP plus HP% bonuses. None of these interact with each other except through team buffs and character talents that convert one stat into another, like Yoimiya or Xiao. CRIT Value equals twice the CRIT Rate percentage plus the CRIT DMG percentage. A 50/150 crit ratio gives you 250 CRIT Value. That is the number you optimize toward. The formula for expected damage contribution from crits is simply CRIT Rate multiplied by CRIT DMG. So 50 percent rate times 150 percent damage gives you 0.75 as your crit contribution multiplier. You want to maximize this product while keeping rate above 50 percent because going lower drops your actual damage output significantly more than you gain from stacking more DMG. Energy Recharge has a soft breakpoint system. For most characters who use bursts every 8 to 12 seconds, you need somewhere between 130 and 160 percent ER depending on your energy generation speed. Below that range, you start missing bursts. Above it, the extra ER just goes to waste unless you have a specific team comp that benefits from it, like Yelan with her shield mechanic or Kokomi who uses skill energy constantly.
Get the Full Details
The Part Nobody Talks About
Artifact scoring is not just about picking the piece with the highest substat roll total. You need to weight them by usefulness to your specific build. A flower with flat HP is worth the same raw HP value for everyone, but a sands with ATK% is worth more to Hu Tao than it is to Zhongli. A goblet with Geo DMG% is worthless on Xiangling. A circlet with CRIT DMG is always high value on any main DPS character. Here is a practical weighting system that works for most situations: Flower weights: Flat HP gets 1.0 across the board. Goblets: Elemental DMG Bonus gets 2.0 if it matches the character's skill type, otherwise 0.5. Sands: ATK% gets 2.0, HP% gets 1.0 for HP-scaling characters like Hu Tao and Alhaitham, ER gets 1.5 if below your breakpoint, 0.5 if above. Circlets: CRIT DMG gets 2.5, CRIT Rate gets 1.2, HP% gets 1.5 for HP-scalers, ATK% gets 2.0 for ATK-scalers.
Multiply each substat roll by its weight and sum them up. That gives you a weighted score that reflects actual build quality rather than raw potential. I ran into a specific problem last month when comparing two 5-star circles for Raiden Shogun. One had 48.6% CRIT Rate and the other had 42.1% CRIT DMG. Raw substat totals made the first one look better at 19.8 CRIT Value versus 16.85. But Raiden scales off ER through her burst, and my spreadsheet showed I was already at 180% ER with the second circlet. The first circlet gave me 184% ER instead. The difference in actual damage output was negligible, and the second circlet's CRIT DMG would have pushed my expected damage higher. I ended up using the apparently inferior circle and saw about 8 percent more burst damage. The spreadsheet caught this because it calculated the full damage chain rather than just comparing substat totals.
Setting Up the Damage Calculation Sheet
Create a separate tab for your damage calculations. Put your character stats from the main sheet as inputs. Then build out the formula chain: Base Multiplier equals your skill or burst damage percentage from the character data. Multiply that by your ATK or HP total depending on scaling. Then apply the DMG Bonus multiplier, which is 1 plus your elemental DMG bonus percentage plus any team DMG bonus. Then apply the enemy resistance multiplier, which is 1 minus the enemy's resistance to that element. Then apply the crit modifier, which is 1 plus your crit rate times your crit DMG. Then apply any flat damage bonuses from weapons or artifacts. Enemy resistances matter more than most people account for. If you are doing Pyro damage against an enemy with 10 percent Pyro resistance, your damage multiplier drops from 1.0 to 0.9. That is a 10 percent loss that no amount of crit stacking will recover. Use the in-game test dummy or community resistance charts to get accurate numbers. The default assumption of zero resistance is wrong for a lot of endgame content.
Using the Workbook in Practice
When you get artifacts, enter them immediately. Do not wait until you have a pile to sort through. The spreadsheet loses its value when you stop feeding it data. I used to batch-update once a week and found myself ignoring it after three weeks because the numbers got stale and meaningless. Before each Abyss run, go through your top three characters and verify their builds against the expected team composition. Check that your ER breakpoints are met. Check that your crit ratio is above 1:2. Check that your elemental mastery is maxed if you are running reaction builds. These three checks alone fix about 60 percent of bad runs I see in the community. After a patch, update your multiplier values. HoYoverse rarely changes the underlying formulas, but they do change character skill numbers occasionally. The last time this happened was when they adjusted Ganyu's charged shot multipliers in a mid-year patch. People who did not update their spreadsheet were off by roughly 12 percent on their expected damage numbers. Nothing breaks faster than a stale formula.
Limitations You Need to Accept
This workbook does not account for variable DPS from randomness. Artifact substat rolls are inherently random, and your actual damage in a run will vary by about 5 to 15 percent from your spreadsheet prediction due to crit RNG, skill variance, and reaction timing. If your predicted DPS is within 10 percent of a floor requirement, you are gambling, not planning. It also does not handle team synergy well beyond simple buff stacking. Characters like Kazuha, Bennett, and Xianyun have complex interaction effects that change the optimal build for everyone in the team. Kazuha's shield strength bonus depends on his EM, which changes how much healing Xianyun provides, which changes how much HP Bennett needs on his bursts. The spreadsheet will give you individual character scores but cannot fully capture these feedback loops. You need to run actual simulations or test in-game to validate those interactions. For characters with extremely complex scaling like Nahida or C6 Raiden, the damage formula becomes messy enough that the spreadsheet starts giving you misleading comparisons. Nahida's damage depends on her elemental mastery multiplying her elemental skill damage, which then triggers reactions that scale differently based on team composition. The spreadsheet can approximate this, but it will not be precise. For those characters, you are better off using a dedicated damage calculator tool rather than your own spreadsheet.
Where to Get a Pre-Built Version
If you do not want to build this from scratch, there are several community versions floating around. The most reliable ones I have seen come from the main Genshin math theorycrafting communities on GitHub and the official subreddit. They tend to update faster when patches drop because multiple people maintain them. Search for the latest version dated within the current month, because older versions still use the old artifact scoring formulas and do not include the characters released this year. Make sure the version you download includes the correct current-year character data. A spreadsheet from last year will have broken formulas for any character released after their last update. The character base ATK, base HP, and skill multipliers all change between patches for some characters, and using outdated numbers will give you wrong results that look right at first glance. The basic structure is straightforward enough that building your own takes about two hours if you know spreadsheets. The real work is maintaining it over time and knowing which calculations actually matter for your playstyle. Most people stop maintaining it after the first month. If you stick with it, you will notice your upgrade decisions get significantly faster and your spiral abyss clears become more consistent.
