Writing a Manual Genshin Impact Build Guide
I have watched hundreds of people waste time building characters the wrong way because they never wrote anything down. They rely on other people's spread sheets, copy-paste artifacts, and then wonder why their Yelan feels weak at level 90. A manual build document is just a structured record of your decisions for a single character. That is it. Nothing fancy. But getting it right saves you dozens of hours of artifact farming across multiple accounts. The core problem most people run into is that they treat the build like a guessing game instead of a specification. You should approach it like a checklist with hard constraints. I started doing this around version 2.0 when Hu Tao came out and the meta shifted hard toward HP-percentage builds for main DPS. Before that, I never bothered writing anything down. After three weeks of pulling golden 5-star goblets for the wrong substat, I made a spreadsheet template that still works today.
How To Make Manual For Genshin Impact Build
The first step is picking a format. Use a simple text document, Google Sheets, or Notion. I use Google Sheets because you can lock cells and add dropdown menus later, but any tool works. The structure should have these sections: Character name, Role (main DPS, sub DPS, support, hypercarry), Weapon of choice with refinement level, Artifact set and target substats, Talents priority order, Constellation milestones, and Energy Recharge requirement. Write down the weapon before you write the artifacts. This is the part most guides get backwards. The weapon determines your base ATK, which changes every percentage-based substat on your artifacts. If you are using a 4-star weapon like Favonius Greatsword on Keqing, your target CRIT Rate and CRIT DMG percentages shift compared to doing the same build on Staff of Homa. I learned this the hard way when I was building Kazuha at the start of version 3.0. My spreadsheet said I needed 165 ER, but I kept rolling artifacts that hit 158 and wondering why my bursts were running dry. The issue was my weapon had a passive I had not accounted for in my calculations. Once I corrected for the energy refund from the passive, the actual requirement dropped to around 140 ER, and I saved roughly two weeks of farming time. For the artifact section, list your target stats in a priority order. CRIT Rate and CRIT DMG come first if your character scales off CRIT. Elemental Mastery comes first for Vaporize and Melt reaction drivers like Xingqiu or Kokomi. Energy Recharge is king for support characters whose entire job is to burst every 15 seconds. Do not skip the exact number. Writing "good ER" is useless. Write "165 ER minimum." The difference between 155 ER and 165 ER on a Nahida build is the difference between a functional team and one that sits there doing nothing for half the fight.
Talent priority is usually obvious but not always. For a character like Yelan, your max priority is Elemental Skill, then Elemental Burst, then Normal Attack. Writing this down prevents the common mistake of investing in Normal Attack talents on characters who never use them. A common pitfall I see repeatedly is people building characters for the wrong team composition. A Ruin Guard build with high Geo RES shred works great on a Nahida team but does almost nothing on a standard monos Pyro squad. Always note your intended team composition in the document. Constellation milestones matter more than most players realize. For Raiden Shogun, C2 adds 60% bonus sprint speed and C6 triples her elemental burst damage. If you are documenting a build for a free-to-play player, note which constellations change the build entirely. A C0 Raiden needs a different artifact plan than a C6 Raiden. The former runs ER and EM to feed the team. The latter runs flat ATK and CRIT because her own damage becomes the priority. This distinction alone will save someone from wasting months farming the wrong stats. Here is a practical edge case I ran into last year. I was building a manual entry for Alhaitham when he dropped in version 3.3. The standard guide said Dendro DMG Bonus, CRIT, and Elemental Mastery. But when I actually played him in Spiral Abyss, I found that his Elemental Skill scales off Elemental Mastery primarily and his burst scales off Dendro DMG Bonus. So the optimal artifact split became 3 pieces of Golden Stealer for ER and EM, plus 2 pieces of Wanderer's Troupe for Dendro DMG. The math worked out to roughly 145 EM for the skill pieces and 50 percent Dendro DMG on the circlet. No existing spreadsheet covered this combination. Writing it down myself took about ten minutes and prevented me from accidentally farming the wrong set for three weeks.
Get the Full Details
Keep the document concise. Five to eight lines per section is plenty. Do not write paragraphs explaining why you chose a certain build. Future-you will not read it. Use abbreviations that make sense to you. ER for Energy Recharge, EM for Elemental Mastery, DEF for Defense, NR for Non-refinement. Once you have written ten or twelve of these, you will develop shorthand that cuts the writing time to under five minutes per character. The biggest limitation of manual build documentation is that it becomes outdated quickly. Every new weapon, every rework, every new artifact set release invalidates parts of what you wrote. I update my documents at least once per major patch. If you publish a build guide on a forum, expect people to quote it six months later when the meta has shifted. That is normal. The value is not in permanence. The value is in the act of writing it down while you understand the character at that moment in time. If you want something faster than a spreadsheet, consider using a simple text-based template with fields. Here is one I use:
Character: [Name]
Role: [DPS/Support/Sub DPS]
Weapon: [Name] R[Level]
Artifact Set: [Set Name] 4pc + [Set Name] 2pc
Target Stats: [CRIT Rate/DMG %, ER %, EM %, etc.]
Talents: [Skill > Burst > Normal]
Constellations: [Noted milestones]
Team Comp: [List 4 characters]
Notes: [Any quirks or adjustments] This format takes about two minutes to fill out and covers everything you need when you open it six months later. The manual approach beats any automated tool because the automation forces you to make decisions you might otherwise skip. That is the real value. Not the document itself. The process of writing it forces you to think through your build choices clearly.
