Ruan Mei Best Builds, Teams & Relics

Character Explanation

Ruan Mei is a generalist support that focuses on providing 3 important buffs to the team: speed, Weakness Break Efficiency, and all-type RES PEN. Ruan Mei’s most important buffs come from a combination of her Skill and Ultimate. Juggling their uptime is a key aspect of Ruan Mei’s gameplay. Building her to maintain high Ultimate uptime while also being skill point positive is what makes Ruan Mei shine in so many compositions.

Ruan Mei’s skill, String Sings Slow Swirls, grants herself the overture buff, which provides the team with a 32% Damage buff and a 50% Weakness Break Efficiency buff lasting for 3 turns. The turn count reduces by 1 at the start of Ruan Mei’s turn, indicated by the dots next to her character portrait in battle. Using her technique, Ruan Mei will automatically cast her skill at the start of combat, which means you only need to recast the skill to refresh the duration of overture or to give yourself more energy to cast Ultimate.

Ruan Mei’s technique, Silken Serenade, allows Ruan Mei to cast her skill at the start of combat automatically without consuming her turn or skill points. Additionally, this technique has some benefits unique to the Simulated and Divergent Universe modes, allowing the attacking team to always hit Weakness when entering battle, reducing Toughness based on the number of blessings you currently have in your inventory (up to a cap of 20 blessings), as well as increasing break damage equal to a percentage of Ruan Mei’s Ice break damage.

Ruan Mei’s Ultimate, Petals to Stream, Repose in Dream, deploys a zone that lasts for 2 of Ruan Mei’s turns. While the zone is deployed, all allies gain a 25% All-Type RES PEN increase and their attacks apply a debuff called Thanatoplum Rebloom to the enemies hit. When enemies afflicted by Thanatoplum Rebloom attempt to recover from Weakness Break, the debuff is triggered. The debuff extends the duration of enemies’ Weakness Break, delays their action by an amount equal to a portion of Ruan Mei's Break Effect plus 10%, and deals additional break damage equal to a portion of Ruan Mei's Ice break damage. Enemy targets cannot have Thanatoplum Rebloom reapplied until they recover from Weakness Break.

Ruan Mei’s Talent provides a small 10% speed buff for her team in combat, and allows her to deal a small amount of break damage equal to her Ice break damage every time an enemy's weakness is broken.

Ruan Mei’s A2 talent increases the whole team's break effect by 20% in combat, while her A4 grants her a small amount of bonus energy upon entering combat. Her A6 further increases the damage % provided by her skill by 6% per 10% break effect Ruan Mei has over 120% break effect, capped at an additional 36%. A combination of these talents is what sets Ruan Mei’s break effect stat goal to be a minimum of 160% outside of combat, due to her A2 granting the last 20% she needs to activate the full effects of her A6 trace.

Build Advice

Due to Ruan Mei’s A6 trace, Ruan Mei’s primary stat priority in her builds is reaching 160% break effect outside of combat, while maintaining a high energy regeneration rate (achieved with a combination of Light Cones, planar ornament set bonuses, and energy regeneration rope). Since the 25% All-Type RES PEN is one of Ruan Mei’s strongest effects, our goal is to balance her speed and energy regeneration to maximize her Ultimate uptime.

Due to both her skill and Ultimate buffs being tied to her turn count, exact SPD tuning is not necessary. Additional speed on Ruan Mei can help generate more SP for her teammates and lower the downtime between Ultimate casts. A rotation of Skill - Basic - Basic can generate enough energy with some minor enemy hit RNG to keep maximum uptime on her Ultimate. Some speed breakpoints that are generally good to look out for are the minimum 134, the recommended 143 for rotation comfort, and 160+ for hyperspeed, assuming you have met the break effect requirement for her A6.

Slow Ruan Mei, at around 120 speed, can be considered if you can maximize her personal break effect to 250% or higher and defeat the bosses or enemies before Ruan Mei’s first Ultimate runs out. This setup is not recommended if you cannot achieve this, as the downtime after the first Ultimate ends and until her next turn begins to gain enough energy to recast her Ultimate is too long and will drastically hurt your uptime on her most powerful buff.