Gorou and Aether from Genshin Impact watching butterflies
Image via HoYoverse

How to play Gorou in Genshin Impact

How to train the bestest boy.

Gorou is a 4-star Geo Bow character in Genshin Impact who specializes in buffing your team’s DEF and Geo DMG. Once you’ve built him up, here’s how to make the best use of him!

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Gorou’s kit, explained

Gorou’s Skill creates a circular field that buffs anyone inside it. The buffs you get depend on how many Geo characters are in your team, including Gorou himself. In order, they are:

  • 1 Geo character: flat DEF increase
  • 2 Geo characters: interruption resistance
  • 3 Geo characters: Geo DMG bonus

These buffs are cumulative, so if you have three or more Geo characters in your team, you will receive all three buffs.

Gorou’s Burst creates the same field that his Skill does, but it now follows you around. It also deals a bit of Geo damage at intervals and pulls Crystallize shards in towards you, creating small shields. Casting Gorou’s Burst will also grant a small DEF% buff from his Ascension 1 passive, on top of the other buffs listed in his Skill description. At Constellation 6, Gorou’s Burst grants a valuable Geo CRIT DMG buff based on the number of Geo characters in your team.

Gorou from Genshin Impact
Image via HoYoverse

How to play Gorou in a rotation

The easiest way to play Gorou is to use his Skill, then Burst, then swap to your Geo DPS character. Then, use your Geo DPS unit’s combo to deal damage. If Gorou’s buff runs out partway through your combo (denoted by his puppy familiar disappearing), you can swap back to Gorou to cast his Skill.

For Itto, this means using his Burst, then Normal Attack, then Skill, then two Normal Attacks before spamming Charged Attacks. After the last Charged Attack in his special combo, Itto will do a final slam. You can extend the combo after the slam by doing three or four more Normals, then another series of Charged Attacks and another Skill. In shorthand notation, this looks like:

N1 E N2 C4 N3 C4 E

For Noelle, this means using Noelle’s Skill, then Burst, then spam Normal Attacks. You can choose to omit her fourth Normal Attack from your combos since those hits have a smaller Whatever you decide, try to cancel out of her third or fourth Normal Attack animations by dashing.

Best teams for Gorou in Genshin Impact

Gorou provides buffs to Geo DPS characters who scale with DEF. As of Version 4.7, the following characters benefit from Gorou’s buffs.

Gorou’s best teams should include one on-field Geo DPS (Itto or Noelle) and one additional Geo character. Albedo and Chiori make the best use of Gorou’s buffs, but you can choose to use another Geo character instead. Navia, Yun Jin, and Zhongli can’t use Gorou’s DEF buff, but they will activate the third level of Gorou’s buffs.


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Author
Image of Christine Choi
Christine Choi
Contributing Writer - Christine has been gaming since she first stole her brother's Game Boy as a kid. She's come a long way since then and has been creating content for Genshin Impact since 2021.