Genshin Impact tier lists — and the receipts players keep on them

By DayOneFix Editorial · August 15, 2026

The current CN ranking, and why only its top row is worth quoting

The most-watched recent Chinese Genshin tier list is @白海黑少’s 6.7 rundown, and it opens with a disclaimer worth more than most whole tier lists:

“Apart from T0 — the top row — where I do think the ranking is right, every other tier is roughly arranged. My reading is a composite one, not pure power: open-world comfort, build cost and execution difficulty are all factors.”

So here is the row he stands behind, mapped to official English names:

Tier	Characters
T0	ColumbinaXilonenIneffaSandrone

And his stated reasoning, which is the useful part:

Columbina — “the highest pull priority in the entire game”, and the core the whole Moon system is built around. He argues at length against the community position that she is replaceable by Aino: “swapping in Aino is not the same game experience.”
Xilonen — “the most universal support in the game. Every main DPS except Anemo can use her, and she is extremely cheap to build: C0R1 is the finished product.”
Ineffa — the first Moon-system unit, and in his framing “the most future-proof, because she is both a sustain and a support.”
Sandrone — “unconditional activation like Flins, and hers is AoE.” A forward-looking placement rather than a current-performance one.

He is also explicit that this is a F2P-oriented composite list, and that the deliberately mixed-together tiers below T0 are not a ranking: “rankings within a tier are in no particular order.” We are not going to publish rows the person who made them says are approximate.

Two caveats before you use it. It is a 6.7 list, published before 7.0 shipped — the creator says he will redo it “once Odette is out, to see where she lands.” And the chart in the video is portraits only; the four names above come from him saying each one out loud, then mapped against HoYoverse’s published bilingual character index.

If you are looking at 7.0 specifically, our Odette teams page covers the cast this list predates.

Genshin has been out long enough that tier lists can be graded — and Chinese players grade them.

One of the most-watched recent videos on the subject is a creator sitting down and going through every prediction a well-known pull-advice channel made over three years. The comment track is the interesting part, and it changes how you should read any Genshin tier list.

The scoreboard is worse than you would guess

The audience verdict on those three years of advice:

“Apart from being slightly right about Yelan, everything else was wrong.”

And the obvious follow-up, which several people made independently:

“How do you even manage to get them all wrong? Random guessing should be 50%.”

Another notes the specific casualty: “Neuvillette killed off how many pull-advice channels.” A character rated unexciting who turned into a pillar of the game is the kind of miss that ends a creator’s credibility.

What to take from this: not that tier lists are worthless, but that their historical accuracy is measurable and low, and almost nobody publishing one shows you their record.

”He wasn’t wrong — just two years early”

This is the most useful line in the whole discussion, offered in the creator’s defence:

“That statement wasn’t wrong, though. There was a buff wave later.” “He wasn’t wrong — it just took two years.”

Read as a defence it is generous. Read as a description of Genshin, it is the single most important thing about the game’s tier lists: a character’s grade is a claim about a moment, and Genshin’s moments last years.

Characters get repositioned by new reactions, new supports, new artifact sets and new endgame formats, none of which existed when the grade was written. A prediction that comes good after two years is indistinguishable from a wrong one for anyone budgeting pulls today.

Genshin characters age differently from other gacha games

Here is the part that makes Genshin tier lists genuinely different from Star Rail’s or Wuthering Waves’:

“Furina is still the number one damage-amp support.”

A character released years ago is still, by community consensus, the best in her role. Genshin’s power creep is slow enough that a top-tier unit stays top-tier across many versions — which is why “is she still worth pulling?” is a live question about characters from three years ago, and why a rerun of an old unit can outrank a new release.

The practical consequence: a Genshin tier list ages far better than a Star Rail one, and far worse than it looks. Better, because the top of the list moves slowly. Worse, because the reason a character sits where she does — which team, which reaction, which content — changes underneath a static grade.

The contrarian correction, and why it exists

The other genre of popular Genshin ranking video is the direct rebuttal: one recent example asks “why is nobody recommending Sandrone? Don’t be fooled — here is her real strength at C0.”

That video type exists because of a specific gap: headline grades are usually written around a character’s constellation-boosted performance, while most players are pulling at C0. A “don’t be fooled” video is almost always about the difference between the version of a character a list is describing and the version you will actually own.

Our own coverage runs into the same split — the most-searched question we get on the 7.0 cast is whether Odette works without Sandrone, which is a C0-budget question rather than a power question. Full answer: Odette teams, including without Sandrone.

What we publish

We do not publish our own S/A/B rankings. Ranking characters requires playing them, building them and running endgame with them, and a list assembled from other lists is exactly what the audit videos above are about.

What we do publish is the specific, checkable stuff: what a character actually does, what shipped officially, which teams the Chinese community converged on, and where they disagree. When we state a measured comparison — like the Cryo Traveler landing around 78% of a C0 Sandrone at comparable investment — it comes with where that number came from.

Sources

The T0 row and its reasoning are transcribed from @白海黑少’s 6.7 full-roster tier list on Bilibili, captured 16 August 2026, using the spoken tier calls rather than the unlabelled chart. Other quoted arguments are from viewer comment tracks on high-view Chinese pull-advice and ranking-audit videos, collected 15 August 2026, translated rather than paraphrased where quoted. Chinese character names are mapped to English against HoYoverse’s own published bilingual character index. The Cryo Traveler comparison figure is from our own build page and is sourced there.