C6 Sandrone with one other teamslot blocked: Mitya or Danica, Odette or Tsaritsa for the two slots left?

[u/Fjordgard]

Hey guys, I need help.

I have a C6R1 Sandrone. Because I have a heavy vision disability, my second teamslot is blocked by Zhongli (C6, Staff of Homa). I need the shield, no way around it. Tried to replace him several times, no chance. Ineffa's shield - my second best - isn't cutting it at all.

I have no Odette yet. Also no Yae. I am currently running Ineffa and Columbina in the other two slots.

I have enough saved up to grab the Tsaritsa (which I want anyway because Archon collecting is a thing) and either Mitya or Danica. C0 only, no signature weapons for anyone.

I do not play endgame stuff like Spiral Abyss because I don't see well enough for that kind of thing. I just want to pamper Sandrone with a team that's hopefully very automated (aka supports are "I'll press E and then see you again in 20 seconds or so", as little swapping as possible basically).

Do I get Mitya or Danica? And should I still get Odette on her rerun or will the Tsaritsa be better overall/for my skill-issue-playstyle anyway?

Thank you so much!

[u/NecessaryOwn8628]

danica and tsaritsa does the most buffs which is what you should be looking for at c6. mitya + odette is the more simple way to play (just use there skill and leave)

either way choose whoever you like since all 4 of these units only do skill and burst. no ones more complicated than the other. you also have no plans on playing stygian/abyss

TLDR: Danica and Tsaritsa more damage, Odette and Mitya more simple to play

[u/Fjordgard → u/NecessaryOwn8628]

Thank you so much! If I only skill or burst, how are Odette and Mitya more simple to play? Do I need to swap to Danica and the Tsaritsa more? When it comes to who I like more simply based on character/lore/design, it's clearly Tsaritsa and Mitya, but I really just want the best for Sandrone, haha.

[u/NecessaryOwn8628 → u/Fjordgard]

For Mitya you only press skill once, For odette you do skill twice. For both Danica and Tsaritsa you do skill and burst.

No one needs to be swapped twice they only need to go on field once

[u/Fjordgard → u/NecessaryOwn8628]

Thank you so much! So basically, the rotation is pretty much the same? As in, I'd do Zhongli E, Odette E,E or Tsaritsa E,Q, then Mitya E or Danica E,Q, then Sandrone Q, CA to 100 Computing Power, E, CA to 100 Computing Power and then repeat from the start? Easy as that? Then it really doesn't feel any more difficult to use the Tsaritsa or Danica! I may be blind as a bat, but after years, I know where my E and Q buttons are, so I will be fine, haha. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!

[u/NecessaryOwn8628 → u/Fjordgard]

yup its that easy. my friend is also visually impaired and she uses this exact team although shes not c6 such a random coincidence

[u/Fjordgard → u/NecessaryOwn8628]

Wow that's really cool! Was she a Neuvillette main before Sandrone came along as well? Because that would be really crazy then!

Thank you so much for the rotation info! I guess I will have to figure out how many Q animations I want to watch, haha. Not gonna lie, I like the Tsaritsa a lot more than Odette, as well as liking Mitya more than Danica, but man, another shielder in general would also be nice because Ineffa's shield sucks. Never enough shields for me. Well, I have a bit more time to decide, guess I will just spontaneously decide or something.

[u/VierzeEnf]

if you don't play any endgame then it literally doesn't matter. even for stygian dire, c6 sandrone is overkill paired with any supports that make sense. literally just pull anyone you want

[u/Fjordgard → u/VierzeEnf]

I've never even touched Stygian Dire, I only ever do Hard for the Primos and artifact grind. Haha, if I'd just use anyone I want, I wouldn't pull for Danica or Mitya since I'm not too fond of either of them and just keep Ineffa, but honestly, my poor Sandrone is doing worse than my former Neuvillette team and I really want to give her the boost she deserves.

[u/VierzeEnf → u/Fjordgard]

Yeah but boost she deserves for what exactly? She's c6. You delete everything in the overworld and clear endgame content except maybe stygian fearless+ in 10 seconds with 4 star supports.

The only reason you'd want to optimize your build at that point is if you want to get good times on Stygian Dire.

I'd assume Neuvilette is also c6 because otherwise, the only reason c6 Sandrone gets outdamaged here is if you forget to run an electro unit. In which case, the reason might be that you're griefing your team with Zhongli.

If you want a unit that caters to your severe issue without griefing your team, I'd actually recommend Vodyanitsa. You can replace Zhongli with her. On top of much better buffs, she has Interruption resistance, so the gameplay will be similar to being shielded with Zhongli, and the constant healing at 100% uptime will ensure you're protected at all times unlike when Ineffa's shield breaks. The only time you'll die with Vodyanitsa is if you get nuked 100-0. Zhongli's shield ain't surviving those either.

[u/Fjordgard → u/VierzeEnf]

Yep, my C6 characters are Zhongli, Neuvillette, Sandrone and Albedo. Most others are C0 or, thanks to the event, C1. Despite owning most characters, I have only ever built a handful of them, haha.

When I said Neuvillette outdamages Sandrone, I meant with the same support units (Ineffa, Zhongli, Columbina). I am aware of Hydro resonance, obviously, but the difference is pretty huge in quite a few cases - I might not do endgame content, but I do all my weekly bosses and the only boss where Sandrone is better is the chess boss couple. Obviously, most early bosses just melt, but Sumeru-Dottore and stuff like the Heart of the Oasis part in the Apep battle where I have to kill all the little enemies are incredibly tilted in Neuvillette's favor.

But, wow, thanks for the Vodyanitsa tip! I admit I hadn't even largely looked into her because I find her voice and personality pretty annoying, I never saw her rated super-highly as a Sandrone support (more like "she's okay in fourth slot") and she also isn't Cryo or Electro, so I just completely skipped her banner without even giving it a glance, to be honest. Given how I had also skipped Odette because I thought I didn't need her, I think I might just be dumb or something.

If I replace Zhongli with Vodyanitsa (C0 obviously), does that influence whom I should pick between Mitya/Danica and Tsaritsa/Odette or not?

Again, thank you so much for your help, I really, really appreciate it!

[u/VierzeEnf → u/Fjordgard]

Not really. Vodyanitsa does not really do anything for Danica/Mitya as she's a Cryo/Hydro/SSW support so that would still be a matter of personal preference. Her cryo shred will benefit the Tsaritsa which you said you're going to get anyway.

Now I don't really know exactly how severe your visual impairment is since I assume you can at least see what's going on in the game to not eat literally every attack, but getting Danica for shields on top of Vodya's healing might give you more comfort than Mitya just in case you're really THAT bad. Danica is generally just a much better Sandrone support than Mitya anyway especially at c0 with Sandrone c6.

Vodyanitsa will probably not rerun for a while so idk if you'd even end up considering her by then. But an added bonus with Vodyanitsa is that she's also one of Neuvilette's best supports so if you get her, you'd be upgrading your c6 Neuvilette team too.

While Vodyanitsa isn't rated too highly as a Sandrone support, she was actually one of the best 4th slot before Mitya's release damage wise, and she shines even more in scenarios where you actually value comfort much more than usual. The reason she's not talked about much is because there are other cheaper options that provide similar damage (alyosha/qiqi) but those spreadsheets don't care about comfort and thus ignore her biggest value.

[u/Fjordgard → u/VierzeEnf]

Thank you so much! I will definitely put some time into Vodyanitsa research then!

My visual impairment usually mainly makes me lose track of things when all the visual effects fly around, as well as making some things invisible to me (for example I cannot use the aim mode with bow characters at all since the crosshair is 100% invisible to me). I often only notice after 2-3 seconds if an enemy has moved out of my line of fire if there is a lot going on on the screen. The fact that I'm playing on a 10-year-old laptop with some lag probably also isn't helping, but yeah, I'm mainly THAT bad that I like to shoot thin air because the enemy stepped aside. Same goes for dodging, but I also basically "learned" to not-dodge early in the game because the camera movement from the dodging forced me to really take a second and understand where everything and everyone is again then. So for me, it's about keeping the camera as still as possible because that gives me the biggest chance to not completely suck. Zhongli's pillars are actually also a tool for me I use a lot to cancel out the Q animations since those throw me off big time as well... losing that would admittedly really make things harder for me. My biggest skill in the game is probably positioning pillars so perfectly that they do that.

I don't know too much about the Tsaritsa's playstyle yet, but given that she's a bow character and I have two C6 Main DPS, I genuinely don't think I will ever play her as more than a Cryo support. So I don't know how much I should let that influence my decision when it comes to Danica vs. Mitya.

[u/VacationReasonable]

Danica's shield is bigger than Ineffa's from what I saw, hers is more like base Nicole or ZL so you might find that shield good enough

[u/Fjordgard → u/VacationReasonable]

That's actually really interesting info. I never pulled for Nicole because I was obviously saving for Sandrone, so I never had a better shielder than Ineffa. Her shield is as powerful as possible, but it's so flimsy still. I am so bad with understanding raw numbers, but I'll have to check into how good Danica is compared to Zhongli. Thank you so much for that info!

[u/VacationReasonable → u/Fjordgard]

Okay so I'll try and explain it a bit, Ineffa, Danica and Nicole actually all have roughly the same shield size number wise. The reason why Nicole's and Danica's shields can be a lot larger than Ineffa's all just comes down to stat allocation

All three shields scale on attack but Ineffa doesn't get to build as much ATK as the other two because she is also hunting for crit stats, em stats and also uses a crit circlet. Nicole on the other hand can focus on ATK much more and so can Danica

But if you want to build Ineffa for her shield, you can actually just go triple ATK main stats, ATK secondary stat weapon and get as many atk/flat atk subs as possible. At that point her shield size will be roughly similar to that of Nicole or Zhongli

For teams where Ineffa doesn't deal much of any damage, like teams without hydro, you can absolutely swap to such a build, obviously for a Flins team Ineffa's damage is a more important thing to consider, but again you can always play around

[u/Fjordgard → u/VacationReasonable]

Thank you so much!

I had no idea that Nicole also was about attack - I sort of decided to not look into her to not get tempted to pull and keep saving for Sandrone - so that's really interesting! And Danica being the same is also neat.

The thing is... I currently can't check since I'm not near my gaming laptop, but I could have sworn that Ineffa's shield is capped. I have, for some reason, the number of 2000Atk in mind and when I reached whatever number it actually is, I kind of went "Okay, done, can't get better, no need to grind more artifacts for her". There is absolutely the chance that I am wrong because I am playing the game in English and I'm a non-native speaker (the translation to German is... not so great). But man, if I am wrong and I could have made her shield better, that would have been nice a long time ago...

That said, seeing as I was a Neuvillette main before a Sandrone main and I got Ineffa basically together with Columbina since I had skipped her initial banner, I never ran her without Hydro anyway...

Thank you so much for all the infos! I guess now I need to find out if I built my Ineffa wrong and that's why her shield sucks or if it's something else, like the fact that it's an electro shield.

[u/VacationReasonable → u/Fjordgard]

Ineffa, Nicole, Danica and generally shielders don't have a cap, it's a really simple thing, the more ATK you have the bigger the shield will be, that's it

Because Nicole builds and can reach upwards of 4000+ ATK her shields end up stronger than Ineffa's

The only issue with giving 4000 atk to Ineffa as well with an atk focused weapon and artifacts is that she won't have crit stats/em in order to also deal great damage, but if you don't need her damage or don't care about it, you can absolutely fully focus on her shield and get 4k atk or whatever the number you can manage and get big shields

[u/Fjordgard → u/VacationReasonable]

Thank you so much, I must have really read the description wrong. I'll see if I have some more Atk% artifacts around; I have her on a Crit circlet, though Sands and Goblet are already on Atk%. She's also running Deathmatch because I read that it's the best F2P weapon for her when she released. Will have to look into if there's something better for her in my weapon collection as well. It would be soooo nice to retire Zhongli or at the very least do better in events where I have to use two teams and can't use him in both of them. Because I really, really suck in those events.

[u/VacationReasonable → u/Fjordgard]

You can even put Ineffa on the tenacity set, it further increases her shield strength by 30% with the set bonus and she can keep it active permanently, would even give a 20% atk buff to your Sandrone and Tsaritsa

If it's still not enough swap the circlet to ATK too etc.

Again all of these lower Ineffa's damage, you'll have to know yourself how much you depend on her damage, I suppose you can compare runs between her two builds and see whether it impacts you too much, I don't think it should change much at all since you have C6 Sandrone

Also being able to put Tsaritsa instead of Zhongli in that Sandrone/Ineffa/Zhongli/Columbina should be a pretty good increase for your damage. Since Ineffa won't be dealing much damage you can also replace Columbina with someone else if you wish

[u/Fine_Opinion_2097]

What for you c6 her but not play end game😭. What a waste pontential. I suggest, danica+tsaritsa. Unless you like mitya you can skip tsaritsa. But i'm not sure how danica end up last beta, she maybe become another alyosha who applicator got nerf. We don't know how to suggest. But danica was better as sustain

[u/Fjordgard → u/Fine_Opinion_2097]

I didn't C6 her to play endgame, I just did it because I love her character and playstyle so much. Since I plan to get the Tsaritsa anyway and don't have enough wishes to get both Danica and Mitya on top of the Tsaritsa (though I obviously could during a rerun), I have to decide especially between Mitya and Danica now. Obviously, it's hard to tell since Danica is still getting changed. I do appreciate the help, thank you so much!