Genshin Impact Talent Priority: What to Level, Skip, and When

Talent priority in Genshin Impact means deciding which of a character’s three abilities — Normal Attack, Elemental Skill, Elemental Burst — actually earns your resin, because leveling all three at the same pace is almost never the efficient move. Priority is set by role, not by rarity: what matters for a main damage dealer is whichever talent carries most of their damage formula, while support characters live and die by their Skill and Burst, often with the Normal Attack left untouched. Someone who spends a month evenly raising all three talents on a five-star support usually ends up with a gain they will not notice in combat.

Talents are the three combat abilities every playable character has — Normal Attack, Elemental Skill, and Elemental Burst — each leveled independently from 1 up to 10. Leveling a talent increases its damage multiplier, healing amount, or utility scaling depending on what that ability does, and the process runs on a separate material track from character ascension. Talent materials are the reason the process gets expensive: three tiers of talent books, weekly boss drops for the top levels, and eventually a rare crown-type item for pushing a talent all the way to 10.

Talent books drop from Domains of Mastery, one per region, each offering three book series that rotate by weekday.

Teachings, Guide, and Philosophies talent materials come from domains, and the series dropped and rarity depend both on the day of the week and domain level. Teachings take a talent from level 1 to 2, Guide books cover levels 3 through 6, and Philosophies handle the expensive climb from level 7 to 10. Beyond domains, weekly bosses drop essential materials required to level talents to level 7 and above, which is why pushing a talent past level 6 always means fitting in a weekly-boss run alongside your domain farming. Common enemies also drop the lowest tier ingredient used across every level, and it costs no resin to collect while exploring. For anyone still deciding which character to build toward this system in the first place, the new and returning player priority guide covers what to unlock before you start pouring resin into talents at all.

What this actually costs you. Taking one character’s three talents to 10/10/10 runs roughly seven to eight weeks of focused farming at World Level 8 — not because the materials are rare, but because the weekly boss drop is weekly and the domains only open on their days. A support taken to 6/8/8, which is where most of them stop being the limiting factor, lands closer to two or three weeks. That gap is the whole argument for picking your priority before you spend the first Resin: the difference between choosing well and spreading thin is measured in months, not evenings.

Lists of “always level this talent first” go stale every patch because new characters keep breaking the pattern. The logic underneath doesn’t: figure out which talent actually moves the damage or utility number that matters for that character’s job, and start there.

Why Sub-DPS Characters Lean on Burst Uptime

If a character’s elemental burst keeps dealing damage after you switch off them, that burst is worth prioritizing, since the goal for a Sub-DPS is maximizing damage while they aren’t your active character. That single fact explains why so many Sub-DPS talent priorities land on Burst over Skill, and Skill over Normal Attack almost every time.

Why Some Supports Skip Elemental Mastery-Heavy Talent Investment

There’s a real exception buried in the support category: characters built around Elemental Mastery, most notably Anemo supports, get a much bigger priority boost from a strong artifact set than from talent levels. For that specific build type, resin is often better spent elsewhere first. Since artifact substats and set bonuses are their own separate rabbit hole with their own RNG, the artifact guide is the better place to work through that decision — this article stays focused on talents.

Myth: Every Talent Deserves Equal Levels

The instinct to keep all three talents at the same number feels tidy, but it ignores that most kits weight one or two abilities far more heavily than the third. A support with an unused Normal Attack at level 10 represents weeks of resin spent on a stat the game barely reads in combat.

Myth: Rarity Decides Priority

A five-star character doesn’t automatically deserve maxed talents any more than a four-star one does. Priority tracks role and kit design, not the pull banner a character came from — a four-star Sub-DPS with a lingering Burst can justify the same Burst-first order as a five-star doing the identical job.

Myth: Talent Levels Always Beat Artifacts

Leveling talents is generally a bigger priority than artifacts because it’s an immediate, guaranteed damage boost compared to artifact RNG, but that ranking flips for Elemental Mastery-scaling supports, where set bonuses matter more than one extra talent level.

Talent materials scale hard toward the top: the jump from level 6 to 7 introduces weekly-boss gating, and the climb from 8 to 10 is where the material cost per level rises sharply. Splitting that investment across four characters means none of them ever clear the threshold where the higher levels actually start changing rotations, clear times, or Abyss/Theater performance. Taking one priority character all the way to their final talent level, then moving to the next, produces a usable power spike far sooner than spreading the same resin four ways and feeling nothing change on any of them. This matters most once you’re building toward harder content — the Spiral Abyss versus Imaginarium Theater endgame guide is a good next stop for seeing where that finished talent kit actually pays off.