Sucrose

Sucrose

4★AnemoCatalystSupport

TL;DR

Sucrose sucks every enemy in the room into one pile and hands the whole team a lump of Elemental Mastery, which makes everyone's reactions hit harder. Her Skill and Burst both do the pulling. You build her with Elemental Mastery in all three artifact slots and nothing else, because the buff she gives out is a percentage of her own.

Rotation

  1. Skill (E) to yank things into a pile.
  2. Burst (Q) on the pile.
  3. Swap to your damage dealer straight away. The Burst keeps pulling and keeps the buff topped up while you're gone.

Abilities

Skill (E) A little whirlwind that drags nearby enemies together and hits them with Anemo. About 15 seconds cooldown, and it's how she makes energy particles.
Burst (Q) A big whirlwind that parks itself for about 6 seconds and keeps pulling. It also picks up whatever element is on the enemies and adds that damage on top.

What actually matters

The two or three real decisions. Everything else is noise.

  • Elemental Mastery is the only stat. Sands, goblet and circlet, all three. She passes 20% of her Elemental Mastery to everyone, so every point you give her is a point the rest of the team partly gets too. Attack, crit and Elemental damage bonus all do nothing useful on her.
  • Her main buff only needs the whirlwind to hit something. 20% of her Elemental Mastery goes out to the team whether anything reacts or not. A Swirl adds a smaller lump of 50 on top, so in a pure Dendro team, where nothing swirls, she hands out a bit less and loses the resistance shred with it.
  • The buff runs about 8 seconds. Long enough that you cast her and go, short enough that you shouldn't open with her and then spend ten seconds setting up other characters.
  • Her artifact set shreds resistance. 4-piece Viridescent Venerer cuts the enemy's resistance to whatever she Swirled by 40%, which is often worth more than the Elemental Mastery. That shred is usually the reason she's on the team at all.

Gear

A build that works. KeqingMains lists every other option.

Weapon Whichever catalyst has the most Elemental Mastery on it. Sacrificial Fragments is the standard-banner one, and its extra skill charge means more grouping.
Artifacts 4-piece Viridescent Venerer. In a Dendro team where nothing Swirls, 4-piece Deepwood Memories instead.
Main stats Elemental Mastery sands, Elemental Mastery goblet, Elemental Mastery circlet. Take Energy Recharge in the substats, ignore crit unless you're running a Favonius weapon that needs it.

Works well with

PyroHydroElectroCryo

Any team that lives on reactions. She's the cheap version of the job Kazuha does, and against crowds the grouping alone earns her the slot.

Don't bother

  • Building her for damage. Her numbers are tiny and always will be.
  • Pouring materials into her talents. The buff scales off her Elemental Mastery and her character level, not talent levels.
  • Expecting the pull to work on big enemies. Bosses ignore it, so you're only there for the buff and the resistance shred.
  • Worrying about which element her Burst absorbs. It grabs one and that's fine.

Want the full theorycrafting version? Read Sucrose on KeqingMains.