Zhongli

5★

GeoPolearmShielder

TL;DR

Hold Zhongli's Skill and you get a shield big enough that you can mostly stop watching your health bar. It also drops enemy resistance to every element and to Physical damage by 20% while it's up, which buffs your whole team. He costs you one team slot and about eight seconds a minute. Stack Max HP, that's the build.

Rotation

Hold Skill (E) for the shield.
Swap to your team and play the fight.
Come back and hold Skill (E) again every 20 seconds or so, before the shield times out.
Use Burst (Q) only when you actually want things turned to stone for a moment. It's optional.

Abilities

Skill (E)	Hold it. That gives you the shield, which lasts 20 seconds and absorbs far more than its listed number suggests, plus a stone pillar.
Burst (Q)	A meteor lands, does respectable damage and turns most normal enemies to stone for a few seconds. The cast animation is long, so it costs your damage dealer field time.

The one mechanic to understand

The shield does two jobs.

The shield is the obvious one. The second is that while the shield is up it lowers enemy resistance to every element and to Physical damage by 20%, which is a straight damage increase for whoever you are actually playing. The area is small and it sits on the shielded character rather than on Zhongli or his pillar, so it only lands while you are stood close to the enemies. It does not stack with a second copy of itself, but it stacks with everything else. That's why he gets brought to fights that were never dangerous in the first place.

What actually matters

Hold, don't tap. The single most common mistake with him. A quick press gives you a pillar and no shield.
Max HP is the only stat that matters. The shield's size comes entirely from his HP. Not Attack, not Defence, not his talent levels beyond the Skill.
Don't go hunting shield strength. It isn't an artifact stat in the first place and the shield is already far bigger than it needs to be. If you want more out of it, level his Skill talent, which is cheap and does the job.

Gear

Weapon	Max HP. Black Tassel is a 3-star polearm with the highest Max HP main stat in the game. On a character who deals no damage it beats most 5-stars. You almost certainly already own several.
Artifacts	4-piece Tenacity of the Millelith. The pillar that comes with the shield keeps poking enemies near it, so the set's 20% Attack buff for the party stays up almost all the time.

Sands	Goblet	Circlet	Substats
HP	HP	HP	HP / ER

Ignore Crit, ignore Attack, ignore Elemental Mastery.

Works well with

Geo

Pyro

Electro

The shield and the resistance drop help any team, so treat these as a mild preference rather than a requirement. Geo is listed because a second Geo character switches on Geo resonance, which is a damage bonus for anyone standing behind a shield.

Don't bother

His Burst, most of the time. It's slow and your damage dealer wants those seconds.
Energy Recharge, unless you have decided you want the Burst every rotation. Skipping the Burst skips the problem.
Building him for damage. His own numbers are never worth the artifacts.
The stone pillar. It does a small amount of damage and it comes attached to the shield anyway.

Want the full deep dive? Read Zhongli on KeqingMains.

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