How to play Clorinde in Genshin Impact

Clorinde is a 5-star Electro DPS character in Genshin Impact, and the second character ever to incorporate Bond of Life mechanics in their kit. Here’s a breakdown of Clorinde’s unique kit and how to play her.

What is Bond of Life?

First, a quick explanation of Bond of Life. Bond of Life is a debuff that restricts the healing that a character can receive by a flat amount. The amount of Bond of Life that you have is represented by a red bar surrounding the affected character’s health bar. If that character receives healing while a Bond of Life is present, the Bond of Life will absorb that healing instead of allowing your character’s HP to be restored. 

Bond of Life can be cleared by receiving enough healing. Once Bond of Life is no longer present, you can heal your character like normal.

Bond of Life on Clorinde, explained

When Clorinde uses her Skill, she enters a special “Night Vigil” stance. During her Night Vigil stance, her Normal Attacks grant a Bond of Life worth 35% of her max HP, stacking up to three times for 105% Bond of Life total.

When Clorinde has maximum stacks of her Bond of Life, using her Skill again heals her, clears her Bond of Life, and deals bonus damage. For this reason, you will want the maximum 105% Bond of Life when using Clorinde’s Skill during her Night Vigil stance.

When playing Clorinde, you should see her health bar be covered just above halfway by a red Bond of Life meter before being completely cleared when you use her Skill. This is just a quirk of how the Bond of Life meter is displayed.

While in her Night Vigil stance, any healing that Clorinde receives will be converted to additional Bond of Life. While this makes her somewhat more vulnerable during her combo, it helps make Clorinde more consistent (and sometimes more powerful!) when played with healers. 

Clorinde’s best combos

This is the rotation you should use for Clorinde in most teams. There is room for optimization if you have a strong healer in your team, but for general use, this combo should be fairly reliable.

1. Set up your teammate abilities.
2. Swap to Clorinde.
3. Use Clorinde’s Burst (optional).
4. Use Clorinde’s Skill to enter Night Vigil stance.
5. Perform three Normal Attacks.
6. Use Clorinde’s Skill again
7. Repeat her three Normals + Skill combo until her Night Vigil stance ends (about six times total).
8. Swap to teammates.

In shorthand notation, this combo combo looks like:

(Q) E 6[N3E]

If you have a strong healer in your team, you may be able to use two Normal Attacks during her combo instead of three, allowing Clorinde to use her Skill more often. Your healer should be continuously healing at least 30% of Clorinde’s HP per tick. If you’re able to meet this criterion, then Clorinde’s optimal combo would be:

(Q) E 8[N2E]