Gaming Build and Guide

Gaming is a 4-star Pyro Claymore character whose playstyle is centered around his specially enhanced Plunging Attacks. His Burst grants him resets to his Skill, enabling continuous and rapid Pyro Plunging Attacks which can be further amplified through Melt or Vaporize reactions.

To further elaborate, casting his Elemental Skill launches Gaming forward. Upon colliding with an enemy or an obstacle, he leaps higher into the air and gains access to a unique Plunging Attack, “Charmed Cloudstrider” for a short duration. This action has higher scaling than his regular Plunging Attack and is tied to the talent level of his skill. Charmed Cloudstrider is also converted to Pyro DMG that cannot be overridden, and it counts as Plunging Attack DMG, though it doesn’t have collision damage.

His Elemental Burst then summons his companion Suanni Man Chai and immediately launches it at an enemy, dealing a large instance of damage. Gaming also enters the Wushou Stance for 12 seconds. This Stance grants him increased interruption resistance, but more importantly, it re-summons Man Chai whenever Gaming lands a Charmed Cloudstrider if above 50% HP. This is extremely significant: whenever Man Chai returns to Gaming, it disappears and resets the cooldown of his Elemental Skill, allowing him to cast it again immediately. This loop forms the entire basis of his on-field playstyle: cast his Skill to access his Charmed Cloudstrider Plunging Attack, catch Man Chai to reset the cooldown, and repeat.

HP Manipulation

Gaming also manipulates his own HP on top of the previous gameplay loop. Landing Charmed Cloudstrider consumes 15% of his Max HP, though this cannot reduce his HP below 10%, while casting his Elemental Burst restores 30% of his Max HP. His first Ascension Passive then restores 1.5% of his Max HP every 0.2 seconds for 0.8 seconds after Charmed Cloudstrider hits an enemy, for 6% in total. As such, he loses 9% of his Max HP per Charmed Cloudstrider as long as he is hitting enemies with it.

This HP loss can matter for two reasons:

First, his second Ascension Passive increases Charmed Cloudstrider’s DMG by 20% while he’s above 50% HP, and otherwise grants him a 20% Incoming Healing Bonus. A small amount of healing or shielding from teammates can be valuable to maintain the damage bonus’ uptime, especially if you expect to be taking damage on top of his own HP consumption. This can also be sustained through Gaming’s Constellation 1.

The much more important reason though is that to be able to re-summon Man Chai through his Charmed Cloudstrider, he is required to be above 50% HP.

Expert

Much of Gaming’s skill expression comes from how his Skill reset works, which can be broken into two parts.

First, his Skill goes on cooldown as soon as he launches forward, well before he performs his Plunging Attack. Rather than plunging, waiting for Man Chai to return, and only then casting his Skill again, Gaming can instead cast his Skill and catch Man Chai during the dash, ascent, or plunge animation. Since he re-summons Man Chai upon landing, he can then cast his Skill again as soon as he touches the ground. This allows him to fit up to 9 Plunging Attacks into longer rotations.

Second, the direction Man Chai travels after being summoned is random. Man Chai initially launches in one direction before bouncing back towards Gaming, so the time it takes to return can vary significantly. A favorable direction can greatly reduce the wait for his Skill reset and increase the number of Plunging Attacks that he can perform during his Burst, whereas an unfavorable one can do the opposite. This is further complicated when facing large bosses or in fights with heavy visual clutter where it can be hard to track Man Chai, as dashing towards Man Chai can help reduce the time it takes to return.

Note that this doesn’t matter in all teams though; in his best Melt teams, there is usually only one Cryo applier. And in cases they apply Cryo every 2 seconds, like Citlali or Escoffier, the number of reacted Plunging Attacks is gated by their application rate regardless of Man Chai luck or the player’s execution. In these teams, the main advantage of efficient resets is a slightly shorter rotation (1 second) since Gaming can Melt as soon as his teammate applies Cryo.

In teams with more than a single Cryo applier, such as double Cryo comps, the randomness of Man Chai makes it unlikely that rotations will be optimized specifically around Cryo application. Rapid plunging still helps, but the limiting factor becomes Man Chai’s RNG bounce direction rather than further skill expression. You could say the willingness to try over and over for good Man Chai RNG is a level of expertise in itself.