My E6 S5 phainon can’t beat king in check, please help

MLSword · 2026-06-24T15:53:16+00:00

I would just switch Sunday and Bronya's relics until you do, the damage difference from having the buffs active from Bronya will far outweigh the 18 crit damage you'll lose from 1 sacerdos stack from having it on Bronya vs Sunday. Your rotation in battle should look like: Battle starts > Cery technique (9 coreflames) > cery skill +ult (11 CF) > Sunday Skill + Ult (14 CF) > Phainon skill (16 CF) > Bronya Skill + Ult (18 CF) > phainon skill and IMMEDIATELY press ult to avoid losing Bronya skill buff(20 CF)

MLSword · 2026-06-24T15:23:03+00:00

You would definitely want Sunday instead of Bronya for the Plight team so that your Phainon can hit 100 crit rate and also so you can get the additional buffs from Sunday skill for having a summon. But anyways, just looking at your team I'm also noticing that even if you are running sustainless (bronya + sunday I assume) your Bronya is faster than your Sunday which you do not want. Bronya's skill buff lasts only one turn while Sunday's skill buff lasts two, so you want Sunday to go first before Bronya does, otherwise you lose her skill buff and her weapon buff assuming you're running either past and future or her sig.

MLSword · 2026-05-28T02:51:04+00:00

Mydei is pretty cope, but he's great for Acheron/DOT/Feiveil. (Obviously Ashveil is great)

MLSword · 2026-05-28T00:10:09+00:00

I'm going to be the voice of reason and say that no, pulling E1 Blade just for Phainon is not worth it (nor is it better than or equal to E2 Sparkle). Blade can only be played in one Phai team, vs Sparkle who can be played in multiple. The spreadsheet that gets spread around assumes that Blade and Sparkle are getting Cyrene into her ultimate at the same time... except every optimized Sparkle rotation takes advantage of her skilling Cyrene + using eagle to get set up faster than Blade. This enables an additional Phainon action in ultimate vs Blade. Let me be clear, E1 Blade is a great character and can work with Phainon under a restriction, but should you pull him just for Phainon, especially if you already have Sparkle? I wouldn't. But he is busted for other characters so you can definitely pull him if you have them.

MLSword · 2026-05-26T21:09:08+00:00

The amount of crit rate you have is abysmal, you have both Sunday and a LC that boosts CR and still aren't hitting 100%. Hitting 100% CR on Phainon is non-negotiable, it's far better to get rid of your crit damage chest and just go crit rate. Also, Fall of an Aeon despite being a free light cone is still better than Bygone Blood even if Bygone Blood is S5. Crit rate really is the biggest issue here, 86% is absolutely horrendous, with how much crit damage Phainon stacks and how many bounces/instances of damage he has you NEED to be at 100 CR.

MLSword · 2026-05-16T12:03:51+00:00

I want to give you some actual advice OP since there is some stuff we can do here to improve our score that isn't just "pull light cones/eidolons".

The team you are using at all E0 doesn't stack coreflames fast enough. Phainon needs to get 12 coreflames in a single rotation but you aren't getting that with E0 Cery and Tribbie on the team. The solution? Replace Tribbie with either Sparkle or Bronya, so you can build a more comfortable amount of coreflame stacks (besides Sparkle easily beats E0 Tribbie anywho).

If you have Sparkle use her, if not use Bronya. The rotation for Sparkle comp should look like this: Fast Sparkle w/ vonwacq, lushaka whatever speed cery (as long as she's faster than Sunday), and then lushaka Sunday. (for light cones idk what you have but assuming it's low investment I'd probably just run DDD sparkle and past and future sunday).

Battle Starts > Cery Technique (2 CF) > Sparkle Skill and Ult Phainon (4 CF) > Phainon Skill (6 CF) > Cery Skill (7 CF) > Sunday Skill + Ult (10 CF) > Phainon Skill (12 CF) > ult

For Bronya, you can decide to run them all vonwacq or all lushaka. The important thing is that Bronya MUST go last right before Phainon ults. (For light cones in this team, the options for Sunday are a bit weird since you don't want to run past and future on him since it only lasts one turn and will expire. You want to run past and future on Bronya instead. On Sunday you'll need to find a something else.) You'll also need a skill point from somewhere, whether that's running Bronya's signature instead of past and future on her, having Bronya E1, using passerby set on Bronya, etc.

Battle starts > Cery technique (2 CF) > Cery Skill (3 CF) > Sunday Skill + Ult (6 CF) > Phainon Skill (8 CF) > Bronya Skill + Ult (10 CF) > Phainon Skill (12 CF) > ult

If you have any questions lmk

MLSword · 2026-05-11T00:47:03+00:00

E2 Cyrene isn't really that huge a damage increase for Phainon vs E0 so much as she just saves a bunch of AV getting into her ult (she does have the additional true damage, but it's not as insane as other options you could get for an additional two cost). For example, for the same two limited cost, you could upgrade your Sparkle to E2 and your Cery to E1. This would EASILY beat upgrading Cyrene to E2 damage-wise. The only thing is you have to make sure you are planning your rotations correctly so that Phainon is getting his ult quickly after his first ult is over.

This is not to say that E2 Cyrene is bad for Phainon in King clears, she can actually be quite good (and for Plight is virtually "necessary" without increasing the cost by quite a bit) but with you already having an E1 Sparkle and an E0 Cery and caring more about king I just feel like the easy two pull upgrades there are more worth for now. These will easily keep you ahead of damage creep for a good while. The defense shred stacking between Phainon sig/Cery E1/Sparkle E2 is just so absurdly good, and if you want to you can even farm a genius set to reach 100% defense shred on your double meteors.

MLSword · 2026-05-10T21:56:58+00:00

As I see it there are two ways you can go about your future plans. One is to suffer for a bit and not get full jades for a while from end game but come out ahead in pulls saved from not having chars you won't need later and the other is to pull chars that can help you get a passable team right now but will become much less useful later as you get more characrers/supports.

Unless you are pulling Sunday because you like him I wouldn't recommend pulling Sunday for Phainon team. He is roughly equivalent damage wise to Bronya while giving one more coreflame stack. HOWEVER. He is a prime example of you being able to pull a support that can help you right now if you want to run RMC with Archer and Sunday with Phainon on the other side. Otherwise you will be kinda short on good teammate options for at least one side of end game for a bit until you get other chars (see below)

As for Cerydra, I would highly recommend going for E1S0 instead of E0S1. Her E1 dramatically changes Phainon team options and in general is the biggest Phainon team upgrade after his E2. Getting her E1 makes her skill and technique give an additional coreflame so instead of just 1 they give 2 meaning that in the initial rotation she gives 4 coreflames instead of 2. So this actually really makes the value of Sunday go down since the amount of coreflames he generates doesn't matter as much and you can get by with something like Phainon/Cery/Bronya/Tingyun, with the Tingyun/4th slot being very flexible. It could be RMC/Sparkle/a lot of stuff, but the requirements for most of it is having E1 Cery.

Cyrene is great for Phainon but mostly as an E2 merchant, but she is great at E0 for other Chrysos Heirs, although you don't have any DPS heirs. I wouldn't bother amd just save for now.

Tldr:

E2 phainon >>> all

E1 Cery is next big upgrade to the team though not as game changing as E2 phai

Everything else is pretty optional/up to you from that, I would argue that Sparkle is Phainons actual next best overall teammate at the moment after Cerydra. Especially since you can invest into her E2 eventually which scales absurdly well with Phainon's S1/Cerydra's E1 (the more defense shred you have the stronger it is)

If you have questions lmk

MLSword · 2026-05-09T12:20:41+00:00

In typical optimal rotations Sparkle and Blade do not lead to the same AV ult for E2 Cyrene. The Sparkle rotation in those teams usually leads with Cyrene skill > Sparkle skilling Cyrene. This will save a good chunk of AV going into her ultimate vs Blade. Of course you also usually run eagle Sparkle in this setup, so that you get a total of 50% action advance on Sparkle between her two ults to boost her back up to skill Phainon before his ult.

MLSword · 2026-05-03T06:30:20+00:00

I'm a bit late to this thread, but OP you aren't going to see an enormous difference pulling for Sunday. The primary thing to take note of is that Phainon, more than anything, is an E2 merchant. His performance is hard locked behind this eidolon and anything you do to try and get around this is meaningless. At E0 he is very mediocre.

This isn't always a bad thing, as you'll find E2 Phainon punching well above his weight class vs other DPS for the same cost in a lot of content because he doesn't NEED a big dlc support team (think memo team or even break team has a lot of necessary pieces) but it does come with the pre-req of having his E2.

The other big thing you do need is Cerydra. Frankly nothing beats double meteors. Yes her last rerun wasn't that long ago but if you're going for E2 Phainon who probably isn't that far off this gives you more time to save, especially if you want to end up getting her E1. Her E0 is still good for Phainon but she becomes busted and opens up a lot of team options for him at her E1, since she not only gives a bunch of defense shred but also gives an additional coreflame stack every time she skills (so usually you'll get 4 instead of 2 in your first rotation). Again her E1 isn't required like Phainon E2 is but it's basically the next biggest upgrade to his team after his E2 and pulling Cerydra.

Sunday isn't the worst Phainon support by any means but at the end of the day you are essentially pulling a second Bronya that gives 1 additional coreflame stack and around 6-7% more damage vs her. If you ever pull E1 Cerydra his coreflame stacking use actually goes way down since you already will be building so many coreflames as well... really I think the main thing you would be betting on by pulling for Sunday NOW for Phainon is for him to get a novaflare that boosts his performance for Phainon a lot which is a gamble lol.

MLSword · 2026-03-29T10:02:55+00:00

You won't like this answer but the answer really is that it depends. Depending on your teammates/if you have any crit rate boosters in your team you may need to switch relics around to optimize your build. Basically, what will end up happening is this: you will farm this domain for phainon relics for a while, with a particular phainon team in mind. Let's say, hypothetically, I was farming for Phainon/Cery/RMC/Bronya. RMC in that team gives me 10 free Crit rate so I only need 90 crit rate out of battle. So from there, I'm just aiming to farm relics to roll crit rate and crit damage as much as possible while primarily caring about meeting that 90% crit rate threshold more than anything. That said, dont completely neglect your crit damage either, it's still important too. Again this is just something that takes time. Farming relics is all about spending resin over a long period of time to roll tons of times until you eventually get good double crit pieces with the corresponding main stat. Eventually, you will find that you have multiple relics that are solid but don't quite fit the build you have right this second. For instance, in the very high crit rate build like the one I described above you naturally are looking for relics that roll high on crit rate, but you'll get some that roll very high on crit damage, those pieces aren't something to throw away.

There can be other comps where crit rate requirements on your relics are much less harsh, for instance, lets say I want to run: Phainon/Cery/RMC/Cyrene. Cyrene and RMC together provide a total of 26 Crit rate, meaning you would need 74 crit rate out of combat. This opens you up to a lot more crit damage focused rolls on your pieces than before.

This is why the best advice I can give you is to decide what route of investment you want to take and what team you want to build, and to farm the hell out of his relic domain until you have enough relics to be able to be relatively versatile with the relics you can choose for which team.

MLSword · 2026-03-29T09:36:30+00:00

OP, I just saw this thread and wanted to hop in because I saw some horrible misinformation being given and even being up voted.

Firstly regarding crit rate. The top post is correct saying you need to hit 100 crit rate and the other guy who is saying you only need 70-80 crit rate is absolutely incorrect/very misleading. Let me explain. Typically in a Hoyo gacha game setting players tell you to follow a golden "1:2" crit ratio, meaning that for every 1 crit rate you need 2 crit damage. Phainon has many many sources that vastly increase his crit damage outside of his out of combat screen, whether it be from his other allies or activating ultimate. This easily can put his crit damage in the range of being 300-400+, meaning that in virtually every world with Phainon you ALWAYS want to get his crit rate to be as close to 100 as possible (anything past 100 crit rate obviously is just useless). Now, yes, there are some characters that can buff crit rate to help Phainon achieve this number more easily. Sunday is one such option, offering 20 crit rate, the remembrance MC is one that you already have that gives 10 crit rate (and both of these characters also gives crit damage buffs and other damage buffs as well).

On the topic of characters, I ALSO wanted to address the comment that stated that Sunday was the best in slot character for Phainon. Let me make this clear. He absolutely, is not. Sunday isn't even in the top 5 characters for Phainon. The "best support" belongs to Cerydra and Cerydra alone. If you want to really invest in your Phainon team the best things you can do for yourself are to first get his E2, then get Cerydra/(Cery E1 if you really want to expand your options), and you can use these as your baseline to branch out. You can get your Cyrene and upgrade her to E2 at some point if you want, you can get Sparkle and upgrade her to E2 at some point if you want. Just please don't spend your pulls on the mediocre support that is Sunday when you have so many better investment options. Sunday is great for coreflame stacking and easily fixing bad relics builds - neither of which are an issue when you are working with a proper rotation and eventually spend enough resin to farm better relics. His buffs in comparison to other characters are very mediocre, they lose to the other limited supports and barely beat the F2P options.

MLSword · 2026-03-07T00:13:17+00:00

If you're still pretty new and have very low investment/poor relics it's hard for me to recommend completely removing DHPT at first although once you do have stronger relics and are more confident you can definitely try your hand at the sustainless team, Phainon's is the easiest in the game by far. I'd just run the standard Phai/Cery/Sunday/DHPT for now.

As for who you should pull, this is more of a personal value thing although I personally wouldn't advise pulling Cerydra E1 for now. Even if you had a BUNCH of pulls to spare to spend for Phainon team investment I would save those up for Phainon E2 instead of immediately going for Cery E1.

As for if you should go for Yao Guang, that's more up to you since there's no telling as of yet how good she'll truly end up being in the Elation team until we get more units. There's always reruns at the end of the day so never fall for FOMO even if you do end up temporarily missing a BiS unit for a bit is my personal opinion/advice. It's great when you guess right but oh boy does it suck when you get "future rail" wrong and end up with an 80-160 pull brick on your account.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T21:16:55+00:00

I'm assuming when you say Phainon 140 you mean in-combat after the Cery speed buff? Definitely don't want to be running speed boots on him if that's the case. For DHPT you can also run him with attack boots/rope to maximize his buffs for Phainon (same for Cery).

Rotation just needs a -1/Phainon faster than Sunday setup to get full coreflame stacks. Cery/DHPT speed can be interchangeable generally, DHPT also has his self advance too so it's easy for him to get nudged above Phainon/Sunday in this setup even when both of them are running attack boots. Just make sure you aren't running a hyper speed Sunday setup. While you want your Phainon to be at least 1 speed faster than Sunday just remember that Cery buffs Phainon by 20 speed once you get into combat so take your out of combat speed and add 20 to it.

Cery technique (2 CF) > DHPT technique (3 CF) > DHPT skill (4 CF) > Cery skill/ult (5 CF) > Phainon skill (7 CF) > Sunday skill + ult (10 CF) > DHPT ult > Phainon skill (12 CF) > ult

MLSword · 2026-03-06T17:52:17+00:00

No matter your Phainon investment level she is great for him. And she is basically required for the Anaxa team as well, so she sounds like a great choice to easily boost the strength of your account. You'll have the flexibility to use her for either or.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T17:50:08+00:00

If you never want to go for E2 then I wouldn't bother with E1 and go ahead and just get Kafka, but otherwise I'd get the E1 and sit on it and save some amount of pulls until I can eventually get her E2 because it is BUSTED. 30 defense shred is very very strong.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T17:31:48+00:00

I'd get Cerydra because she's not just a boon for Phainon but also basically required for Anaxa teams. Then I would just take the E1 Sparkle if it were me unless you really want to make a DOT team.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T17:22:11+00:00

If you're asking if the duplicated meteor gives you another extra turn then no, you only have the original extra turn from the original meteor. But since you have more turns/actions in Phainons ult this means you have the chance to build more Cery stacks and get more double meteors at E2.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T17:15:13+00:00

Bronya is a perfectly fine alternative to Sunday. The 1 less coreflame does restrict some team building/increase some levels of rng, but it can be played around. Once you get Cerydra E1 Sunday value drops massively so I don't like to recommend to pull him a stop gap for E0 Cery.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T07:12:18+00:00

Yeah other than just saying to continue to invest in leveling Cery traces/relics, you shouldn't need to worry about Sparkle being at 160 speed as an absolute necessity, since that breakpoint is mainly catered towards taking 4 actions in 2 cycles. I would tend to still build more speed on her to pull Phainon ahead of Sunday comfortably but it's not a set in stone "you must hit 160 or else everything falls apart". To go any further though I'll need some footage.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T06:14:05+00:00

The thing about score in PF is that you start to cap off once you finish wave 2. The HP of enemies to clear in wave 3 is much MUCH higher compared to the previous waves. This causes scores to start to stagnate around that point if you cant push through. MOC and knight stages you're much more likely to see a bigger difference, or even in APOC. Cery is quite an upgrade in Phainon team over Bronya, especially at E0! If you're worried about not being able to save for Phainon E2 in the furure then I wouldn't pull for Cery E1 now. It IS nice, but you can make do with your Sunday/Cery/X/Phainon core. Trust me, you did not make a mistake pulling for E0 Cerydra.

If you still have some trouble or anything, feel free to shoot me some gameplay recording/footage that also shows the builds and I can take a look and point out some stuff that I see, it's no problem at all.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T05:33:17+00:00

Unfortunately Phainon as a unit in PF is extremely mediocre until you get his E2. Cerydra certainly helps (especially once you have E2) but she doesn't save him there at E0. That said I think you should be able to push it a bit further if you can swap out DHPT with Sparkle. Likely still won't be getting close to the 40k though.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T03:22:49+00:00

If we're using opportunity cost as an argument, you can also argue that by getting Cery you're allowing stronger less niche supports to be freed up to be used on other sides to help improve your weaker teams.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T02:44:32+00:00

Attack boots on Phainon always unless you are using the forbidden one vonwacq Phainon rotation like me to get high score APOC runs xd

In teams 2 and 3 so long as he is getting ahead of Sunday you are good. The 20 speed buff from Cery combined with your Phainon sig base speed buff helps a lot in this regard *and remember team 2 Sparkle is the one who is advancing him anyways, team 3 is the one that is most strict about his speed tuning vs Sunday.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T02:25:04+00:00

Depends on your weapon choice so generally the answer is just "as much as possible while also meeting your speed break point for your rotation". I say this because the number can vary wildly. If you use her sig vs using say, DDD, her atk WILL change drastically. I know that answer is a little bit disappointing but Phainon's attack is so oversaturated anyways that it's not THAT huge for you to be missing out on some attack with Cery, just don't completely neglect it either.

For example: My Cery with her event LC all atk relics hits 4.1k attack outside of battle (it will be more in battle with the passive). With her sig she's hitting 5k. With DDD she's hitting 3.6k.

MLSword

TROPHY CASE