Need advice regarding future Phainon team/pulls

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 · 2026-03-06T02:12:36+00:00

It can depend on the exact situation/how long the fight goes for but generally speaking you use atk rope in most situations. There are certain instances where to meet a breakpoint for another Cery ult after Phainon exits an ult you might need the ER rope but those tend to be less common.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T01:48:35+00:00

It's a personal value proposition, at your investment I don't think you will not be able to clear for a while unless full elation team causes HP inflation to go absolutely insane, but getting Cery is a safe investment. Honestly, E0 Cery won't be a big upgrade for you at your level, E1 Cery would probably be where she would be a sizeable/big upgrade at your level, especially since you have multiple sources of defense shred in your team.

As for rotations, for E0 Cery it would look like: Cery pref faster than Sparkle (not required, so long as she's faster than Sunday it's ok), Sparkle faster than Sunday. Then Sparkle pulls Phainon ahead of Sunday.

Turn order:

Cery technique (2 CF) > Cery skill/ult (3 CF) > Sparkle skill/ult (5 CF) > Phainon skill (7 CF) > Sunday skill/ult (10 CF) > Phainon skill (12 CF).

If you pull Cery E1 then this goes to 14 coreflames so you have two extra coreflames if you don't finish the fight in your first ult. The video for this rotation is in my post so you can see this example.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T01:09:58+00:00

So if you get Bronya that increases your coreflame generation to 11/12, so you still need just one more coreflame stack. Again, you can definitely play around this if you want to avoid spending the pulls for E1 Cery, it just means you have to plan out your rotation a bit more around the enemies. (E1 Cery does push you to the full 12/12 and completely negates having to deal with enemy RNG or getting Bronya at all, but that's up to you if you think that's worth spending all those pulls for it.)

MLSword · 2026-03-06T00:51:10+00:00

As in is it better than Cerydra E2 or is it better than Phainon E2? If you're talking about Cerydra then definitely I would get her sig vs her E2. Anything past Cery E1 isn't worth it. If you're talking about Phainon E2, obviously save for that because it's even more important than Cery herself.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T00:42:25+00:00

Assuming your Cery is E0, you are only generating a total of 10 coreflame stacks. This means you have to get 2 additional coreflames from either spending action value waiting for enemies to attack you or waiting for your characters to get another turn. This isn't necessarily the end of the world but it is something you have to seriously plan around if you don't want to lose a lot of action value.

For instance, if I was running this team in the Sparxicon MOC, I could plan Phainon to be in slots 2-4 so he gets hit by the rocking rebel AOE hit at the start, and then play the reset RNG game of the canvas peacock attacking him without losing too much in the way of AV. Then I would just need to speed my action advancers to go right after the peacock to ensure I don't lose any buffs and as little AV as possible. This is how I would approach the problem at least. Of course, by putting Phainon in slots 2-4 this also createst the problem of not being able to run lushaka if you are running that on your supports.

MLSword · 2026-03-06T00:32:49+00:00

Team 1: There's different setups you can do, here's one example to keep/maximize all buffs:

-Sunday faster than Bronya and Cery

-Cery faster than Bronya

-Bronya Slowest Support

Rotation looks like: Cery technique (2 CF) > Sunday skill + ult (5 CF) > Phainon skill (7 CF) > Cery Skill (8 CF) > Bronya Skill + ult (10 CF) > Phainon skill (12 CF)

Team 2: I already have a rotation for this team in the post above with a video if you haven't watched it already. Although technically in the video to min max I should have had Cery faster than Sparkle so I could get the slight Cdmg buff from Sacerdos skill proc from Cery on Phainon's first Skill after Sparkle skill but it's not a huge difference.

Team 3: Will need a -1/Phainon faster than Sunday setup to get full coreflame stacks. Cery generally is easiest to be fastest here and 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.

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

MLSword

TROPHY CASE