Hook Best Build Guide

Hook is a mostly single-target focused damage dealer with some occasional Blast AoE thrown in. She is focused on inflicting Burn on enemies and then dealing increased damage against them, while also recovering some HP for herself and even regenerating some extra Energy. Her infrequent AoE results in her being more of an honorary Hunt unit, rather than a fully fledged Destruction character.

We’ve got characters like Qingque that are ‘Erudition’ in point size 50 inverted commas, and then we’ve got Hook who is ‘Destruction question mark?’ and doesn’t really seem to be doing Destruction things as well as she probably should do. Even still, she’s a decent damage dealer and a relatively accessible source of Fire DMG.

Hook’s Skill deals up to 240% ATK to a single enemy and has a 100% base chance to Burn them for 2 turns, with the Burn dealing 65% ATK at the start of each turn. This Skill has an Enhanced version after using her Ultimate that deals up to 280% ATK to a single enemy and 80% ATK to adjacent foes, with the same Burn chance and damage.

Her Ultimate deals up to 400% ATK to a single enemy and Enhances her next Skill. That’s it, that’s all it does. Would have been nice for it to be AoE but at least it has a good damage multiplier. It also has an average Energy cost of 120 meaning it’s up more than you’d think, especially when factoring in Hook’s Talent. Hook’s Talent will deal additional Fire DMG of up to 100% ATK when Hook attacks a target afflicted with Burn, and will also regenerate 5 extra Energy. 

With this, it’s plain to see that Hook is really not that complicated of a character, perhaps even to her detriment in some regards. What I mean by this is that there’s nothing to really optimise or play around with. Our collective galaxybrains are mostly useless here since Hook’s kit really is just this simple. Her upsides and downsides are as presented, and that’s a little unfortunate since it results in her potential being really quite low by comparison to other characters.

There can be no new support character that is beneficial to Hook’s performance without also always being better for other damage dealers. She’s a competent dps, but with her being quote unquote ‘Destruction’ and more like a Hunt character, she naturally struggles in many of the scenarios we see in the endgame these days. If there’s ever a Fire-weak Boss that needs to be pounded into the ground, then Pitch Dark Hook the Great will undoubtedly have a good time against them — provided they don’t summon reinforcements all the time. 

Hook’s Bonus Ability Traces definitely help out quite a bit with her performance but are really equally as boring as the rest of her kit. A2 restores 5% Max HP to Hook whenever her Talent is triggered, A4 increases the chance to resist Crowd Control debuffs by 35%, and A6 will Action Advance Hook by 20% when using her Ultimate, and additionally restore an extra 5 Energy.

It’s a lot of extra Energy coming Hook’s way for just playing the game as you normally would, and it definitely contributes a fair bit to even more frequent Ultimates, thus reducing the downtime on her only source of AoE in her Enhanced Skill. Especially if you include teammates like Tingyun or Huohuo with Hook, you can end up getting extraordinarily frequent Ultimates that are dealing 500% ATK with her Talent included. It’s definitely nothing to scoff at, and Hook’s base stats are also surprisingly good.

With Eidolons, Hook’s performance actually goes up a fair bit. E1 grants a 20% DMG bonus to her Enhanced Skill, and E2 extends the duration of her Skill’s Burn by 1 turn. This leads to greatly increased consistency especially since you’re not likely to be building for Effect Hit Rate on purpose on Hook. E4 continues the trend by having a 100% base chance to burn adjacent enemies whenever her Talent is triggered, and finally E6 caps things off with a 20% DMG bonus against Burned enemies.

She’s definitely one of the forgotten characters of this game, and it’s a bit unfortunate because she’s really not bad at all. It’s just that there are plenty of characters that are better. If you’re lacking a Fire option but are sitting by an unlevelled Hook with potentially even E6, I may even recommend using her until you get something better. You may even be pleasantly surprised by her performance.