Barbara build guide

Barbara acts as a support healer that specializes in healing her entire team. Her Elemental Burst (Q) is a one shot instant large heal for everyone and scales based on her HP. Meanwhile, her Elemental Skill (E) gives the active character a hydro ring called “Melody Loop” that heals periodically. Plus, “Melody Loop” will give Barbara normal attacks with the ability to heal her party members that scales based on her HP.

Maximize Barbara

Building Barbara optimally is pretty simple as all her abilities scale base on her HP. Look for HP% stats on her artifacts to max her healing potential as well as Energy Recharge so her Burst has a higher uptime. Although Prototype Amber (4✩) with its secondary HP% stat provides her with more heals, utility wise the Thrilling Tales of Dragon Slayers (3✩) is more beneficial for the team with its ATK% buff. In fact, if Barbara is properly built for HP% and ER from her artifacts, the difference in running a HP% weapon is minuscule.

Barbara’s weakness

Barbara has a couple of drawbacks especially when running her on endgame content. Firstly, she does little to no damage from her kit yet requires to be on field to maximize healing her team when using her E. This isn’t specific for her as Kokomi and Qiqi both share the same issue. However unlike Kokomi who can at the very least provide utility with her hydro application from her jellyfish, Barbara can’t even do that.

Plus on Barbara’s Elemental Skill (E), the “Melody Loop” or hydro ring will apply hydro onto the character. This hydro application is constant throughout the skill runtime making them vulnerable towards elemental reaction such as frozen or electro-charged.

More about Barbara:

Barbara’s skill gives you a pulse of healing every 5 seconds, every pulse will imbue you with a Hydro status, that means it can be used for status-cleansing (Pyro in specific, while other elements may take more pulses).

Take note that Hydro reacting with Cryo status will freeze you in place, her skill should be used in consideration of the environment

Regarding Artifact Sets:

Maiden Beloved (2) Tenacity of the Millelith (2): Acts as a place holder set for Maiden Beloved if you want pure healing and have not been able to gather Maiden Beloved (4) yet.
Noblesse Oblige (4): Usable option if you want Barbara to have more utility, but do note that Barbara might have bad uptime on this set.