What is Hitlag in Genshin?

Hitlag occurs whenever an attack seem to slowdown whenever it connects with an enemy. Hence why its called ‘hitlag’, your hit literally seems to lag. This happen because frames get frozen in place for very a brief moment giving player a sense of weight in every hit. It exist so that players don’t feel like their hit seems to phase through an enemy like hitting a ghost or empty air.

Hitlag also only happen to characters that wield sword, polearm, claymore and have to physically connect wtih the enemy. Zhongli players would notice that his spear kicking Auto Attack (AA) has no hitlag when it strikes enemies because it actually doesn’t connect him to the enemy. Both catalyst and bow users do not experience hitlag. The amount of hitlag also varies across the enemies hit. For instance, hitting mitachurl with shields would reduce your attacks to near standstill. However, outside of this instance, the difference is not big enough worth mentioning.

Advantages of Hitlag

This also introduce a unique effect, in which certain buff/debuff and aura (Electro-Charged) duration is extended whenever hitlag occurs. Remember that hitlag is basically frames getting frozen for a brief moment. This inevitably causes specific in-game timer to pause as well. Good examples include Xiao, Razor and Noelle’s Burst (Q) that gets extended whenever their hit connects with enemies. Have you ever wondered why their Burst (Q) seem to last few seconds longer than they’re supposed to? Its because of hitlag!

Also, hitting enemies lengthens the duration of certain effects on the enemy that are related to their current state. The best example of this Zhongli petrification.  If you have a 6s Zhongli petrification with C4 and lvl 10 ult, and play in co-op with 3 people attacking a petrified enemy, the petrification will last until Zhongli has his burst back up, meaning the delay from the enemy being attacked causes petrification to extend for an additional 6s.

Disadvantages of Hitlag

This also mean that you have to keep in mind how rotation works with characters that have hitlag. It may not be obvious how much time you’re spending in a character’s Burst (Q) form before swapping to your off-field DPS. The extended duration from hitlag may mess up your team energy regeneration and overall DPS depending on how often you get to cast other skills.

You would also need to keep in mind that the speed of your Auto Attacks (AA) are different when testing them on air vs actually hitting an enemy. This may not be obvious for slower characters using claymore but for faster characters using sword or polearm the difference is significant.

Characters that relies on AA for DPS also need to think of how much hitlag actually impact their DPS. This is even more so for characters like Ayaka or Xianling as both rely on faster but numerous smaller AA meaning the effects of hitlag affect their AA more. Consider that if everyone gets around 0.5s of hitlag per attack, if you have 10 fast attacks you’ll have 5s of hitlag, as opposed to 5 slow attacks for 2.5s of hitlag.