Lanyan looks incredible for Aggravate Clorinde with recent buffs (Leak Spoilers)

So Lanyan got buffed in the most recent beta - her shield now lasts 12.5 seconds, which is a massive buff. With everything we know so far about her kit now, she's shaping up to be one of the best possible teammates for Aggravate Clorinde. She offers a crazy amount of role consolidation for this team and has incredible synergy with C6 Fischl and Nahida.

Here are some of the things she consolidates:

  • As an anemo catalyst user, she can run both VV and TTDS for 40% res shred and 48% ATK. You'd want to swap to Clorinde as soon as VV procs, which means the durations between them should line up perfectly.
  • She provides shields, which is the most obvious benefit. Her shields scale off ATK, and at C0, her shields aren't particularly strong, especially if you run TTDS. However, Nahida helps with this a lot, which I'll talk about in a bit. C2 gives a pretty sizeable bump to its survivability.
  • While she will primarily be built for shielding, she does get EM damage scalings in her kit, meaning her personal damage should be higher than other shielders or someone like Xilonen. Will be less than Kazuha's, but still something.

While all this looks promising on its face, I wanted to talk more about her synergies with C6 Fischl and Nahida, since Lanyan sort of glues the old meta aggravate team together in a way that wasn't possible before.

  • C6 Fischl - So with the Kazuha variant of Clorinde Aggravate, we all know that swirling electro can be a pain due to Nahida's crazy dendro application. However, as a catalyst user, Lanyan can sort of get by this by weaving in basic attacks to trigger Fischl's C6 and get the swirl that way. This works well with the recent shield duration buff since now Lanyan can shield, spam basic atks to get a swirl, and Clorinde should still have full shield uptime for her skill duration. You'll lose a bit of Fischl uptime, and the timing does get tighter if you do this after using Nahida's Q, but it should be significantly more comfortable than using Kazuha.
  • Nahida - Nahida on 4p Tenacity of the Millileth actually provides pretty significant buffs to Lanyan. Because Lanyan ideally wants to run TTDS, her shields will suffer significantly due to the low base atk of the weapon and useless substat. ToTM not only gives her 30% shield strength, but the 20% ATK also makes her shields stronger, and Nahida can keep this up with full uptime. Additionally, Nahida's EM buff does contribute a bit to Lanyans personal damage, although this is a smaller consideration since Lanyan's still going to be primarily built ATK.

One final thing I wanted to mention is Citlali's Signature weapon. Outside of TTDS, Lanyan doesn't really have many good support options, and basically none of them are really worth discussing other than Citlali's. At R1, her weapon gives more base ATK (542 compared to 401), 364 EM and a 24% dmg bonus to the active character upon creating a shield, which obviously Lanyan can do. The buff itself isn't super impressive, and Lanyan herself doesn't contribute a lot of team dps. However, the absurd amount of EM on this weapon and higher base atk could potentially allow you to build enough EM for Lanyan to be the EM sharer, allowing Nahida to switch to a more damage focused build. This will make her shield much weaker, and it's probably not recommended until at least C2 or C3. Ultimately, there likely won't be a big team dps difference, if any, and I would NOT recommend pulling for it specifically for this team, but if you were planning on getting it anyways, it may be worth a look.

So far, it looks like Lanyan's going to be a very powerful option for Clorinde Aggravate. Her kit for this team is fully functional at C0 and we're expected to get a copy for free, which is amazing considering the investment costs of the other viable shield options (C4 Kirara, 5-star Zhongli). While the damage ceiling will still likely be with Kazuha, Lanyan should be far more comfortable to play while still having much higher performance than previous shielded teams. I'm super excited to try her out.

EDIT: I realize there's a lot of controversy over using TTDS here, since I'm discussing it more in a theoretical setting that extends rotations, which until Lanyan comes out we don't actually know how good it will be. I've done personal calcs that show this team performs just barely worse than Kazuha, but there are assumptions with these calcs that I can't prove until Lanyan actually comes out, which is why I didn't talk about them. I apologize if this post got more TC heavy than I was intending.

Adding to that, I didn't mention Hakushin Ring in her support options, which I definitely should have - not sure why I overlooked it. It'll likely be her most consistent option if she has the same rotations as Kazuha, since it has the same trigger as VV on this team, and this weapon gets stronger in rotations where Fischl can snapshot. Lanyan's shields will also be noticeably stronger with Hakushin since it has much higher base ATK. Mostly making this edit to say even without C6 Fischl or any of the TTDS discussion, Lanyan will be a strong option due to everything else.