Xing Zhe is the seventh playable Hero in Gunfire Reborn, being unlocked with the new Visitors of the Spirit Realm DLC. Xing Zhe specializes in extracting power from his enemies and turning it into his own strength, allowing him to boost his gun’s power beyond mortal limits. If you want to be the master of any weapon you come across and make every shot hit like a truck, Xing Zhe is the hero for you.
In this article, we will examine how to play and build Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn to help enhance your weapons to unbelievable heights.
Xing Zhe Character Summary
Xing Zhe’s play style utilizes a combination of all weapon arts in order to intrinsically buff his skills, doing the same by using his abilities to buff his weapons. He can summon multiple clones that cudgel his enemies and share his gun scaling to deal more damage. Xing Zhe also uses his Essence Chain to extract the power from grouped-up enemies to turn a fraction of their strength into his own.
How Xing Zhe’s Abilities Work in Gunfire Reborn
Soul Strike
Soul Strike is Xing Zhe’s Primary Skill. Using it throws out a small yellow projectile toward your crosshair. When the projectile nears an enemy, it homes in on them and forms a clone of yourself, striking them with a cudgel hit before moving on to other nearby enemies. Soul Strike has a base range of ten meters and hits up to four enemies.
Based on the held Weapon, Soul Strike scales with Weapon SMG instead of Skill DMG. Soul Strike also has additional effects based on the Weapon type. Soul Strike also deals damage based on your weapons, level, element, CritX, Lucky Shot Chance, and other bonuses from Inscriptions and Essence Chain.
Different Weapon Types Grant Unique Build Bonuses to Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn
- Pistols: Cause each cudgel hit to also inflict hits from Essence Chain that deal +100% damage, but will not boost your weapon, slow enemies, or trigger other effects.
- Shotguns: Adds three extra projectiles to the projectile count of cudgel hits, slightly increasing damage. Additionally, all projectiles hit regardless of accuracy.
- Snipers: Adds a 40% chance for the cudgel to inflict a critical hit, and any crits from cudgel hits receive +60% total damage.
- Launchers: 100% chance for the cudgel to become explosive damage, hitting all enemies within six meters and dealing an additional 30% damage.
- Melee Weapons: The first cudgel hit has +80% Lucky Shot Chance.
- Rifles, SMGs. & Injectors: The base damage of the cudgel hit is increased by 500, considerably boosting its typical low damage. However, the bonus is added after weapons levels, which worsens the higher your weapons level, compared to other choices.
Essence Chain
Essence Chain is Xing Zhe’s Secondary SKill. Using it will wrap a golden rope around four enemies, dealing damage and lowering their movement speed by 90% for 0.25 seconds. Additionally, every weapon that you hold receives two temporary levels for six seconds, improving their effectiveness which then improves Soul Strike. The bonus does not stack, regardless of the number of enemies hit.
Related Article: Top Gunfire Reborn Ao Bai Build and Guide
Xing Zhe Strengths
Xing Zhe is a master of all weapons and scales primarily with how much he has upgraded his weapon. It’s a unique playstyle and very different from the Crown Prince in Gunfire Reborn, whose playstyle and build are much more versatile.
Essence Chain allows you to easily gain six temporary levels and inscriptions just for striking one enemy. That’s thousands of gold worth of upgrades obtained just from the Essence Chain. Combo this with Soul Strike as a follow-up, and Xing Zhe can deal massive damage.
However, Xing Zhe is one of the more heavily RNG-reliant Heros in Gunfire Reborn.
Since Xing Zhe requires having good upgrades and stats on his weapons to scale accordingly, having lousy luck can severely impact your damage. Also, since Xing Zhe is a master of all weapons, he can make even bad weapons, good and great weapons feel godlike. Yet, attempting certain Zing Zhe builds in Gunfire Reborn may have bad synergy or poor inscriptions based on luck.
Even with the chance of luck being against you with enough Essence Chain buffs Xing Zhe still can make any underperforming weapon hit like a bus. No matter what your preference for weapons is, Xing Zhe will still elevate it beyond the limits of any other Gunfire Reborn Hero.
Tips & Tricks for Playing Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn
Our main tip for playing Xing Zhe is always to have your Essence Chain buff up whenever possible. Without upgrades, Essence Chain still buffs your Weapon by two temporary levels for six seconds. That’s a 600+ gold buff for free. Even if you devote most of your upgrades to enhancing your Soul Strike, Essence Chain’s buff should be maintained.
Our other tip is to know that Xing Zhe requires a bit more game knowledge to utilize appropriately. If you are new to Gunfire Reborn, we highly recommend looking at our Crown Prince guide and Ao Bai guide to understand how elemental effects and Lucky Shot works fully. Since their main focus is enhancing your weapons, it’s highly recommended to become familiar with how every Weapon operates, what Lucky Shot Chance is, and how to proc elemental effects.
Xing Zhe’s Best Talents
Every character in Gunfire Reborn has three talent trees that focus on enhancing their guns, abilities or granting extra utility. Xing Zhe’s talent tree focuses on improving his Soul Strike, weapon mastery, or Essence Chains effects. There are many viable Xing Zhe builds in Gunfire Reborn for focusing on one tree over the rest.
Yet, we found it is usually best to focus on enhancing his Essence Chain first, then weapon mastery, and Soul Strike last. Each tree does offer great benefits, but we didn’t find that focusing on one overall reaped many benefits.
Concentrated Essence
Hitting an enemy with Essence Chain enhances your weapons with extra levels, starting with +3, up to +9 at max rank, and increases the buff’s duration by two seconds, up to six. At the max rank of Concentrated Essence, Xing Zhe gains one extra weapon level for every enemy hit with Essence Chain.
Concentrated Essence is Xing Zhe’s strongest Ascension for allowing him to skyrocket the number of extra levels his weapons can obtain and increasing how long the buff lasts. At max rank, your Weapon will be buffed by nine additional levels for 16 seconds. That’s thousands of gold worth in damage at the press of a button. Combine that with the fact you can add four extra levels if you hit four enemies with Essence Chain. It’s a must-have talent for every single run.
Ancient Etching
Add an additional inscription to all weapons, which takes effect when Essence Chain enhances your guns. Each level in Ancient Etching increases the rarity of the inscription, from normal, to rare, then exclusive.
Giving your weapons another inscription, possibly past its normal limits, is wonderful. Extra attack speed, reload speed, weapon damage, critical chance, or elemental damage is unbelievably strong to have on top of your weapons levels skyrocketing every time you use Essence Chain. Another must-have talent for every Gunfire Reborn run.
Raging Waves
Add one up to three extra meters for Soul Strike and add between two to six extra cudgel hits. At the third rank, every unused cudgel hit reduces the cooldown by 5%.
What sounds like a slight buff on the surface is actually quite beneficial to pumping out more Soul Strike DPS. Adding extra range gives better AOE, and the additional hits means Soul Strike gains more damage per use on top of the bonus damage Essence Chain gives.
Extra Shackle
Add up to three maximum targets for the Essence Chain. If the number of enemies hit is below the max, add up to 60% DMG for every target below the maximum.
Essence Chain’s buff doesn’t require hitting all possible targets unless you use rank three of Concentrated Essence. But whenever you face a Boss or an Elite enemy, your Essence Chain’s damage will skyrocket the fewer targets there are, allowing for some much-needed single target burst.
Strength Taker
Enemies hit by Essence Chain will deal -30% less damage, up to a maximum of -60% for between eight to twelve seconds. For each enemy hit by Essence Chain, you gain extra Skill DMG and extra max Shield for the same duration. Strength Taker can hold between 10 and 15 stacks.
Damage reduction and gaining extra Shield are crucial in greater difficulties, and we highly recommend Strength Taker as a primary defensive option. While the Skill DMG doesn’t synergize with Soul Strike, it does, however, buff the amount of damage Essence Chain deals. Combine Strength Taker with Extra Shackle, and you mix damage reduction, max Shield Gain, and great single target DPS. It’s a wonderful option to have and combos well with other Ascensions.
Related Article: How to Build Tao in Gunfire Reborn
Alternate Talents for Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn
A few other strong talents to grab are Wombo Combo, Rotation Technique, Aura Protection, Turn into Reality, and Reversed. Wombo Combo causes every five hits with Essence Chain, you will cast a free Soul Strike. The Rotation Technique increases your Essence Chain capacity and restores uses after hitting five enemies with Essence Chain or 30 times with weapons.
Aura Protection increases your max Shield and grants damage reduction after killing an enemy. Aura Protection can stack up to five times, but you lose stacks when your Shield Breaks. Turn into Reality increases the scaling of Soul Strikes DMG. Lastly, Reversed lowers the cooldown of Soul Strike every time you kill an enemy.
Weapon Builds for Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn
Xing Zhe is a master of all weapons, which ultimately comes down to your preference. However, if you are focusing more on a Soul Strike build instead of an Essence Chain build, we don’t recommend using Rifles, SMGS, or Injectors, since their base damage increases Soul Strike and becomes worse the further you progress in your run. If you want a more AOE-focused build, we recommend using Lunchers or Shotguns.
If you want a high crit chance Zing Zhe build, we recommend using Pistols or Snipers due to their extra crit chance on Soul Strike. We found that Shotguns were our favorite weapon type for Xing Zhe since they add additional projectiles to the number of cudgel hits on Soul Strike.
Overall, it doesn’t highly impact your run which of the best Gunfire Reborn weapons you decide to focus on, which is a breath of fresh air since most of the Hero roster focuses on using one or two gun types.
Best Occult Scrolls for Xing Zhe
There are a lot of Occult Scrolls in Gunfire Reborn. They can shape the outcome of your build by adding some quality-of-life improvements or drastically impacting your damage output. To round up our Gunfire Reborn Xing Zhe build, we recommend the following Occult Scrolls.
Occult Scrolls to Increase Damage
- Perfect Sixth: Every sixth shot gains +80% DMG (Count is reset when reloading.)
- Elemental Relic: +5% Elemental DMg for ten seconds whenever you kill an enemy affected by an Elemental Effect.
- Elemental Cube: A random element will be selected after reloading, and increases the corresponding elemental DMG by 50%.
- Mid-Air Strike: +50% DMG dealt while in the air.
- Elemental Torment: +20% Lucky Shot Chance against enemies affected by an Elemental Effect.
- Abundant Vitality: +75% total weapon DMG while your Shield is recharging.
- 3rd Time Unlucky: +50% Weapon DMG. Obtain one cursed scroll for every three mysterious chests you opened.
- Ninja’s Discipline: +5% Lucky Shot Chance per second (up to +50%). Resets after triggering a Lucky Shot.
- Elemental weave: Element DMG will always cause an elemental effect within three seconds after swapping weapons.
- Unfettered Will: +3% weapon DMG for every 100 copper you currently have. (Up to 30%).
- Elemental Magazine: Deals an additional 50% DMG when weapon damage causes an elemental effect.
Other Great Scrolls for a Powerful Xing Zhe Build in Gunfire Reborn
- Improved Clip: Whenever an ammo pack is picked up, it directly refills the magazine instead of reserver ammo and increases your movement speed by 25% until the next reload.
- Brief Respite: Gain immunity to all damage for one second after swapping weapons or reloading. (Cooldown: two seconds.)
- Fast-Loader: After swapping weapons, replenish your magazine instantly and gain +30% Lucky Shot Chance.
- Good and Evil: +15% Lucky Shot Chance if you don’t own any cursed Scroll; +15 max Shield/Armor for each cursed scroll you own.
- Fight for Immortality: Upon taking DMG, again additional max Shield/ Armor for twelve seconds, equivalent to the DMG received.
- Hidden Transaction: There’s a 33% chance to enhance a weapon by +1 extra level when enhancing your weapons at a craftsman.
Wrapping Up Our Xing Zhe, Gunfire Reborn Build Guide
If you are tired of feeling restricted to the types of weapons you play on Heros, Xing Zhe, the master of all weapons, is the Hero for you. That’s our build and guide for Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn. Despite what Xing Zhe’s abilities look like on paper, he is extremely fun and simplistic to play since his focus sticks to only weapons.
If you are looking for a wonderful alternative to Xing Zhe, and you want to throw down your guns and punch all of your foes into the dirt, check out our guide on how to build Qian Sui in Gunfire Reborn.
Have you been playing with Xing Zhe in Gunfire Reborn recently? What do you think of our guide and build suggestions? Let us know in the comments below. And, for other great build guides, check out our tier list for every Gunfire Reborn character.
