Genshin Impact released its Version 2.8, “Summertime Fantasia” on July 13. The update brings a lot of new content to the game—including the much-awaited Kaedehara Kazuha’s first rerun—but Version 3.0 has been the most anticipated. The big update will introduce the new nation of Sumeru, and along with it will come the Dendro element.
While nothing from Hoyoverse about Sumeru and Dendro was known except for some mentions here and there in Genshin Impact in the form of Sumerian NPCs and such, the company has now started teasing what fans can expect to see with the new Dendro element, along with its reactions and other details.
A new teaser video about Dendro shows the lush green forest areas of Sumeru. Combat designers Aquaria and Yangshen revealed the process behind designing the Dendro element.
Dendro Elemental Reactions
Of course, with a new element comes new elemental reactions. The team behind Genshin Impact followed the same philosophy of using everyday phenomena and the combination of different elemental design languages from the game to design Dendro’s elemental reactions. The game already has Burning, which occurs when Dendro comes into contact with Pyro, as seen with those pesky Dendro Slimes all around Mondstadt, Liyue, and Enkanomiya.
Dendro will come with two new reactions in Version 3.0: Bloom and Catalyze. Bloom is obviously taken from the real-life phenomenon of flowers blooming. Bloom occurs when Dendro and Hydro react with each other.
The Catalyze reaction uses the concepts of energy and wisdom that Electro and Dendro represent, respectively. It also ties in with the lore of Sumeru, whose current Archon Lesser Lord Kusanali is known as the God of Wisdom.
Some targets in Sumeru that have Dendro characteristics will react with Hydro, Pyro, and Electro elements resulting in different interactive effects. The same thing goes for enemies, they will switch between different states depending on the element used. Defeating enemies in certain states will get players rare special drops, which will be a new feature introduced to Genshin Impact.