I been thinking about Xiao / Hu Tao / Ayaka (since they're the characters we know are coming and have some data).
Hu Tao seems to be a sort of sub DPS character, she can boost her ATK up to 400% her base ATK (a measly 106 ATK at level 90) with her Elemental skill, which brings it to 500~, but the skill has a duration of 9 seconds and a CD of 16 seconds, so almost half of the time you're running around with basically no ATK which rules her out of main DPS role IMO.
Her Burst is a hefty 500% damage at lvl 6 plus a 33% pyro damage bonus while your HP is lower than 50% or 400% with no pyro bonus if her HP is higher, that means she'll not pair well with Bennet since his heal is very fast, you want to use that burst while being at less than half HP. Other than that, she has potential to deal the biggest burst damage in the game with her Elemental skill ATK buff and her Burst at less than 50% HP, but it requires a bit of setup.
Ayaka looks she'll be good dps from what we know, both of her skills are simple damage skills without any gimmick, short cooldowns and good damage, she looks like a Cryo Diluc with a sword instead of a Claymore and since Cryo is a good element for reactions that already does a lot. If she doesn't change on release (Xiao didn't change too much besides fine tunning, so no reason to believe she will be any different) she'll be pretty solid.
Xiao on paper looks like he'd be on the higher end of the DPS pyramid, very high (highest?) base ATK, very good damage on his combo, good % damage on his Elemental skill on a relatively short cooldown with 2 charges and his Burst is a flat %DMG increase with a 15 second duration on a 18 second cooldown and allows you to jump higher than normal letting you do plunging attacks, Xiao's plunging attacks have higher damage than other characters, about 300% damage at lvl 6.
There are dome downsides though, his burst costs 70 energy and he can't generate much energy by himself, so there will be times where you are running around without his burst active and that plummets his damage compared to more consistent characters. Doing plunges puts him on a very vulnerable state, you can't dodge while doing plunges and can get knocked off while jumping. Some enemies move around quite a bit or back away, so they can get outside of the plunge AoE, and lastly, he's Anemo, his burst changes his element to Anemo damage and can't be overridden by other skills, that means no VV 4x piece bonus for him as you can't trigger swirl with Anemo.
About Ganyu, many people called her Cryo amber (myself included) but I think it's mostly because nobody realized the absurly high % damage on her charged attacks, if it was for her skills she would be good enabler for melt/freeze teams and that's it, but her charged attack is ridiculous at an almost 500% Cryo damage at level 6, let that sink in, she's doing an elemental burst tier of damage per charge attack. Having to charge and aim leaves you quite vulnerable but her Elemental skill being a taunt helps a lot with that, no to mention that she can fire at range and Cryo has a 2x multiplier when triggering melt. It kind of worries me that she got released like that, if more characters like her come out many of the "balanced" ones are going to be power-creeped. badly.
And with that, I'm still not decided on whether to pull on Xiao or not, having his spear lying around doesn't make it easy lol. plus I have 0 interest on the featured 4* characters.
