Genshin Impact is an RPG game with lots of anime elements, horrible monetization, gambling for characters and weapons, tons of pay-to-win, and it plagiarized the hell out of Breath of the Wild. I advise spending absolutely no money on it. It has some good things like the stuff they copied from BotW, pretty good combat, a bunch of open world exploration, and regular content updates. It’s primarily single player with some limited co-op so the pay2win is reasonably ignorable.
A lot of stuff in the game can be done with large self-imposed handicaps if you have the skill for it, e.g.:
The game is easy to play in a mindless way but it’s also possible to impose limits on yourself to make it more challenging. (Going 100% free to play is the most important limit to make the game harder, but additional challenges on top of that are also necessary for good players.)
One of the good things about balance is they’re always power creeping the heroes to encourage people to pay for them, and trying to make the content hard enough to frustrate people into paying. There are a lot of things wrong with that, but it leads to a semi-hard game, whereas a lot of games without pay2win just wanna make everyone feel good by making it super easy.
A lot of people play games but autopiloting and being dumb, but if they lose/die then they try to improve to get unstuck. Except with pay2win a lot of people decide the problem is they don’t have strong enough stuff and just pay instead of learning.
If you go free to play and try to improve when you run into problems, you could spend hundreds of hours pretty mindlessly. The game is too easy. You have to push yourself to optimize stuff even though you’re winning or you’ll waste your time.
If you push yourself on your own initiative, tons of activities can work well. If you don’t, many activities work badly, e.g. TV watching or most games.
Some activities work better without having much personal initiative to challenge yourself and optimize. A good example is speedrunning. The concept of speedrunning pushes you to optimize because there’s basically no boundaries on how well you can do. By contrast, in most games you can play well enough to win and there’s little incentive to play better than that, so most people limit their progress to whatever is good enough (and some people don’t get that far and give up, and often blame the game, which has resulted in most games being made a lot easier in order to appeal to more players, plus it’s resulted in pay2win business models to exploit people’s psychological errors. Related, even games with difficulty settings usually make the max difficulty way too easy, otherwise bad players will play it, fail, and get mad, b/c they want to think they’re good at that they should be able to succeed at the hardest thing in the game. So the casual masses will not allow difficulty settings for actual good players because it offends them by implying they aren’t very skilled.).
im trying the event for the first time right now. it seems nice getting to try some characters which i dont have (Albdeo, Sucrose, Keqing).
I think I found a better subreddit than the main one:
Genshin’s pay2win stuff is ridiculous and keeps being power creeped too.
2.45 million damage seems really ridiculous
about a week ago i made a spreadsheet with some characters i have some interest in getting all their talents to lvl 6. it shows how many talent books i need to grind to get all their talents to lvl 6.
it did this so i had some idea of what to grind for instead of not having an idea of what to grind for.
i realized that for a character to go from lvl 1 to lvl 6 on all their talents it costs:
- 66 Blue Talent Books
- 72 Green mob materials
- 378K Mora
Not all chars need talents leveled equally, especially to test them out
i am AR55 now. i havnt thought about which world bosses to fight for character ascension materials
i had problems fighting the weekly boss Azdaha. i practiced fighting him to get better. i did some thinking of what i should practice and what were some problems i had while fighting him, but i did not write them out.
i think i should have wrote the problems i had while fighting him, and the potential solutions. i think that would have made the learning go faster and be more organized, and then i could also have posted the writings here.
when i played Vindictus and was trying to get gold medals in Ein Lacher, i specifically wrote what moves i found hard to deal with, and potential solutions to deal with them.
there are lots of ways to beat azdaha. strong chars, like high dmg and also more hp (5stars, constellations, artifacts, weapons, talents). strong party composition. food. running lots of heals/shields so it’s way easier to stay alive. knowing how to dodge well.
I shared a tip that I figured out on reddit:
@internetrules did you practice anything in Genshin lately? try out different team comps and learn to build good ones and how to play them? research any details of how the game works? do any in-game experiments to test stuff?
what chars have you built? which interest you? why? how do you decide?
i don’t have very strong preferences for chars btw. i like variety. i like chars where you swap more often instead of staying on one guy a long time (so i like razor, xiao and yanfei less). i also tend to like chars that put out more elemental applications, not less, cuz doing more reactions is more interesting.
i’ve been spreading out my resources a lot to different chars cuz i don’t need the game to be easier anyway. i haven’t been doing artifacts. still need a 4 piece noblesse oblige set but i don’t care that much in short term – just makes u do more dmg which i don’t rly need.
i got most of my chars to 60/70 or better now and been working on ascensions and talents a lot. i got some chars at 8/6/6 talents (like XQ, chong, ning, ganyu, barb. well XQ is 6/6/8), a few better (9/8/8 jean, 8/9/6 fischl, 8/7/8 XL, 8/7/7 diluc). some others are 6/6/6 (traveller, noelle) or reasonably close like 6/4/6 yanfei, 6/6/5 tartaglia and 6/4/4 razor. ben is 4/5/6 but i’m ascending him next and will get his Q to 8. (these are base talent numbers. i’m not counting constellation bonuses). i recently got sucrose to 5/6/6 and 70/80.
i beat abyss 12 yesterday. 4th time i think. i beat the previous one with the ruin guards on 12-3 and i’ve beaten the new one 3x i believe with the electro lectors on 12-3. i ran barbara for the lectors again and that worked well. i used ganyu+diona for the water mimics on 12-2B. i got 9/9/7/3 stars. i haven’t gotten 36 stars ever, don’t really care, and am not trying to optimize my chars for clearing abyss fast (and i’ve avoided wishing on some OP chars like venti and zhongli). plan to try for 36 stars eventually but right now i’m just spreading out resources to many chars and they aren’t very fully/seriously built so trying to beat the timer doesn’t sound fun.
haven’t spent any crowns yet. got all 6 of them. i might crown some efficient stuff like fischl’s oz talent or ganyu’s attack talent but i’m not really in any rush to.
i posted 2 minor comments in this reddit thread re genshin
current banner lasts for about 40 minutes
idk whether to wish on current banner or not. idk why should or should not.
i have 19500 Primogems (121 wishes), + 5 wishes = 126 wishes.
Pity:
5-star:5
4-star:0
my last 5 star was a banner character so i currently have 50-50 of getting banner character
Current banner is: Eula, Xinyan, Xingqiu, Beidou.
Next banner is: Klee, Barbara, Sucrose, Fischl.
Third Banner is: Kazuha. the leakers seem to think the 4 stars will be: Rosaria, Bennet, Razor.
i have not had a 5 star in a while
i have C2 xinyan, so i dont think i need more of her constellations, and idk how interested i am in her. her C4 seems nice.
i have beidou C1, the C2 seems nice?
i have xingqiu c0, his C1 and C2 seem nice
These are my characters:
5star:
Xiao, C0, 79/80
Mona, C2, 79/80
Zhongli, C0, 20/40
4star:
Traveller, C6, 80/80
Xiangling, C3, 80/80
Diona, C6, 79/80
Razor, C0, 79/80
Barbara, C1, 70/70
Fischl, C0, 69/70
Yanfei, C0, 60/70
Noelle, C0, 50/60
Chongyun, C2, 50/60
Beidou, C1, 50/60
Xingqiu, C0, 50/60
Xinyan, C2 50/60
Bennet, C0, 50/60
Ningaung, C0, 20/40
Kaeya, C1, 20/40
Lisa, C0, 20/40
Amber, C0, 20/40
my current feeling is: wish like 30 times, hope to get beidou and xingqiu constellations
i havnt thought about 5 stars yet, that seems important to think about.
Enviosity:
I feel like now 1.6 is the jebait patch to get you to use your primogems, and all this juicy stuff is about to come out on the next update, were gonna have like inazuma like a lot of inazuma characters cuz why else would they start talking about these new characters and showing off these new characters if inazuma wasnt coming out next right?
yes c2 beidou is a good one. c4 XY too. XQ constellations are strong and he’s a strong char. ben, dionya, XQ, XL are probably viewed as the top 4 stars.
ascend your traveller to 80/90! it’s so cheap/ez.
my general opinions on characters is variety is good, power is not necessary (game isn’t that hard even with f2p), and more swapping and reactions is more fun and interesting (so e.g. i like xiao, yanfei and razor less b/c of the 15s bursts that end if you swap).
a good thing to list is what 4 stars you’re missing. you could do some wishes for Sucrose next banner. i think it’d make sense to go for sucrose or kazuha (they’re kinda similar).
Ben c1 is rly important FYI. and i think you’re missing rosaria so you should wish on kazuha banner at least a little.