Genshin Impact has gotten more press than likely any Gacha game to date and with it a whole cottage industry has sprung up of channels devoted the game. I’ve noticed as several Destiny YouTubers have even been bitten by the bug and it is shocking just how wide spread the appeal has been. However I am also starting to watch as folks slam into the wall that begins around Adventure Rank 30 as the breaks get applied to player progress and the huge open world seems to shrink a little bit. During the early days in this game it has boundless enjoyment, but as you gain levels you start being funneled into a tighter and tighter scope of activities that can actually provide progression.

I’ve just dinged AR37 and I feel like it will probably take a week or so for me to finally progress to AR40 and open up the next World Level. I was able to move upwards at level 35, and two levels later I am nowhere near close to having my full team of four characters leveled, their weapons upgraded and their talents purchased. This says nothing to the rest of my squad of characters which are in complete disarray as they got abandoned somewhere around 40 or 50 when the material and gold crunch started. This is a whole that you can buy yourself out of but the amount of money that it would take to restore reasonable forward momentum is not something for the faint of heart.

The challenge is there are three progress bars that essentially need to keep going up for your party of characters as you progress. The first is character level and this is fairly straight forward and mostly involves the acquisition of experience books and the application of gold to train your character with them. The next is the talents on your characters and these require books which come from dungeons that drop 2 or 3 at most at a time as well as a huge resource cost each time you need to ascend to a higher tier. Lastly there is the leveling of your weapon which can be done through the combination of mining resources and gold with a huge outlay of resources when you need to ascend to the next tier of levels much like character progression.

You gain these resources by completing dungeons that have a resin cost associated with them. So for example when I move to the next weapon tier I am going to have to spend 6 purple quality weapon widgets that spawn in dungeons only on a specific day of the week. Right now Domains of Forgery III should in theory be dropping purple items, but the reality is each time I go in I get 3 green resources and 2 blue resources. If I keep acquiring at that rate the essentially crafts up into a single purple resource, which means I am going to need a grand total of 120 resin to ascend a single weapon. 120 resin represents your full rested allotment for a day.

This same pool of resin is used for essentially everything that gives meaning progress in the game. You need it for weapon components, character ascension elemental drops, skill books, as well as it is also a primary source of leveling books, acquiring gear from bosses, and getting additional gold. You get four quests each day and they reward 10 primagem and then an additional 10 for turning all four back in at the adventurers guild. These can of course be saved for wishes giving you a shot at getting more characters and weapons… or you can spend it to buy 60 more resin giving you a few more attempts to farm the resources that you need.

Unfortunately it isn’t a flat 50 primagem per 60 resin and is instead a sliding scale that increases each time you refresh during a day. So you can in theory buy an additional 360 Resin each day on a scale that looks a little something like this:

• First Refresh – 50 primagem
• Second Refresh – 100 primagem
• Third Refresh – 100 primagem
• Fourth Refresh – 150 primagem
• Fifth Refresh – 200 primagem
• Sixth Refresh – 200 primagem

There are also Fragile Resin, which are doled out sparingly either through the Adventurer’s Guild level up rewards or gained through the battle pass, but there is no way to buy more of these once you have spent them all.

The challenge set by the game is that there are really enjoyable things to do, like the various World Bosses which can drop pieces of gear that feeling meaningful. However each and every one of these things requires an expenditure of resin in order to get any rewards from it. So when I killed Stormterror this week and got my very first 5 star artifact, it felt bad seeing how poorly its stat allocation was knowing that it cost me 1/2 of my daily allotment of resin and locked me for other loot from that same encounter.

Part of the challenge with all of this is the fact that Genshin Impact is maybe the first Gacha game that is actually legitimately fun to play. This is also a game that because it is extremely enjoyable is bringing in a lot of people who may have never played a game like this in the past. The itemization, the constant push towards gambling mechanics, and the painfully slow energy recharge mechanics are all part and parcel for the Gacha industry. However none of these games before have really had fun and enjoyable gaming mechanics that pushed players to spend MMORPG type amounts of hours grinding away and exploring.

Most Gacha games look like this and are barely a game at all… and more something that you do out of idle boredom than something that you actually enjoy playing. I’ve spent time poking my head into more than a few of these over the years as I am constantly in search of something enjoyable to do with my phone. The games have this visual overload going on and are loaded with “auto play” functionality that largely just keeps you clicking buttons much akin to hitting spin on a slot machine. Nothing about this is terribly enjoyable but it looks almost like a game and as a result you end up holding on hoping that it eventually opens up into something enjoyable. These games are a trap and Genshin looks and plays nothing like this.

Genshin instead presents this gorgeous world to explore filled with puzzles to unlock. It features extremely enjoyable action combat with complex character designs that interact with each other in unique and interesting ways. It might be one of the best games I have ever played, but it is unfortunately shackled to a series of mechanics that don’t necessarily do it any favors. It is a game designed to limit your play time into small chunks scattered throughout the day, and as a result it is quickly becoming a game where I can only realistically get 15-20 minutes worth of forward momentum each day and then while the world itself is still enjoyable to explore… there is a limited amount of things that I can do that actually impact something that feels like progress.

None of this to this point has really even touched the challenge of how this game goes about allowing you to acquire new characters. Like so many Gacha games you receive characters rarely through “summoning” as it is colloquially called or in this game by spending “wishes” upon the various “banners” in the game. The game has a pity system and will give you something of 4 star rarity every 10 wishes and something of 5 star rarity every 90 wishes. Tenha is a YouTube that covers this game and claims that he spent $7000 chasing Diluc, one of the best and most sought after 5 Star Champions in the game.

There are currently 21 different playable characters in the game and 7 of them are at the 5 Star rarity. Any given “wish” has a .06% chance of pulling one of these 5 stars. As I have gotten free primagems I have been spending them primarily on wishes and managed to trigger the pity system after 90 pulls. Instead of getting a champion like I was hoping for… I instead got a 5 star weapon which also felt awful. So when the game says it is going to give you are 4 star every 10 pulls… you might end up with a weapon instead of a character.

Also extremely likely is that you are going to get multiple copies of the same character, which the game has built around by giving you different “constellations” to unlock. What you are looking at is proof that I have not only gotten Barbara which you get for free by getting to AR20, but have pulled five more copies of this same character unlocking an additional constellation each time. All of which is designed to keep you spinning the wheel and trying to push your luck of maybe pulling what you were after the next time. So I guess I am completely not shocked at all that someone on YouTube spent $7000 chasing a single copy of a specific champion.

Genshin Impact is an exceptionally enjoyable game, but I fear that as more folks hit the wall that is AR30 and beyond… that it is also going to continue shedding players. I’m still enjoying myself but I feel like I am progressing less and less and have reached a point where it doesn’t make much sense to be playing more than thirty minutes a day. I doubt Mihoyo will make significant changes at a fast enough pace to turn this ship of opinion around before it comes crashing into the docks. I accepted the game for what it was, but I look forward to someone taking this formula and making it a little more user friendly. Had they just made it so that champions were outright purchases and removed the resin system… I probably would have actually purchased every single one.

However now I figure that eventually my interest will wain as we get into this season with some really big releases. I am likely going to stick around for the time being because I really want to see how far I can get in the battle pass before it ends in 25 days or so. There however is going to be a point folks reach along this path where they start to check out. For me AR30 was when the resource costs started to bog me down, but for others that might come sooner. I am still enjoying myself, but the honeymoon phase is definitely over. That isn’t to say that I can’t settle into a routine that makes me happy, but the overwhelming excitement that I once felt is now a bit tinged with reality. The post Genshin Honeymoon Over appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yesterday around 10 am CST, the Elemental Crucible event started up in Genshin Impact. It appears that it is going to be running for around seven days and it offers a new game mode during that time. Essentially this is the first Co-Op event and you are either match made with three other random players, or you can bring in a full or partial party of your friends. All told the matchmaking goes extremely quickly because it is drawing from players on all platforms including PlayStation 4. The mission it is pretty simple, in that you collect elemental bits that spawn around the arena and run them back into the crucible for credit. Once you have filled the crucible you win.

However before I go into further detail lets cut to the chase since I am not a YouTuber and do not need to pad time and bury the lead. Each time you do an ignition you have the option to spend 40 resin to get some rewards and generally speaking this will be around 30 blue character experience scrolls, 30 companionship xp and 200 adventure experience. To answer the original question… is Elemental Crucible worth it from a resin standpoint? Hell no. No one should be spending their resin in this manner because it is a waste of resources. That said the event as a whole is absolutely worthy of your time.

With this event comes something called the Alchemy Handbook, which asks you to do certain activities while in the Elemental Crucible game mode. Each time you tick off one of these boxes you get some sort of a reward. Additionally there are new event achievements in the Battle Pass that pay out a significant amount of progress there was well. All told if you complete everything that had to do with the Elemental Crucible this week you get the following:

• 300 Primogems
• 23 Blue Weapon Crystals
• 10 Purple Character XP Books
• 6 Blue Character XP Books
• 50,000 Mora
• 1 Blue Elemental Crystal Shard of each type (minus life which isn’t in the game yet)
• 4950 Battle Pass Progress

That is a significant chunk of stuff that you are getting for running this event a minimum of 20 times. After having run this event 22 times so far, I have completed everything but that is turning out to be the hardest of the achievements. It requires you to fill your elemental energy bar in less than 3 minutes. The closest I have gotten so far is 3 minutes and 4 seconds and in fact we have managed to get that more than a few times. It is absolutely infuriating, but I could care less about the character scrolls and weapon crystals that are rewarded. What I instead care about is the 2250 Battle Pass progress which in theory should be more than a full levels worth.

The event flows a lot like any of the time challenges in the game with multiple waves of mobs spawning in. There will be a wave that includes a few mini bosses at a time… these are often times elemental themed Abyss Mages that are generally of a type that you don’t have a good attack against. There will also be a wave that is one Ruin Guard and Stonehide Lawachurl. In my experience it seems to be best to focus fire the Ruin Guard down and then get everyone focused on the Stonehide to get through them as quickly as possible.

During the event a number of elemental particles will spawn around the arena and you will need to pick these up and run them back into the crucible. There is however a trick to it and you can only be carrying one type of charge at a time. So if you have a fire charge then you can run around and pick up other fire charges until you have three in total before running it back in. You need to avoid getting close to any other colors of charges or it will cause the one you are currently carrying to disappear and the team to miss out on that elemental energy. Additionally you need to avoid getting hit while carrying a charge or you will drop your cargo. All in all it is a pretty fun game mode and sorta reminds me of igniting the forges in Destiny 2.

Other than that I spent some time with friends farming various world bosses that they needed parts from. I also participated in a Wolf kill but did not take loot given that I am really close to AR35 which should bump me up to World Rank 4, and with that a higher chance of better loot. It is my understanding that starting at AR35 there is a very rare chance of getting 5 star artifacts, but what I really really want this week is a Northerner Claymore Prototype so I can refine the Aminus for Razor to rank 3.

Co-Op is actually really fun in Genshin Impact, and I hope they keep adding more content that I can do with my friends. I’ve talked about it before, but I really like the way the lockout mechanic works in this game so that I can keep helping people with content as needed and then choose when I want to receive rewards and lock myself out of loot on my own terms. I do think over time the Resin economy will loosen up a bit, but for now it feels like we are walking a very thin line of what we can actually accomplish in a single day. This is one of those moments when I wish this game were a traditional buy the box model MMORPG. The post Is Elemental Crucible Worth It? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.