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.
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Morning friends. World of Warcraft appears to be on fire right now, so I am giving it some distance so it can improve itself. Tuesday night I managed to do some makeovers and last night I was going to log in and spend some time roaming around with the freshly redesigned characters. Unfortunately this is what I kept encountering when attempting to log any of them in. It seems that the servers are still struggling, and as a result I am going to I guess give it another attempt tonight. I guess it is a good thing that the expansion was delayed and that the pre-launch event has yet to start. I am just hoping that the fires have died down by the 18th so I can farm the Hallows End event for another round of tries on the mount.
Instead of playing World of Warcraft I ventured back into Genshin Impact and made another attempt at a decent re-rolled alt account. You can create a seemingly infinite number of Genshin Impact accounts because they don’t actually require you to use an email address for any of them. If you can get to level 7 you will have earned a significant number of free wishes and should have a decent shot of pulling something reasonable. As a result my third attempt at an alt account seemed to have born fruit, or at least something that I consider completely functional when it comes to playing with it.
Xingqiu is a character that you encounter in the Liyue storyline and is not a character that I have on my main account. On this account I also managed to pick up Ningguang, 1 constellation Noelle, and a 1 constellation Xiangling. Of the characters on this account, I feel like Xingqiu is the strongest carry that I can build into a DPS Carry. I would have rather had Razor, Diluc, Chongyun or Beidou as a two handed beater but I can make this character work for leveling. To be honest this is a pretty great champion that I am happy I at least have access to now, even though it is on the wrong account.
So for my party right now I am using Xingqiu as carry, Xiangling and Kaeya as support dps and Noelle as a healer. Have Noelle bubble before going into a fight and then use either a pyro to hydro reaction or a cryo to hydro reaction for dps boosting depending on what I am fighting. However all of this said I think I glazed over WHY I would want a secondary account. Essentially if you have alt accounts and can get them to level 16, you can then abuse them for farming world resources… which you start to need in higher quantities as you progress through levels. So in theory I can log this account on… and then have my main join it to run around and collect ore, flora and kill mini bosses that are on a 24 hour respawn timer.
On the main account I have managed to push my Battle Pass up to rank 34 and I should be able to get higher this week pending I can finish a few achievements. The most annoying of these is the farm 20 clouds. Sure you can start and finish a cloud event without taking the rewards… but the cloud sits there with rewards waiting even if you log out and back into the game. I am not exactly sure how long I need to wait before attempting the cloud again… or if I need to wait for reset each day and in essence do two a day until I have gotten that twenty.
This morning with my free primagems I managed to pull yet another Barbara, which means I am one constellation away from having her maxed out. That last constellation is pretty damned sweet because it means she auto resurrects your characters when they fall in battle. The game itself has slowed down considerably because I realistically have only a few things that I can really do to make progress each day. Essentially I get in and do my daily quests and then farm whatever dungeons are up that day for resources with my resin. Now that I have moved to world 4 I need to spend one of the days farming the world bosses for attempts at either a 5 star artifact or even better a claymore pattern.
The core challenge of Genshin Impact is that it is still a Gacha/Energy game at its core and while it feels very open and very free… once you have completed the story content there are a very limited number of ways you can move that needle forward on a daily basis. There is apparently some discussion within Mihoyo about tweaking this, because apparently they had no idea that the game was going to blow up on the level of a “phenomena” like it did. So hopefully they ease some of the restrictions and lean into the whole big open world free to play thing, and shift around to some alternate ways of play. You can still have a really fun time without “whaling out” but from AR35 onwards it slows down again… and I imagine from AR40 onwards it is a very painful slog.
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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.
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Morning friends. I am not entirely certain what to talk about because I had a fairly rough night after which my mind is largely blank. I do know that I spent a good deal of the weekend playing Genshin Impact and at least a chunk of yesterday was spent looking for things to do in it. Since I am struggling to get started, lets do an informational dump of some things I have come to realize. Special thanks to my friend Easha for setting me off in this direction. First off I’ve talked about this a bit, but in Genshin Impact there is Cross Play and Cross Save, and they represent two different things.
Cross Save – This allows you to share the same account effectively between multiple platforms. Right now this works for Android/iOS and PC players and they can shift freely between those platforms. PlayStation 4 players at this very moment are stuck to that specific platform, and when the Switch version releases we are uncertain how it will work. I have my hopes that given how many games on the Switch cross save with PC titles… that we will get to add it to the shared account block.
Cross Play – You can play with players on other platforms so long as they are within the same region. That means even though I am on the PC and that the PS4 is excluded from Cross Save… that I can friend someone with a PS4 account and run co-op content with them. Once again this is pending they are in the same region as me.
Regions – Right now the game has four regions that I am aware of, with one of those that I have next to no information about.
Mainland China – I have no clue at all how to get onto this server. Given that it is the first server I would imagine the numbering scheme would be very low.
America – This server is indicated by a UID that starts with the number 6, for example 600012345
Europe – This server is indicated by a UID that starts with the number 7, for example 700012345
Southeast Asia – This server is indicated by a UID that starts with the number 8, for example 800012345
You can play freely within your own regional block, but there appears to be no way to play across region which is unfortunate.
I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon, roaming around and trying to collect all of the “Air Doodads”, which is what I call them because I never can remember how to spell their real name. In the Game Tools menu there are a number of things that are useful related to Genshin Impact, but one of them is an interact map that folks have been using to collect the location of various data points. Slight problem that I did not realize at the time I made my run from point to point is that apparently you have to be near the elevation in order to get the Star icon to show up on your in game map. This means that while I travelled to the location of every doodad, I failed to get 4 of them… meaning I am going to have to reset the map and start over from scratch. One nice feature of the map though is it allows you to log in with a google account (because it is driven on google maps) and mark various items as “found”.
I’m in a phase of the game where I am needing to judiciously apply my Resin each day so that I can focus down specific materials that I need for weapon and character unlocks. This means that there are a certain number of times when I am just sorta looking for something to do. Last night I made it my mission to put the entire map of Mondstadt and Liyue on respawn for all of the mini bosses. There are a number of encounters that can drop useful bits and that don’t require Resin to earn rewards, and if you go into the bosses section of the adventure log you can even navigate to the nearest instance of that miniboss.
I did this until I put each and every one on cooldown, something that took me pretty much the entirety of two episodes of Fear the Walking Dead and the new Walking Dead World Beyond. This was worth a decent amount of cash, experience and a significant chunk of materials. Speaking of materials… another tidbit of information is that apparently the listed 30,000 inventory isn’t really just one big bag. There appears to be smaller sub containers for each TYPE of thing… and these seem to be somewhere around 1000 items or 150 rows in your inventory. So that would mean 1000 artifacts, 1000 weapons, 1000 collectable resources, etc… which doesn’t seem to actually add up to 30,000.
I would not be shocked if there is a per resource limit to the number of items you can have in a single stack as well. In theory you should be burning through your artifacts and weapons to help power whatever you are using up. However for other resources those might stockpile a bit, and currently the largest single stack I have of anything is Iron Chunks at 439. I will have to watch and see if I reach a point where I can no longer loot any more of these. As far as artifacts and weapons, I am in the part of the game where I need a constant supply of these to fuel into the few weapons that I actually care about keeping so I am no longer at a risk of ever having too many.
Starting today is an Elemental Crucible Co-Op event and I don’t know much about it. It apparently happened on the test servers during the various phases of closed beta and was a good source of resources. I expect tonight to poke my head in, and given that it takes resin I am going to let that stockpile throughout the day so that I can have plenty for whatever this event brings tonight. You can check out the official Mihoyo news post here, but it appears this will be limited to accounts that have hit AR20 and have completed all of the quests in Prologue: Act II.
In other news I managed to pull a 5 star weapon from the normal banner, which means my pity has been reset back to zero. I guess I will have to figure out what to do with this book, given it seems to be dps focused and I am not currently running any DPS casters. I would have far rather had a character, but you get what you get. Something that has come to my attention is that the Pity counter is apparently tied to each individual banner, so there is one for the featured character banner, the weapon banner and finally one tied to the normal banner. I had been spending the little bit of primagems each day on the normal banner, given that I already had venti and didn’t really want to get additional copies of him. However I also am not super interested in five star weapons so I might end up shifting up that lock at some point.
Towards the end of the week I was starting to run out of things to focus on… but with a new reset begins a new week of things to start plugging away at for the battle pass. I am probably going to hold off on doing either the Wolf or Stormterror because I am pretty close to 34, which means it is fairly likely that I will hit 35 before the next reset. I am not sure if this will increase my chance at getting 5 star artifacts but I feel like I should probably hold off regardless. Tuesday will distract me with the release of the World of Warcraft pre-patch so I will need to devote a certain chunk of time to Genshin or else I will probably be spending all of it doing the pre-events in WoW. We are entering a very busy time of the year for releases so we will see how well I keep up with things in Genshin.
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