Good morning everyone. I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I spent the majority of mine playing Genshin Impact. If you have not tried this game out you really should given how much of my time it has been eating up… and subsequently how many of my friends have also become more than a little obsessed. I am a little slap happy at the moment because I was woken up by work at 3 am and felt like I never could get back to sleep properly after that point. I am sure there will be a point during the day where I require copious amounts of caffeine. I feel like I didn’t actually make a ton of progress over the weekend, but looking back on Friday’s it seems I did. That post had me just dinging AR20, and at this point I am about halfway through AR26.
Grace and I made several attempts at the various world bosses, and I think at this point the only one that I have not taken down is the Geo Cube thingy. We actually spent some time on Saturday morning farming bosses, which is a significant leap from where we were originally in struggling to get them down. I am not sure if it is a gearing and level thing or if we just now better understand the fights… or a little of column a and column b. Whatever the case I was super thankful at having learned at least one of the fights because low and behold one appeared in the level 25 trial that allows you to progress past that point… and I had to fight it on a timer. I won’t say which, but maybe spend some time doing the fights before you get to that level.
Another thing that I took care of was getting the Spiral Abyss through Floor 3-3 which unlocked a free Xiangling, or in my case one of her constellations. I did not unfortunately get enough points on Floor 3 in order to move on to Floor 4 so at some point I will return and focus on the elemental affix in the hope of getting a faster clear and a few more points. Spiral Abyss is likely going to be a great place to farm artifacts, but for the time being it is mostly just a bunch of blue fodder. I need to spend some time straightening out my gear so that I can safely start using blues as infusion fuel for weapons and artifacts. I still have not gathered up a full set of 4 star purple artifacts for any of my characters, but I have a wide enough assortment so that multiple characters have one or two of them.
Yesterday was the last day of the login bonus, and I gotta admit I feel a little sad seeing it go. I had hoped that it would be something like Dragalia Lost where it just seems to keep rolling forward each day that you log in. Instead I can confirm that you only get seven days worth of free gifts before it ultimately peters out. I still seem to keep getting a daily allotment of 160 primogems by mail which is incidentally enough to do one free summon each day. I kinda dig the way it is handling the currency where as in Dragalia Lost you were given free summon tokens, and here instead you can use the primogems for other purposes if you don’t feel like summoning anything.
The thing that I really need to focus on are the backlog of quests that I have gathered up. Once I hit AR20 it seemed a significant number of world quests started popping up all over the place. Each time I encountered one I would grab it and then promptly go about my business of doing other things. You have to understand, my natural state is wandering and exploring in games and I had to train myself to focus on questing for leveling purposes in games like World of Warcraft. In theory if I complete all of these quests I have backed up I will surely shoot up in Adventurer Rank very quickly. I am shocked however that this far into the game I am still finding things that I missed in the first areas.
The only real negative right now is occasionally I will pull a cool new character, like Beidou here but I don’t feel like I can really devote the resources to catching her up. All of the guides that I read or watched ahead of the launch told me to focus on only one or two characters. I have avoided this good advice and have instead focused on a huge smattering of characters. Right now my regular rotation includes: The Traveler, Razor, Kaeya, Amber, Barbara, Noelle, and Venti. They all get some attention and I attempt to keep them at least ascended to the next tier. What I really wish is that this game had something akin to the Pokemon Party XP system, because while I am not certain about it… it seems like the only character getting XP is the one actively killing things.
All of that said I am still completely enthralled by the game and all of the weird and wonderful things it contains. Why is there a cut up fish out on an island in the middle of nowhere? Who knows! There are few games that I have played where I enjoy venturing off the beaten path nearly as much as I have with Genshin Impact. It feels like there are so many secrets yet to find, and when I reach a point where I finally have… I know there is a brand new map opening up on the near horizon. If they can maintain a good release cadence there will in theory be always something new to find in this game. For now I am just happy to piddle around and do my own thing.
I think your whole active party gets XP, based on my characters having the same amount of xp before I started using items to level them unevenly. I’d bet that going multiplayer messes that up, since you have fewer characters in your active party. And of course everyone not in the active party gets bupkiss.
I’m loving Genshin Impact so far. I’ve put in quite a few hours already but even so 95% of everything you said in this post means absolutely nothing to me! I can’t remember the last time I played a game I enjoyed so much while understanding so little. I’ve decided to ignore the learning part for now and just roam around, opening the map and taking a million screenshots (and don’t i wish there was a single keypress for that instead of about six or seven).
I can’t help but think of The Traveler as my character and al the others as the equivalent of Mercenaries in other games so I’m concentrating everything on her. She gets all the good stuff, which so far is not much. I like Amber for the range attacks and after that I have no preferences yet. I can see how you’d not want to spread yourself too thin but then I guess it also depends how fast you want to go.
Leveling AR seems to be really hard. I’m only AR 8 and it took me an entire evening session to get there from 7. I can see that quests are the way to go but I hardly ever see any. Possibly because i spend most of the time out in the wilds. I should go to town more often.
Anyway, I’m in no rush. It’s a really great game. I can’t quite figure how it can have arrived so complete and polished when every other similar game we’ve seen for years… didn’t.
Those levels from 7 to 10 went real slow for me. After that you get more and more quests, which helps a lot.