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.