Belghast

It has been a very Genshin Impact week, and to be truthful right now it has my full attention. At first it was in order to get to Adventure Rank 20 and get the free Barbara healer character. Now it is just because it is extremely freaking fun, and it happens to be the game that I want to play the most. I am sure the new will wear thin at some point, but for right now I am happiest when roaming the world and looking for interesting things to explore. There are still areas of Mondstadt that I have yet to see and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the much larger Liyue.

Last night Grace and I got in sync and decided to explore how exactly Co-Op works in this game. For starters you can in fact join the game of another player and wander around in the open world. This could serve very useful for helping your friends out when they are working on puzzles and such. It effectively splits the party so each player controls two characters. The weird part is that the joining player can’t really interact with the world, like opening chests or interacting with objects in dungeons. However everything that drops seems to spawn an instanced copy for both players. That means if you mine an ore node, both players get their own copies of whatever pops out of them. The same is true with any in world kills, and the one exception to the no interaction bit seems to be when you would need to spend resin to open something.

We spent some time trying to figure out something meaningful to do with our time. The domains that we had access to were completely trivialized with two players. We couldn’t quite figure out a way to may trails or the spiral abyss work co-op which was unfortunate. Eventually we settled into taking on some world bosses and this is absolutely the best use of time with other players. We started with probably the hardest, the Cryo Regisvine but after a couple of attempts we managed to down it. After that we moved on and took down the Electro Hypostasis which was pretty easy, and finally moved to the Anemo Hypostasis which gave us a bit more trouble but was doable as well. The negative is that these bosses cost 40 resin each… the positive however is they drop a bunch of stuff… most of it we have no clue how to use yet.

Opening up at 20 was the battle pass, and considering how much I have been enjoying this game I absolutely paid the $20 to unlock both tracks. All of the shenanigan’s we had been doing throughout the night seemingly counted towards the unlocking of ranks. It seems like the game is secretly crediting you for your activities before you reach Rank 20 and then letting you cash those in when you get access to the Battle Pass system. I’m currently level 12 and this also serves like the Adventure’s Journal in giving me something to focus on for the time when I am not doing structured content. For example I need to find more secrets in each of the two areas, but I am pretty close to unlocking another bunch of BP experience for Mondstadt.

Additionally at 20, I unlocked Barbara which had been the focus of my recent leveling push. Grace ran with her last night and I was able to see just how much passive healing she is capable of dishing out. I love Razor, but he is a bit squishier than I would like him to be so it might be nice to swap in Barbara in that last slot to swap over to periodically to passively heal up the party with her attacks. It is somewhat unfortunate however that you can’t really heal your characters without going into combat, but shredding a Hilichurl camp while paying Barbara effectively will top off the entire party and prepare for them for the next big engagement.

I find myself still having a blast with this game and I cannot wait to talk about it on AggroChat this weekend. It is just so surreal because this is absolutely a game that came from out of nowhere for me. I had heard about it but I largely filed this away as a mobile only experience, and since in general I don’t love playing games where I have to mimic a controller with on screen thumbsticks I ignored it. I hope that maybe just maybe something like this convinces other mobile games to give creating a PC client a shot. I’ve played a few of them with Android emulators like Nox Player or Blue Stacks and with Keyboard and Mouse they were a much more enjoyable experience.

I hope you have a glorious weekend. What do you have on your gaming schedule for the next few days? Are you also obsessed with Genshin Impact? Drop me a line in the comments.

Every so often you just have to sit back and revel in how extremely gorgeous Genshin Impact is. There is a lot of comparrison between this game and Breath of the Wild and it is completely valid. However to me, Genshin Impact improves upon that formula in so many ways that it feels iterative. My core problem with BotW was weapon durability and it greatly hampered my enjoyment of the experience. Also the world of Hyrule felt extremely dead, which I think is the vibe they were going for… but there is at no point where I feel isolated and alone in Teyvat. Both Mondstadt and Liyue feel bustling with life and activity in spite of bumping into other people in a fairly similar cadence as that of Breath of the Wild.

I had grand goals last night of testing out the multiplayer functionality, but for whatever reason I was feeling deeply out of it. Co-Op as the game calls it is gated both on a specific part of the main story quest and on reaching Adventure Rank 16. After that point it seems like you can just pop into the same game as one of your friends, or seemingly complete strangers as that seems to be what is shown on the actual Co-Op menu. I am curious if it only works for Domains (aka Dungeons) or if it will allow folks just to roam around together in the overworld. If the later is the case I am curious how it handles each player being progressed differently in unlocking things in the overworld.

My last night instead was spent hanging out on the couch, snuggled with cats and unlocking all of the shrines in Liyue. This of course meant that I did a bunch of assorted side content while roaming the land. For me at least the game is best when I am just wandering aimlessly and doing whatever happens to be over the next hill. This is the way that I play Skyrim, and in truth my preferred method of playing games like Destiny 2 that have a more open map mode. As a result I tend to be lagging behind in the Main Story quest. I go through these phases where I burn through whatever quest is available and then go back to open world exploration. Tonight when I get settled in I am going to pick up where the story was gated at AR18.

My overarching goal this week was to hit AR20 so that I could claim the free healer and also do the dungeon that unlocks Xiangling. However on the later part I ended up getting her through a Wish pull, so when I earn her through the dungeon it will unlock a constellation. I have to say I am a little on the fence about that system, namely that the only way you can unlock the higher tiers of your characters is through getting duplicates. Getting a dupe in Dragalia Lost felt awful, but at least you got generally useful currency and that the progress was not gated. I doubt I will ever play at a level that requires to have a full party of characters with all of their constellations unlocked. That said it is a little annoying knowing that dupes are the prime vehicle for high end progression. You do however get a significant number of free pulls so maybe over time it shakes out.

I am still deeply enthralled by this game, and in truth so far there is nothing that has required me to spend any money. On the other hand I want to spend a little money because the game is so damned good, that I want to do something to support its development. It seems like they are following the release cadence of a mobile developer because there are already patch notes on the test realm for the content updates coming in 1.1 which apparently includes an entire new region of similar size to Liyue. If this game can stay this free feeling while expanding at the rate that something like Dragalia Lost did… we maybe have a new MMO sensation on our hands.

I am so sorry Noelle but you have officially been replaced. I feel confident that PizzaMaid will continue the tradition of using the big bashy battle mage, but I have a new main. Largely this is due to the fact that I made the mistake of looking at tier lists for Genshin Impact. For those unfamiliar with the concept, when a game like this comes out folks end up ranking the best characters and assigning them a value that depends on the specific list creator but S is usually at the top and then it cycles through the A/B/C rankings after that. Ever list that I found seemed to rank Razor as either S rank or A depending on who was doing the creating, and putting Noelle at C or D depending on the list.

After kitting him out with a decent weapon and some artifacts, I absolutely understand the ranking. Initially I was a huge fan of Noelle for her sheer tanky prowess and the ability to just stop taking damage. Unfortunately a lot of the encounters require you to kill X number of things within a time limit, which means you need someone with a significant amount of burst damage. Noelle is not bursty at all and Geo right now has very limited elemental reactions. Lightning on the other hand chains on water, fire and ice exceptionally well and when paired with the sword I am using that causes increased damage after an elemental debuff has been applied… I can just straight up shred things with the wolf boy.

The only negative however is that I find myself needing to eat to regenerate my health constantly. So I really need to get to Adventure Rank 20 so that I can unlock the free healer that is part of an event that is going on currently. Having someone that can top off the party would be extremely beneficial, but my new lineup tends to favor the main character, amber, razor that I spend most of my time on and Kaeya or Ice boy as I tend to refer to him as. Due to some lucky pulls I have them all equipped with four star weapons and am working on unlocking those further.

You end up unlocking a 4 star sword through Adventure Rank 10, but I found myself trying desperately to find a two hander. After some research I found a quest that would ultimately get me one. On a peninsula that is Southeast of Town there is place called Dadaupa Gorge. When you arrive there you will see the crossed trees in this watery valley and surrounding the trees will be three wind barriers and a chest inside them. There is no way to drop down from above so you ultimately have to figure out a way to drop the barriers. Unfortunately I didn’t think to take screenshots before completing this so you are just going to have to imagine the wind barriers.

Surrounding the camp are three Hilichurl camps that I have marked on the map with colored rings. Inside of each of these camps is an elemental pillar that you will need to activate. The Southwest camp will be lightning, the southeast fire and the northern camp is ice but that one is a bit tricky. Inside of that camp is a ring and when you approach it it will start an event. You will have 1 minute and 40 seconds to kill 10 monsters. These will range from frost slimes and a frost wizard to a wave of Hilichurls including one of those big brute types with the shield. Burst damage is key and the ability to exploit elemental weaknesses.

After dropping all three shields, you will be able to walk up to and open the chest in the gorge. There will of course be an assortment of random items, but there will be two guaranteed drops. The first is a four star Berserker’s feather artifact. Artifacts are randomly rolled but it should in theory always have attack power and then an assortment of random stats that may or may not help support that. I got one with defense, crit and hitpoints in addition to the attack power. It is the first four star artifact that I have found so far, and seemed to make a significant improvement in damage output.

The second guaranteed drop is Northlander Claymore Prototype, which can be forged at the Blacksmith into a Prototype Aminus. The challenge with this however is that the materials required are rather scarce. They can usually be found up in the mountains and in all of my travels and making a beeline for every type of ore/crystal that I can find… I have only gathered 13 crystal and 27 white iron. Thankfully I lucked into a few 4 star two handers off wishes, but I am likely still going to grind this out just to see how good the weapon ends up being.

I’ve found a few other of these outdoor puzzles that I am working my way through, but the solutions have seemed significantly less clear. I am sure I will post about them once I have them figured out. Hopefully the solution to the Dadaupa Gorge puzzle helps someone out there. Still greatly enjoying the game, but mostly focused on figuring out ways to raise my Adventurer level to 20 so I can unlock that healer.