Genshin Impact Archives - Page 5 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Regions, Banner Pity, and Inventory

October 12, 2020 by Belghast

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.

AggroChat #318 – BiznsBel is Sus

October 11, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Earlier this afternoon a large chunk of the AggroChat crew spent a few hours playing Among Us, a two year old game that is now suddenly the most popular thing on the planet. So of course we lead off the show talking a bit about that experience and how we are making tentative plans to do this as a regular thing. Maybe at some point we should even offer it up as a stream. From there Bel talks about a bumped topic from last week and the delay of the World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion to an undetermined time in the future. The pre-patch starts this coming week which means the expansion likely lands in November. However we discuss some of the core problems this expansion cycle has had and the frustrations the players have brought up. This leads to a further discussion of Genshin Impact and how much Bel has been playing it. This time Thalen also was able to chime in as he recently started and had some general thoughts to share. Finally we wrap things up with a discussion about how Games Workshop once again should really stop being afraid of the internet and how their actions are just going to lead folks to pirate copies of their products.

Topics Discussed

Among Us
- Playing with AggroChat and Friends
- Repeat Impostor Problem
Shadowlands Delay
- Problems with Expansion
- Problems with BFA
- Problems with MMORPGs in General
Genshin Impact
- Bel Plays a Nonsense Amount
- Thalen has thoughts from playing
- Switch Version needs to Hurry
Games Workshop Fears Internet
- Removing Digital Copies of Books
  - Will Lead to Pirate PDF copies
  - 3D Printing Models
- Ways that Corvis Belli does this better

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Regularly Playing: October 2020 Edition

March 7, 2025October 9, 2020 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! For anyone who has tuned in more recently during the “Genshin Boom” as I am calling it, there is this thing that I like to do semi-monthly where I review the games I have been playing and talk about them a bit. This also serves as a reminder for me to update the regularly playing widget in the sidebar of this blog. Even more than this it is also a time for me to finally admit that a romance with a game is over and send it off on its way, while also talking about the new things that excite me. I actually legitimately did one of these in September so maybe this is the beginning of it actually returning to being something I do each month.

Essentially I like to divide the games up into a few categories:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

To Those Remaining

I am a sucker for this game. I am not playing an awful lot of it right now because we are in the doldrums between finishing one season and starting a new one. However the next season is right around the corner and it should be a very interesting one. During the season the Kanai’s Cube is expanding to four slots with the fourth being completely open to what you want to stick in it. I am assuming that most builds are going to go with some sort of double weapon buffs, but it should be super interesting. Given how packed that November is going to likely be gaming wise, it probably means I will be Demon Huntering it up given that tends to be the fastest route forward.

I am one of the lucky few that managed to snag a PlayStation 5 preorder, or at least hope that I was successful. I am not playing this game a lot, largely because I am waiting for the improved visuals of playing it through a PS5… but I am occasionally popping it open and wandering feudal japan from time to time. Glorious game and I look forward to focusing on some more at the tail end of this year.

This game is now officially out and you should probably be playing it. I’ve shifted things up a bit and I am now playing a lot more of this on the Switch from bed than I am on the PC. I am looking forward to cross save being implemented because while I am not super progress on either platform I would love to just have one that I am focused on period. This is a really great game and I am constantly in awe of how well Supergiant makes games.

I am not actively playing this game but lord I wish I was. I keep hearing rumors about new phases of testing starting up soon, and I am down for this. I had a blast in August and September playing the last extended phase of testing, and the phase prior to that one. I am super on board with this game whenever it actually launches and I would love for if the next phase included a friend code… or if they just rolled into Open Beta soon. I cannot fully conceptualize why I enjoyed this game so much, but I am wanting to get in and share it with some friends. I have this sneaking suspicion that the AggroChat group will be drawn towards Team purple, even though I myself tend to gravitate towards Green. I will make the sacrifice of course for them however, but it is definitely an experience where you want everyone on the same team.

Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch

I started this last time as a general catch all category for poking around with emulation and my Retro Freak console. I’m not really dug in deeply into any games other than maybe the current play through of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest that I have going on the switch. I also picked up a mega pack of Sega Genesis games recently when it was on sale for the Switch and I’ve been playing quite a bit of classic Streets of Rage 2. I’ve yet to really go spelunking into the closet, but given that I am going to have to rearrange my set up to make room for the PlayStation 5… I have a feeling that I might be doing this sooner rather than later. I need to devote a weekend to organizing and hooking up my office for playing this sort of nonsense. I still want to dig out the NeoGeo CD and see if I can get it running on HDMI.

Shadowlands has been delayed, but we should have the pre-patch event starting next Tuesday. I am hoping to spend some time this weekend maybe finishing leveling my rogue, but other projects have stolen my attention. Additionally we should have the beginning of the Halloween event soon, and you can damned well bet I am going to be spending each day running it on each of my available characters because I really want that damned mount finally. I mean it is highly likely that I won’t get it… but I am going to at least make a good effort this year given that I actually am enjoying the game still. November is likely going to be heavy shadowlands time for me so this absolutely retains its spot.

To The New and Returning

If you have been reading this blog at all this month and the tail end of the last month you will know that I am completely obsessed with Genshin Impact. This is being called “Breath of the Waifu” by many a person online, but I am not even sure if that covers it. I am absolutely not playing it for the Waifu or Husbando, but instead because it is this insanely good action RPG that sort of came from out of nowhere. It is this expert blending of Breath of the Wild, Trials of Mana, Modern Dragon Quest games, Open World Exploration and the addictive as hell Gacha mechanics of Dragalia Lost. I am still shocked at just how damned good this game is for as free as it legitimately is. Sure I have spent money on the game but I also didn’t feel like I had to. If you are not playing this you should be, and probably on the PC/Mobile since they cross save and the PS4 is locked to only that platform. That said there is cross play between all of the platforms regardless, I just like the freedom of being able to farm materials from bed on my phone or tablet and also play primarily on my PC.

To Those Departing

Oh Avengers… its not me… its you. I feel like this game probably needed another year to mature and develop enough interesting combat to really be the sort of game that it was trying to be. This is the Anthem of 2020, a game with a lot of promise but also a game that felt pointless after awhile as I chased rewards that didn’t really matter. The difference being that the moment to moment gameplay was so much more enjoyable in Anthem. Avengers needs significant tweaks in its combat system to make it feel more enjoyable in the moment to moment gameplay. I leveled and farmed up a full set of yellow gear for Captain America, leveled up Thor, and then realized while I was leveling Ms Marvel that I didn’t exactly know why I was doing it and logged out never to log in again.

I rarely do two pictures for a single game, but here we are breaking that rule. This is a snipping from Steam DB for the Avengers game, and notice that its peak concurrency was at launch… and only ever hit just over 31,000 players. The few times I attempted to match up with other players, the queues were too long and I eventually gave up and went back to soloing content. The storyline for this game was great and I made me fall in love with the character of Ms Marvel, and since then I have been pouring through her comics through Marvel Unlimited and having a grand ole time. The game however just becomes repetitive when you realize there are six maps in the entire game and everything is carved out as chunks of those as they send you on the same handful of mission types with semi-randomized objectives. Maybe I will revisit in a year or so and see if the game has improved.

I still don’t know why this game and I struggle to get along. There is so much about it that I adore, but at the same time I feel absolutely no desire to actually log in and play it. I left it on the list last time, but to be honest I don’t think I logged in at all during September. With everything on the horizon game wise with the launch of the PS5 and World of Warcraft Shadowlands… I don’t expect to probably play it for the rest of this calendar year. At some point I will return and gobble up a few patches worth of story content, but I am already behind in that department. I love Lalabel, and I will come back to visit him at some point in the future but for now we are admitting to ourselves that the game just isn’t going to be played in the near future.

Ships Passing in the Night

I gotta admit I teetered back and forth between putting this on the new and returning list. I had a really fun week/weekend hanging out and playing this game and I could see myself returning to it on a more permanent basis. That said… there is just so damned much stuff on my radar right now so I am going to put it in this category for the moment. If it becomes more… then it can trickle upwards on the list. The game has either massively improved since its launch, or I never really gave it enough of a chance because I became enthralled with Anthem. Either case… I am compelled to spend some more time here at some point.

This charming game is an Early Access title that Tam stumbled onto and I have poked my head into a few times. Not really actively playing it, but it is something I am definitely going to be watching. They are doing active development on it and I am hoping some rounds of combat balance are in the works. if you want more detail you can check out my write up from a few weeks back.

Summary

There really wasn’t a ton of movement, but that is usually the case when I actually manage to do these on a monthly basis. Looming on the horizon is the launch of the PlayStation 5, World of Warcraft Shadowlands, and Cyberpunk 2077 which are all going to steal some of my time. Past hat I am really not sure what the tail end of this year is going to lead to. Time is moving so damned fast in part because every day is effectively the same as I rarely leave the house. I can’t believe we area already knee deep in October when mentally it still feels like it is maybe April. 2020 is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” I think for me, and while I have stayed busy… it all just sorta flows together.

What are you “regularly playing”? Drop me a line below.

Insufficient Mora

October 8, 2020 by Belghast

Well friends… it has been twelve days since Genshin Impact released for the North American audience and I feel like I have just now arrived at the “real game”. Last night I hit level 30 and with that opens the last of the story content currently available in the game. They are in theory working on a patch right now for a whole new area to open up roughly the size of Liyue. The reason why I say I am just now arriving at the “real game” is because up until this point I always seemed to have whatever resource I needed at any time I needed it. I could pretty comfortably keep a squad and a half worth of characters fully equipped and leveled without much issue.

At level 30 the World Level increases once again and with it comes the 3rd stage of ascensions for Characters, Weapons and a whole slew of talent levels that you can now train into. All of which require materials that I don’t quite have consistent access to as of yet, and are only really obtainable through the Alchemy table and crafting them. This is a VERY lossy method of obtaining these items and I am very rapidly whittling through whatever reserves that I had stockpiled for this point. I mean the answer to all of these woes is just to “play more of the game”. Thankfully that moment to moment gameplay is so damned good that I am not going to have a problem with this fact. However the relatively rapid ascent is going to grind to a halt for awhile as I slowly upgrade my core team.

I feel like I am probably lucky that I had enough resources banked to pour everything into a single character and kit Razor out completely. The theory being that this one character should be able to carry the rest of the team forward as I ultimately farm all of the resources and mora needed to drag up the rest. I can absolutely foresee that I will probably hit AR35 and the next break WELL before I have managed pulling up those characters, which probably begins a viscous cycle of always being out of resources and money.

I did make a call and ended up switching weapons. I had been using the Sacrificial Greatsword, which had the feature of ending the cooldown of one of my abilities. However since my Razor is built mostly for melee damage output, this wasn’t the best synergy in the world. I’ve now switched to the crafted Greatsword Prototype Aminus which has a 50% chance every 15 seconds of proccing an attack that deals an additional 300% attack damage and causes a small AOE. When this procs it is absolutely glorious and I have crafted two of them… and now am desperately on the hunt for additional Northlander Claymore Prototypes. If anyone has tips for farming these to drop given that they just state as coming from “Bosses”, I would be greatly appreciative.

As for artifacts I am rocking a full set of four stars and using the 2 piece Berserker and 2 piece Gladiator bonus. Once I get a few more pieces of Gladiator I will likely switch over to that set for 4 piece bonus. I think my lowest artifacts are +12 and my highest are +16… but this really comes down to a lack of mora to push them up much higher. That has rapidly become an issue for progression is that I just need so much raw money to pay for the upgrades needed. I guess I could start farming Gold Clouds but up until this point they have seemed like a poor use of Resin.

The most costly thing to level both in Mora costs and resources is absolutely the talents. Each one of these required a significant number of higher tier mob drops, which I had to create through crafting and a copious number of talent books. thankfully I was able to get most of the later through the Battle Pass, which continues to be a phenomenal boon. The positive is that the talent increases make a massive difference in damage throughput each time they are available. So in theory these should also allow me to push a little further into the Spiral Abyss.

Yesterday I lucked out on pulls and managed to get both Ningguang and Fischl, but unfortunately given the drought in resources they are both likely going to be relegated to running missions at the Adventurers guild for the time being. I know given that the content is essentially paused for the moment while additional releases are being worked on by Mihoyo, I should in theory have enough time to dig myself out of this hole. Largely I just wanted to prepare my readers for when the elevator stops going up quite so fast as you hit Adventure Rank 30.

Thankfully however my favorite part of the game is still as valid today as it was on the first day. I love wandering around and exploring. I can get lost in just roaming the map looking for monsters to kill and treasure to open. I still have a copious number of doodads to find out there in the world to finish unlocking the towers, and I have likely not even scratched the surface on all of the possible treasures available. I imagine I will continue finding areas that I have been near but never actually explored fully for a good while. Genshin Impact has an immensely dense world full of lots of tiny details that can be easily missed on the first viewing. I guess in some way I am happy that the ride is slowing down a bit so I can take more time to savor it.