Genshin Impact

Good Morning Folks! One of my favorite things about Genshin Impact are the boss fights. The game is full of these raid boss style encounters that reward a significant amount of good loot. Two of them are on weekly timers Andrius the Wolf god and Stormterror which in theory I hope you have already fought by this point as part of the story. Fair warning if you have NOT finished that step in the main story then this might give you some spoilers. The big wolf is awesome because you can bring your friends and quite honestly he is a cakewalk with multiple ranged characters. However Stormterror is a pain in the butt and something that both myself and Grace barely limped through.

As a result this has been something I have dreaded stepping foot in, and last night apparently I had some clarity. So far every boss fight in Genshin Impact has been challenging but at the same time very fair and if you understood the mechanics you were going to get through the fight regardless of your gear levels. This made me realize that we were likely doing the fight entirely wrong. The problem with Genshin Impact guides is that they are almost all YouTube videos, and the vast majority seem to be streams of people opening Gacha pulls. After some digging I found an excellent resource from one of the beta tests and if watching a video is your jam then I highly suggest checking it out.

For those who prefer a written guide, I am going to take stills from that video and talk through the process. One of the problems with the Stormterror fight is that you won’t have full control of your camera because it effectively puts you in a 2.5D encounter as you traverse a series of platforms left to right in front of the boss. Because of this ranged classes have a hard time doing normal damage or “white hitting” the boss, and since the guide suggested it I made a party of nothing but melee characters along with Barbara as a healer. This helped immensely, and now I will walk you through the basic mechanics of the fight.

At the beginning of the fight you are going to spend most of your time just avoiding getting hit. Stormterror will strafe the platform and you need to be preserving your stamina so you can dodge out of the way. I took another tip from the video and decided to use Kaeya as a “soak” or a character that I didn’t care that much about to use doing the dodge phases so I didn’t risk killing my highest damage characters which were Razor and Xiangling. There are going to be some wind sprites on the edges of the platform and you want to go ahead and activate those to start the wind currents going which will come into play in a later phase.

After a few minutes Storm Terror will slam his claws down onto the platform giving you an opportunity to dps them down. If you look at the health bar for the encounter you will see a smaller white bar below it which indicates the health of the claws. Your goal is to burn through these claws as fast as possible to trigger a phase shift. Like the video I started dpsing the right claw and very shortly after doing so Stormterror will start a breath attack that ultimately sweeps the platform. As this is beginning you want to dodge your way over to the left claw and begin burning as hard as you can to shift the phase. If you are of reasonable gear and you burn various DPS “E” attacks you can do this. I would hold your limit breaks or “Q” attacks for the next phase.

When you have burned through the claws, it will cause Stormterror to slump down onto the platform at which point you need to climb up on top of his neck and unleash everything you have on the glowing pink “scab”. This is the point where you want to hit your limit breaks if you have them saved up and cycle through any attacks that you might have available as well. This is the REAL burn phase of the encounter because it is the first time you have been able to do anything to the red bar indicating the health of Stormterror. In theory you should be able to get this down to about half before the next phase change.

Now here is the key to the fight, that I apparently originally missed in the times I have done it before. Stormterror is surrounded by a ring of platforms and he is going to do an attack that causes them to start cracking. If you stand on the ground during this phase you will take signficant damage over time. However the goal is now to find a clean platform and use the wind currents to safely make your way across the chasms between. In the video the guy just keeps going left until he finds a clean one and that is precisely what I did as well and it seemed to work. This will cause a reset of the phases and you are back to dodge the strafes, attack the claws and dodge the beam and then hop up on the back and in theory you should be able to finish it off in the next phase.

Once I knew what the hell I was doing I was able to finish off the fight last night without taking significant damage on any of my characters. This went from a fight that I dread to something that I can probably cakewalk my way through with way lower geared characters. Essentially here is the TL;DR of the keys to success as outlined in the excellent video.

• Bring a Melee Team
• Avoid taking damage until he slams claws down
• Burn claws while avoiding the breath attack
• Hop up on Back and Burn the “Scab”
• Glide left until you find a clean platform
• Start the process over by avoiding taking damage until claws phase

The reset of the Wolf and Dragon encounters is essentially in the wee hours of Monday morning each week. It is well worth doing and hopefully between the video that I keep linking and my text/screenshot break down this will give you the confidence to tackle the fight. Doing so this week managed to net me a second piece of Gladiator’s gear giving my Razor the excellent 2 piece bonus. At some point I will also do a write up on how I have approached the wolf encounter, but that one is considerably easier given that you can co-op it. For friends I am more than happy to ride along for wolf kills even though I have probably already gotten my rewards for the week.

That is one thing above all else that I really enjoy about this game is the way that they handle lockouts for encounters. You can always attempt something for free and bash your head against it as many times as you like until you figure it out without risk of spending currency on attempts. You don’t spend any of your resin until you actually receive loot, and similarly you can keep helping friends out with encounters as many times as you like without getting loot. So for Wolf boy I could do it over and over all night long even though I already got my loot for the week. So if you are a mutual and are struggling with some of these fights, hit me up and I am more than happen to help you through them.

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.

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.