Genshin Impact | 5.2 Special Program

[Moonface]

So I don't know the context of what this is, but I saw something about a new event that reduces your current characters health by 50% for attacking the enemy and decreases your ATK just for sprinting, and it doesn't seem to be getting received too well because of how punishing it is.

[Dragon Lord]

This is the third time they've done this event, and what it consists of is the player choosing between various effects to put into place that effect your overall score. You have full control over how hard you make the fight. People complain about it because to reach the absolute maximum score for each round, you need to have a pretty powerful team, which only whales will really have due to needing 5* characters at C6 for maximum potential.

You don't need the maximum score every round to get all of the rewards from the even though. Basically reaching max points every round is just a flex for the whales. But in the second round of the event, there was an effect you could choose that would cause you to be struck by a bolt of lightning every time you hit an enemy, causing you to lose 50% of your HP (couldn't reduce your HP below 1 though).

But as I said, it's completely up to the player on which effects you put in place. People just like to whine because F2P with shitty team comps aren't able to max score each round, regardless if you don't even need to do it to get everything. But they want all of the content to be at their level, and any time content like this that requires a lot of effort, they whine and complain about it.

You need 30,000 points to get all of the rewards, and there's 7 rounds, so you only need 4,3000 points per round to reach that, which is more than doable by F2P players, unless you haven't built up any decent support characters or you just really suck at the game, both of which are 100% on the player.

[Moonface]

Ah, I see. It reminds me of how heat levels work in Hades. The way I saw people talking about it I got the impression the event made the penalties I mentioned compulsory.
What's the maximum amount of points you can get in a round by the way?

[Mr EliteL]

There's four rounds available to play at the moment, all max points being varied. Challenge 1 has 6050, Challenge 2 6550, Challenge 3 7050, Challenge 4 6250. For comparison if all the multipliers are to the max but difficulty is lower, total points change drastically. For Challenge 4, max Easy is 1250, Normal 2500, Hard 3750 then Expert 6250. Nothing but difficulty only Easy is 150, Normal 300, Hard 450, Expert 750.

My characters still aren't good enough at the moment, so far I've managed 2880, 2940 and 2010 and yet to try Challenge 4, those are on Hard too. I'm mainly going for the Primogems for completing/defeating the boss in the challenge, I've lost points in the first two for taking too long to get the time points, the Magu Kenki boss destroyed me first time, had to lower stuff (not difficulty, won't do Normal as points are so low) to be able to win.

[Dragon Lord]

The Dual Maguu Kenki fight is rough. I tried it last night with most of the modifiers on. My 34K HP Zhongli shield got absolutely demolished in seconds and it was over at that point. This is probably the first fight in these events that I feel is actually a little too much. You already have all of these modifiers to strengthen the enemy and weaken yourself, and they want you to fight two of them at once?

I hadn't tried this fight prior to my previous post, but after trying it last night, this one definitely feels like a huge "Fuck you!" to F2P/light spenders. Like, I'm a bit of a heavier spender and even I went into it like, how the fuck am I supposed to do this? Then you also have to kill them at the same time if you have the revive modifier on? Unless you have C6 Eula with an R5 Song of Broken Pines, good luck ending this fight quickly.

Though as I mentioned previously, I'm among those people who hasn't really worked on my support characters as much as I should have before. I just recently started getting serious about building Venti up due to the Swirl buffs in 1.6 (Venti is even more overpowered than he was before after that). I might have to think about building up Jean now too, which I hate because I do not like Jean at all, but she provides a lot more damage now and her healing/cleanse on her Burst would be useful.

I can't just brute force my way through this one with Ganyu or Hu Tao, so it's definitely punishing me for lack of supports built up. Though of course having supports built up is more about your luck on artifacts than anything else. Farming an artifact set for a week and walking away with maybe one decent piece is rough.

I ended up settling for 3050 points on that fight though. Might try to go back and improve it, but I don't think I will need to. I got 4850 on the first Primal and 4750 on the Oceanid, so I have some leeway for points. As long as I can score highly on Primal and Oceanid Round 2, the lower score on this one shouldn't hurt. Just have to remember that I'm likely walking away with another low score around 3,000 for Round 2 of the Dual Maguu Kenki.

EDIT: I was able to achieve a near-maximum score of 6050 on the second Primal fight, so yeah, I should be okay taking a lower score on the Kenki fights. The only modifier I didn't use was the one where your active character's attack decreases by 15% every 5 seconds. I think that one would kill my DPS too much to finish the fight in 120 seconds, but other than that, the usual Hu Tao + Xinqui combo was enough to destroy this guy with everything else on/set to max.

[Mr EliteL]

I need to finish off the last two fights then see if I can improve, believe I can after doing better with Diona as my healer with Ganyu, Eula and Zhongli when I tackled the second Oceanid fight. *checks the last fight* Ah so they did go with a gauntlet style fight.

Just adding this here as I started to go into a bit more.

Genshin Impact (PS5)

I also managed to 36* the Abyss for the first time the last rotation. Something that I would have probably done a lot sooner had I realized that the Primo Gems rewards for floors 9-12 refresh every time the Abyss resets, allowing you to get 600 Primos every rotation if you 36* it. Since the release of the game, I thought that the Primos were one-time rewards like floors 1-8, and that you just got other rewards for clearing 9-12 every time. Nope. Instead, I cost myself... a lot of Primos over the life of the game. Pretty irritated by that fact, but there's nothing that I can do about it now. My own stupidity for not making sure how it worked from the start.

Cool you got that done now, but AAIIEE, what?! Damn I didn't know that about the 9-12 reset either, I'll get on that too then. Although I doubt my two teams will be good enough as not all have decent artifacts yet, ascended to 6 star level, or if they are just 80, and so on. OK, safe to say it's time to use the Original Resin I have left and see what I can get, have been grinding for Hero's Wits for a little while so that'll help a bit. Oh, and just started up my game today, used a 10 pull on Kazuha's banner and didn't realise I was in soft Pity range, lost the 50/50 and got Jean instead, which I am not disappointed in at all. I wasn't trying to get a new 5*, just wanted a Bennett constellation. I'm just slightly annoyed I didn't check beforehand where I was at, would've done single pulls to get closer then save for next banner or something. Although doesn't Ayaka come first, if so I'm not exactly in need of yet another Cryo user. I'll wait for Yoimiya and pull a bit towards next Pity unless I get insanely lucky.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, the last fight is a real bitch to get a high score in unless you're a decently big whale. Thankfully I accumulated enough points in the previous rounds that I didn't have to try too hard in the final fight.

My scores for the event in the end were:

Challenge 1: 4850
Challenge 2: 4750
Challenge 3: 3050
Challenge 4: 6050
Challenge 5: 4850
Challenge 6: 3400
Challenge 7: 3250

Putting me at 30,200 points total, allowing me to get all the rewards from the event. Getting 6K on the second round of the Primal was a huge boost. Thankfully that one didn't include a Pyro RES buff for the boss, so I was able to go in with Hu Tao and just rip him to pieces. Could have gone back and increased my score by quite a bit on the first Primal too, but didn't feel like doing it. Didn't matter in the end. You can tell how little I tried on the Dual Maguu Kenki fights, haha. Didn't feel like putting any effort into that crap.

And yeah, I was pretty mad at myself when I discovered that. Though I probably wouldn't have been able to clear Floor 12 in the beginning of the game anyways, but at least could have collected the Primos for 9-11 all that time. Lots of lost pulls by not realizing how Abyss works. Though no other primo rewards in the game reset every month outside of what you can get from the Battle Pass, which costs money to unlock. So I assumed there was no way MiHoYo was going to give a free way to get Primos every month outside of Dallies.

I'm not sure who will be coming first, but I am excited for both characters regardless. Ayaka maybe not so much for practical use, because I already have Ganyu and Eula for Cryo DPS, but Ayaka is cute as all hell and I need her for that fact alone. If she turns out to be OP as hell, that's just a major bonus on top of it all. Yoimiya is definitely the one I'm most interested in, being a Pyro Archer. I saw a small clip of her from beta footage and she seems pretty damn OP, so I'm excited for that. Can't wait to make an OP archer team with her and Ganyu.

[Dragon Lord]

So it's been announced that there will be a Livestream for Genshin Impact 2.0 release on July 8th. So we're gong to go from 1.7 directly to 2.0, so this must be a pretty massive update. I expect this to include the release of Inazuma if it's going to be this big.

More importantly, there's been a leak that dataminers have found information in MiHoYo's code that they may be making Cross-Save between PS4/PS5 and PC/Mobile. So two weeks after I buy a PS5 to play Genshin better, there's a possibility that MiHoYo is going to make it so I could move from PS to PC.

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME?!!? When I bought a Switch for Octopath, SE announced the PC port of the game a week later. Now I buy a PS5 for better Genshin, only for the possibility that two weeks later MiHoYo is going to tell me I could have gone from PS4 to PC? Apparently the universe says no, I can't just be happy. Gotta burn me every time I buy a new system for something.

[Mr EliteL]

Ooh a livestream for 2.0 tomorrow, nice. Will be watching. But damn rumours of Cross-Save for PC/PS finally happening? Might not though, but it is still stupid not to have that so perhaps it's true. I did see the Wings of Descension is locked for PC as it's for PSN players, I noticed when I was changing my gliders yesterday on there. I thought it was already available for everyone or to meet a condition I forgot about, but wasn't.

I haven't played my PC save in a week, got on for my birthday to receive the cake (it gives one Fragile Resin plus you keep the cake in your inventory to either remain there or destroy). Yesterday had the best session on there, my laptop was running Genshin smoothly and I managed to play for like 4-5 hours with no problems other than a screen freeze when I tried taking a photo, yet the game still played as I could back out, change characters just no picture following that. I'll be annoyed if I can't keep my PC save, although if I can't I'll use a different server, haven't got too far into the story yet, just about to get to Stormterror's Lair.

EDIT: Done mostly what I can for the Legend of the Vagabond Sword event. This is what I ended up with:

Challenge 1: 3500
Challenge 2: 2940
Challenge 3: 3400
Challenge 4: 4050
Challenge 5: 3150
Challenge 6: 3050
Challenge 7: 5250

Not quite reached the 30000 for all the rewards, got two left and doubt I'll be able to improve as far as the final reward. Might retry the Oceanid fights (2 & 5) as I never went back to do them on Expert, the others I did. I added the Mask of Terror for Challenge 7 forgetting what it meant, so there were three Magu Kenki dudes in the fight, goddamn. Luckily the normal Magu Kenki stayed back and sent out the double mask attack every so often, if it did anything else I wasn't aware, plus if it did get in the fray while I dealt with the Gale and Frost versions, I'd surely lose. Also my 5250 isn't exactly good, the max modifiers were 11k something, but I was pleased with just that.

Oh and forgot to mention, if I do get lucky and get Ayaka in her banner when pulling but not trying to get her, I won't be annoyed.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, I got carried by my 6050 score on the second Primal fight. That one didn't have Pyro RES for the boss, so I turned on all but one modifier I think, max HP, lowest time limit, expert, and then just tore into him with the always OP Hu Tao + Xinqui combo. Even with the increased HP, he didn't last too long taking 50K+ Vaporize hits.

If Ayaka ends up being totally busted, that will be a plus. Like I said before, I don't really need another Cryo DPS, but I've loved her character design since I first saw her all the way back to last year, and I had my mind made up right then that I had to have her no matter what. Even with Ganyu and Eula already, I'm sure I can find plenty of time to use Ayaka if she ends up being powerful. Especially since the Abyss will be tailored to her when she releases, as it usually is for new characters.

Yoimiya is also in the same category for me too, though. Already having Hu Tao, Klee and Diluc, I don't really need another Pyro DPS, but the fact that she's a bow character, and we saw what happened the last time we got a 5* bow character (DPS Queen Ganyu), and from the leaked footage of her that I saw, she looks like she's going to be amazing. It looks like her kit is going to be geared normal attacks instead of charged shots, which has me very interested. An archer character that is all about just spamming auto attacks and doing big numbers that way? Yes yes yes. I can't wait to see what kind of Melt comps people come up with her. Perhaps a Ganyu + Yoimiya match up? Use Ganyu's burst to get all the enemies hit with Cryo and then spam attacks with Yoimiya for big Melt damage. Though I'm not sure if Ganyu's burst would be able to apply Cryo fast enough, so maybe it'd be better just to go with the typical Pyro DPS + Xinqui comp.

Either way, I'm super excited for what possibilities lie ahead with these characters. I know people are sick of Pyro and Cryo characters all of the time (especially since they always end up being the most powerful due to how good Vaporize and Melt are), but I love it. Though I also hope the rumors of a major Electro rework are true, because I'd really love to see Keqing be able to keep up with the big DPS bois. I absolutely love using her, but 90% of the time it's better just to use Ganyu/Hu Tao/Eula and end fights three times as fast. Making Keqing great again!

[Moonface]

I think the stream is July 9, not the 8th. Also, if either of you are interested, there's some leaked stuff about what the update is going to contain all gathered here: https://www.heypoorplayer.com/2021/07/07...ain-leaks/

[Dragon Lord]

I do believe the teleport way point for the Serenetea Pot was actually confirmed by MiHoYo in a Q&A a bit ago, so someone trying to claim that as a big "leak" is hilarious.

Keqing's story quest was also heavily hinted at by MiHoYo in the same Q&A I believe, so that one has been known for a little bit as well. Though I guess these leakers are going to try and claim everything as a huge discovery for clicks regardless.

As we all know, I came across the leak for the cross-save a couple of days ago, so nothing to be surprised by there. Just anger and rage.

Other than that, everything else seems pretty to be expected. Inazuma is going to be the next major area of the game, and the first huge expansion since the game released, so getting new domains/quests/items/etc. is very much to be expected. I'm just super excited to see how big this region is going to be, and what kind of new enemies we'll be getting. Inazuma is probably going to be very island based, and we'll probably be using the same ship for travel that we have in the current time-limited event area. There are currently no aquatic enemies in the game, so I'm interested to see if MiHoYo is going to introduce any, or if all of the combat will continue to be land-based. I'm not expecting them to have gone through a huge change like adding water combat, but we'll see.

Most of all though, just can't wait for Ayaka. She's been a huge want for me since like... man, when did I even first see her. October? Been almost a year-long wait to finally get her in the game.

[Moonface]

I assume Ayaka was announced a while ago but hasn't been made an official character yet or something? I'm just trying to work out how she's had a year long wait otherwise. XD

[Dragon Lord]

Ayaka was in the... third closed beta test that China had prior to the game's release. I think that was in... July or August of 2020. So yeah, she's been known since before release. Everyone thought she'd be released in the game much sooner since she was in the beta so early, but nope. They've held on to her until Inazuma's release.

[Mr EliteL]

Was disappointed about no livestream yesterday, just a bit, then got confused when today's was meant to happen. The Twitch one is happening right now, but I have to go back to work so I'll be watching the 5PM YouTube re-broadcast later...