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- Genshin Impact offers low rates for acquiring desired characters and weapons, often requiring months of dedicated gameplay or significant financial investment.
- Even the rewards mailed to players are lackluster when compared to other games in the genre.
- Hoyo’s other project, Honkai Starrail, is leagues more generous in rewards than Genshin.
The Tyrannical Gacha
Gacha games are known to be stingy. If your entire game is built upon promoting newer characters, you’d make that the foundation of your funding. For example, When I got back to Honkai Impact 3, I could get and build 8 new Valkyres in a month.
Genshin Impact is very, very different. The Gamer shows that Genshin’s 0.6% falls relatively low when compared to Arknight’s 1% or Reverse: 1999’s 1.6%. However, user LRTendoPain on Reddit insists that “Genshin has terrible Gacha rates, but the pity system makes it better than other Gachas.”
Then, an average patch lasts about 42 days, and you can expect to get around 8k Primogems if you complete all new content and do your commissions daily. This is about 50 pulls, and usually, you’d get less. The game has a hard pity of around 90 pulls, but you can expect to get a character around every 80 pulls.
| Category | Amount |
|---|---|
| Quests | 💠 120 |
| Events | 💠 2,260 |
| Dailies | 💠 2,520 |
| Abyss | 💠 1,800 |
| Compensations | 💠 600 |
| Livestream | 💠 300 |
| Stardust | 💠 800 |
| Trial | 💠 80 |
| Total | 💠 8,480 |
While the infographic is quite old, 4.5 doesn’t seem to be much better. While there are events like the Lantern Rite and the release of new areas that can give up to 12k Primos in a patch, those occur at most twice a year.
| Category | Amount |
|---|---|
| Quests | 💠 120 |
| Events | 💠 2,260 |
| Dailies | 💠 2,520 |
| Abyss | 💠 1,800 |
| Compensations | 💠 600 |
| Livestream | 💠 300 |
| Stardust | 💠 800 |
| Trial | 💠 80 |
| Web Event | 💠 200 |
| HoYolab Login | 💠 80 |
| Twitch Drops | 💠 30 |
| Achievements | 💠 30 |
| Total | 💠 8,820 |
A quick calculation shows that with this, you’d get one featured character every 2 patches, or around every 84 days. This seems a bit much, but surely it can’t get worse than that, right?
The Guarantee System
Genshin Impact has this system where if you don’t get the featured character you want, you’re guaranteed to get it the next time around. This means that even if you get a character, there’s only a 50% chance of it being the one you’d like. In the worst-case scenario, if you really want a character, you’d have to collect primos for 4 patches or 168 days. That’s about half a year of playing the game daily to save up for a character.
Furthermore, the 4-star characters have no guarantee whatsoever. I’ve been playing the game since launch, and I still don’t have Yanfei.
The Weapon Banner
Oh, but it gets worse. The weapon banner has its own separate guarantee system. If you get an unfeatured weapon once, you’re guaranteed a featured one the next time. However, there are multiple featured weapons at a time. At the game’s initial stages, this meant even with 500 pulls, there was a chance you wouldn’t get the one you desired.
The updated version is a bit nicer, but it’s still honestly a scam if you’re f2p. You get your chosen weapon after every two weapons, which means you’d have to save around 240 pulls to guarantee a weapon.
Youtuber Vidmillo concludes in his guide to the weapon banner that it’s only worthwhile if you already have the best characters and half the 4-star weapons in the banner are relevant.
Hoyo’s Questionable “Fix”
Genshin Impact’s recent attempt to appease the player base with a banner featuring previously released Mondstadt characters backfired spectacularly. The banner is called the Chronicled Wish. It implements the same flawed guarantee system as the weapon banner, requiring an unrealistic 240 pulls to guarantee the desired character.
Somehow, they made it even worse by making the pity not follow through. What this means is if you manage to do 230 pulls in a single patch, they will all reset when the next patch comes.
Hoyo’s Favorite Child: Starrail
The stinginess within Genshin Impact becomes even more apparent when compared to its sister game, Honkai Starrail. While both games celebrated award wins in 2023 with 1600 of their in-game currencies, Starrail offered the additional reward of a free 5-star character, Dr Ratio.
This stark difference in generosity highlights a concerning trend of Hoyoverse prioritizing one game over the other. Hoyo’s actions in this regard almost make it seem like they lack respect for the Genshin fanbase.
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Heya, I’m Asad (Irre) Kashif! I’ve been writing about anything and everything since as far back as I can remember. Professionally, I started writing five years ago, working both as a ghostwriter and writing under my own name. As a published author and a council member in Orpheus, my journey in the world of writing has been fulfilling and dynamic.
I still cherish the essays I wrote about my favorite PS2 games, and I’m thrilled to have transformed my passion for game journalism into a career. I’m a theory crafter for Genshin Impact (and now Wuthering Waves) and have a deep love for roguelites and roguelikes. While I prefer indie games for their distinct aesthetic and vibes, I do enjoy triple-A games occasionally. I’ve also been playing League since season 6, and I main Akali! I have a keen interest in discovering and playing more obscure games, as well as researching forgotten titles. Additionally, I am a front-end programmer who dabbles a bit in gamedev occasionally.
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