The Problem With 4 Star Characters In Genshin Impact

4 Star characters in gacha games are naturally meant to be less powerful or efficient as 5 Stars to offset their lower rarity, but most well designed gachas find a way to retain their usefulness in any possible way. Genshin faces a growing issue where many 4 stars (not all, but many) aren't necessitated in any way, causing many of them to be neglected or not invested in. Today we're gonna discuss why that's the case.

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#GenshinImpact #Character #4Star

[debamchakraborty]

Var saying, "We have never had a 5 star character for free since release" and showing a clip of Aloy just staring into oblivion while hiding behind a tree is so evil and I love it.

[YayaFeiLong]

I think the biggest problem with 4-stars is that they require the exact same amount of investment to build as 5-stars. Same amount of EXP and Mora, same amount of ascension and talent mats, same amount of artifact farming, etc. If they cost less resources to build than 5-stars I'd have tried out a lot more of the 4-stars I own by now

[danieldante]

Honestly the only 4 star that very appealing and after version 2.0 is Heizou. Unique basic attack, one punch skill, Rule34 birthday portrait and decent burst. Even that, he not appeared as much as the magnificent 6 4 star

Btw im talking about Raw damage, not reaction damage :)

[lucnat]

My main problem with using 4 stars is that they need the same amount of mora, hero's wits, resin, and weapons as 5 star units only to be massively disappointing. If Genshin really wanted players to start using 4 star units more often, they'd need to drastically reduce the amount of resources you need to make them even playable. It's also why I'm not too keen on having bosses with specific weaknesses that only a few units can take advantage of. Even if those units were just four stars, fully leveling and building somebody like ningguang, yanfei, sayu, or any of the other four star units just for one boss would be awful and leave me with no resources to build the other units that I actually like.

[cottonpop]

A tiny correction: Yan fei wasn’t the last 4 star to require on field time. It was Heizou I think. Anyways I agree with the points that you made in the video :)

[powwowken]

My big problem with 4*'s, especially the newer ones is that it's C6 or bust.
At C0 they're not just bad by comparison but almost unusable because massive pieces of their kit get constellation locked or in the case of the "niche supports" like Sara, Gorou and Faruzan they can't even properly fill their niche without their C6.
Edit: Also... 4*'s are NOT "easier to get", I had a C3 Raiden Shogun before I got a single copy of Sara from the banner, 4*'s are NEVER guaranteed so getting a 5* is actually often much easier for your average player.

[yaemiko]

"The last 4 star on field dps we had was yanfei"

Shikanoin Heizou: /cries in the background and wonders how he can be an off field support

[addadeptus]

There is one main and probably the biggest problem in this approach of making content for a specific character mechanic. That is the whole resource economy discourages experimenting because how scarce the resources are. In the end, you will only build the character with the most coverage which we are already doing. And if another mechanic comes that favors only a handful of characters, the resource economy wont allow it. They then have to re-balance the whole thing which probably they wont do.

[ms.sysbit]

I think a key issue is the sheer amount of resources to raise a character. Between Hero Wits, Talent Books, Mora, Trounce drops, Weapon to 90, etc. It makes raising a bench of characters arduous. I joined in September 2022. I have at this point 1 fully built Keqing (who could still improve obviously but 49/179 with a Lion’s Roar. My Noelle and Lisa are closing in on that point of completion. Qiqi and Barbara are solid but could be far better. Xiang and Nahida have spares and are incomplete. Jean has not started. It’s been 4 months about and that’s what I have at AR55 pushing 56. It takes ages to get a full team let alone two for the Spiral Abyss. I am happy I cleared 12-1.

I think too many YouTubers forget how this game is before they achieved perfect everything. It is more than a bit insulting to say X is worse Y when X is 4 and Y is a 5. We know. These things take time and other resources though. It’s more insulting to say every mob is 2 shot. Yes, for you it id but for most players, it’s not the case.

[villecor]

Nah the only reason why people arent using different characters is that they are ridiculously hard to build to a usable status I know I would use Candice but I just don't have enough time resources or willpower to grind her to a usable state

[PyraXadon]

Personally I find the ending comment on the unique bosses aspect to be woefully short sighted.

While we do get opportunities to use unique units, the tradeoff becomes railroading players into using only those units as a solution. Wolflord is a great example. He shows up in abyss and railroads you into using geo in order to efficiently fight him. For someone without any geo characters built, he’s hell to kill because the one counter won’t be available.

[kyllernotkiller]

Doing domains made for a specific character is a thing old story quests did, recent story now quests are just damage input trials. There aren't many examples but these are a few: Venti quest domain where there are elevated platforms and you need to use his skill, Xiao quest where he's in perma ult and you use his jump to move, Klee quest wich there are rocks to break with klee and conviniently elevated lasers tall enough to have klee to pass, Lisa quest where you use her electro attacks to activate things.

[KittyPozer]

My intrinsic reason for using weaker characters is that I like variety. Having amazing power doesn’t really matter in genshin. You can make a few good teams for beating the abyss if you care about that, but once those teams are set you can run weaker teams to clear anything else in the game.

[seluhir]

I disagree with the premise that they should hyperspecialize content to certain niches, but agree that they should expand content to encourage usage of more characters. Most of your ideas are predicated on the idea that everyone has YOUR roster, which is not the case. Expanding your roster is a VERY slow process unless you're a whale. Having a single weekly boss that REQUIRES a specific mechanic can completely lock certain players out, especially newer players, which drives customers away. Nobody wants to feel 'oh I didn't pull on this banner last month so I guess I can't do this content at all'.
The idea that I've been thinking about is a rogue-like Abyss-style "Dungeon" with like 20-40 floors, which gives randomized rewards every floor(along with weekly challenge rewards for clearing x numbers of floor per week) and slowly increases difficulty(early floors being quite easy), where you have to choose to bring a set of, say, 20 characters with you. Every floor you're presented with a randomized set of enemies and a randomized ley line effect. You then have to pick your team from the characters you 'brought with you'. The catch? Every time you use a character, that character gets an exhaustion point, but every two floors a character 'rests'(is not used) they lose one. If a character hits 3 exhaustion points, they become unusable until they reach 0(which would be 6 floors)
Newer players would still be able to complete the first 5-10 floors pretty easily, even if they don't have a big, specialized roster, and that'd be enough to get any weekly rewards from the place. But the challenge would be reaching the depths of the place and balancing your character usage. The exhaustion system would force people to be strategic with character usage, even if it's not 'true end game', but since you'd get rewarded for every floor it would be something people could do endlessly and really push themselves to reach the deepest floors. And benchmarking your deepest run in this content would give players some sense of accomplishment as they develop their roster - "Oh man - I finally beat floor 20 for the first time!" type thing.
(This would also give content creators something long-form to do for streaming/etc., which this game lacks)

[jy]

Keqing hasn't fallen off in relevance, she has in fact become more relevant than ever since dendro has been introduced. She is crazy strong right now.

[buttermanaws]

While I'm personally fine with the more niche 4* characters I am not fine with how hard it can be to build then for that niche, sometimes they take more building that the 5*'s they are meant to support

[GentleIceZ]

I think the worst part of is how we hear all the time how "genshin is easy, so use who you like" but both through a combination of Genshin not differentiating characters enough and players trying to optimize everything, a lot of 4 stars who are nearly as good as 5 stars (such as the on field DPS ones) are considered awful

I've used Razor, Yanfei and Noelle, and I've even recently started using Ningguang. They're all strong enough to get through the abyss. They're all really fun to play in their own ways. But because they don't go above and beyond, a lot of people will say "yeah, they're fine. Use them... if you want." which really feels like a nice way of saying "they're trash." Which sucks.

I think it really does come down to that quote from Soren Johnson; “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”

[DualSwordBesken]

7:45 Heizou came out in 2.8 this past summer. He is nothing but an on field 4 star.

Edit: Also, please explain your Chongyun to Shenhe comparison. Their kits are heavily different. Chongyun is a general support with the ability to convert physical to cryo, reduce skill cooldown, and speed up attack animations, and has a high scaling fast 3-4 hit burst. Shenhe is a narrow support that increases cryo damage and either normal + charge attack damage or skill + burst damage, and has a slow hitting, low scaling burst with a primary focus on improving cryo damage. About the only overlap they have beyond being cryo is they can reduce cryo res.

[krowe]

I think the biggest fault with your analysis and suggestions about the game's combat is that they all seem to turn the game into "If you're not a whale you can go suck it". The reason the game's balance works so well in my opinion is that all content is perfectly balanced regardless of what characters you have. New units are almost never about creating more optimal ways to engage in existing content, its moreso about creating fun new ways to experience the game's content. Not everyone has every character, nor do they have the time and resources to build every character. Therefore, the game's content never really requiring a specific unit (outside of some general cases like hypostasis fights and the wolf lord) the game provides a base wherein players are never really punished for playing or building who they want. My DPS Sayu will never reach the heights of Ayaka or Hu Tao, but the game never necessitates that kind of damage anyway. 4 stars (while they certainly have some issues) don't compete with 5 stars because they don't really need to. A lot of the issues you bring up in this video only really apply if you really care about being optimal; and while that is fair, that's also ignoring a huge part of why Genshin is so appealing in the first place.

[mika]

The problem with what you are suggesting is that having bosses with very specific ways to defeat them is going to be a constraint for the players who don't have the means to defeat them, nor the will to invest in characters they don't like. (See wolflord requiring geo or the drake requiring archers: they work fine in the overworld, but they get old pretty quickly in the abyss, for people who like to experiment different parties like me, repeating the challenges time after time).
One of the greatest appeals Genshin has is that its contents are very accessible (some might say too much, me included) but that's one of the reasons for its huge success.
Although what you were suggesting with Jean, Xiao and Heizou might be a good idea for some kind of endgame content other than the abyss. But probably there should be an option to get free trial characters for it, because it would be kind of a waste of resources to build someone like Jean in a very specific way, just for a single scenario.