Artifact farming in Genshin Impact sucks. We all know it, this is nothing new. The system isn’t unfixable, but the suggestions
which you’ve probably heard up until now, won’t actually work. Or at least, not as well as you’d think. But let’s take a step back first. So obviously the decision to make artifact
farming so tedious and unending was intentional to get players to continue playing the game,
but the implementation is so terrible that it has the opposite effect on players like
me who are completely unmotivated to even try. Story time- In 1.2 when the Blizzard Strayer
set artifact dropped, I farmed every day that month to get a 5 star Cryo damage cup or crit
damage hat and never got either. That experience scarred me so much that now
I don't even bother farming artifacts for new characters, and when needed I just steal
them off of others. And I’m sure there are more out there who
feel the same way I do. So far the only direct adjustment we’ve
gotten to the artifact farming process is the introduction of 3-to-1 rerolls through
strong boxes, but even if they were to add them to the rest of the artifact sets, that
wouldn’t do anything about solving the root of the problem. (So it turns out that after I finished recording
this, they announced during the 3.0 reveal that they are adding artifact strongboxes
for the artifact sets that were released up to version 1.2, which is admittedly nice because
you can convert sets you don’t want into sets you do want, but still doesn't change
the rest of this video. So today we’re going to fully understand
what about artifact farming is the root of the problem, and then discuss the pros and
cons of some other ways in which it can be fixed to give the system a much healthier
gameplay loop. But before we get into it, this video is sponsored
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the channel. Upon completing a domain, there are so many
cascading levels of RNG that make it very unlikely to get what you want, and essentially
impossible to get exactly what you want. To give further context to what I’ll be
discussing, here’s a breakdown of the 7 ways RNG is a factor in artifact farming. I’m not confident enough to be able to calculate
the exact probabilities for every outcome, but this visualization should be enough for
you to grasp just how crazy stupid the system is. So for every 20 resin you spend you are guaranteed
at least one 5-star artifact if you are above adventure rank 45, and this’ll be the starting
point. From there, you can get a piece from either
of the two artifact sets available in each domain. After that there are 5 different artifact
pieces in each set. Flowers and feathers always have flat health
and attack as their main stats respectively, but sands, cups, and hats each have a multitude
of options, and those options are not evenly weighted. Besides the sands, which are pretty easy to
get attack on, specifically getting the generally most desirable main stats are rare. 5% for a specific elemental damage bonus,
and 10% for a specific crit stat. And for some reason elemental mastery is even
lower than those. So to get that Cryo piece I mentioned earlier,
assuming even distribution of sets and artifact types, that’s a 1 in 200 probability. In other words, it would take on average 100
domain runs to get just one of these, and we’re not even at substats yet. This is where it goes from a rough grind,
to utterly ridiculous. A 5 star artifact is generated with either
three or four substats on it, each coming from a list of 10 potential stats. A sub stat cannot be the same as the main
stat, so in most cases it's 9, but it’s not like it matters because again the distribution
is always weighted towards flat HP, attack, and defense, and against crit rate and crit
damage. Then, each substat has an internal tier value
from 1 to 4, which determines its base value and growth per level. And finally, which of the four existing substats
gets upgraded every four levels on your artifact, comes down to luck. Even though I’m a huge proponent of the
idea that your artifacts aren’t automatically trash just because they have a few undesirable
substats, the whole system is clearly way too harsh. Now obviously the most straightforward solution
would be to remove layers of RNG, by letting players have some form of choice in the outcome
before the RNG roll begins. In a very ideal world most of them would be
removed, but we need to stay realistic. So which would be the best to remove if I
had to choose one? Choosing the artifact set would seem good
from a logistical standpoint, but that only eliminates the first 50/50 and wouldn’t
change your odds much. Picking the type of piece would be much better,
and is actually what’s going to be implemented in HoYoverse’s next game, Zenless Zone Zero. Any level deeper than this wouldn’t really
work since the possible outcomes are then dependent on whatever kind of piece you receive. But even if Genshin did decide to implement
choosing the type, I still think it would only be a surface level solution, and not
fix the core of the issue. At the end of the day, what I find to be the
biggest problem about artifact farming isn’t just the insanely rare chance of getting a
perfect artifact, but rather the fact that I can spend an infinite amount of time farming
just to end up not getting anything close to what I want. I strongly believe that players would be much
more willing to go through the incredibly repetitive process of farming, if it was guaranteed
that they’d eventually get the artifacts they desire. This concept is absolutely nothing new, in
fact it’s already implemented in Genshin in other areas. For example, the pity system on wishing. We kind of take it for granted nowadays, but
not all gacha games even have it, making it possible to spend thousands of dollars without
ever receiving the featured character, and others make it less accommodating by having
it not carry over from banner to banner. Having a generous pity system not only makes
the user experience much better across the board, but it can push players that wouldn’t
normally spend money to buy primogems if they know they are guaranteed to get that character
they really want, justifying the system’s existence even from a business perspective. With weekly bosses you might get unlucky and
not receive the one talent upgrade material you need out of the three, but you know that
as long as you keep farming weekly bosses, before long you will have enough dream solvent
to make it happen yourself. Unlike with artifact farming, these systems
give you a clear end goal to work towards. You won’t have to even use them if you just
happen to get lucky, but if you aren’t lucky it doesn’t completely invalidate the time
and resources you had just put in. If a system like the ones I’m about to describe
is added to Genshin Impact, I genuinely believe that it would greatly improve the player experience,
while also better accomplishing the original goal of getting players to continuously sink
time into the game by simply being more intuitive. I have two separate concepts for implementations,
since there are many possibilities, each with some pros and cons. The first one focuses on artifact main stats. Let’s say that at some kind of station,
you can break down sands, goblets, or circlets into that artifact type’s essence, which
represents the broken artifact’s main stat. When you have enough of a single stat, you
can consume them to change any artifact’s main stat to that one. This works because as you farm you are going
to end up getting main stats that are good, but not the specific one you were looking
for. In this scenario and in ones where you have
a good main stat but absolutely terrible substats, that artifact won’t be completely useless
since it can contribute to a better artifact later down the line. (Yes, if the new main stat was one of the
substats it would have to be replaced, probably randomly.) Essence like this would also incentivize you
to upgrade artifacts you normally wouldn’t care about due to their main stat, since you
could just replace it. I feel like this system is a little bit less
useful now than it would have been previously due to the addition of more characters that
scale off of stats that used to be considered useless, but it would still make things much
easier in terms of being able to get solid 4-piece sets, and retains the initial design
of certain main stats being more rare without making them impossible to farm. Substats would still for the most part be
outside of player control, so this style would appeal more to players that lean on the casual
side, since it would greatly increase your chances of getting good artifacts, and only
slightly help your odds of getting a great artifact. My second implementation instead focuses on
substats. First off, make five star artifacts always
begin with 4 substats because there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. Alright now for the actual idea, let’s say
a new resource is added to domain drops. Using these would allow you to reroll any
particular aspect of an artifact's substats. You could reroll a substat’s tier, reroll
what substat is in that slot, and for fully upgraded artifacts, you can reroll the distribution
of upgrades. However, by spending either a higher rarity
version of this resource or just simply spending a greater amount at once, you can guarantee
the option you want instead of rerolling. No matter what you are still at the mercy
of RNG, but this at least gives you some form of concrete progress towards your goal on
every domain run. Being luckier and getting a good artifact
out the gate is still rewarded since you don’t have to invest as much, and you wouldn’t
be able to get your ideal artifact without spending a lot of time, but with this your
end goal would at least be feasible. This style obviously appeals much more to
hardcore players since you’d need way more investment to get any kind of payout, but
it would also make for much more rewarding final outcomes. So yeah, while of course HoYoverse giving
players some initial choice in farming artifacts wouldn’t hurt, I can’t really say that
it would be enough to motivate me to get back to hitting domains. I really do think artifact farming continues
to be the worst aspect of the entire game, and seeing that we’re almost two years in
it kind of hurts to see it’s gone essentially unchanged, but that doesn’t mean it can’t
be changed now. I’m gonna stay hopeful because HoYoverse
has made system adjustments in the past because of player feedback, and yeah I just really
don’t want to try my luck for a dendro damage cup when those are released… But yeah, anyways I hope you found this video
to be interesting or insightful, and as always, thank you for watching. Also thank you again to World of Warships
for the sponsor.
