How The "Power Five" Ruined Four Star Characters | Genshin Impact

kin impact may very well have the most intriguing and confounding initial roster out of any gacha game I've ever seen generally the power progression of a gacha's characters has all of its first wave becoming obsolete eventually replaced by updated or more powerful versions of units as the game's content and mechanics advanced in complexity with balance adjustments being extremely rare in this category of gaming there comes a time where such units are no longer valuable or even viable even if they used to be in the past in some ways that law remains in effect I doubt many would consider the majority of the first 21 characters to have aged all that well as we enter year four of genin's timeline despite the game's less Cavalier approach to power creep in contrast to other gcha titles units released today are definitely of a comparable if no higher caliber where at the very least have a more sophisticated design to account for the more modern game thus making it increasingly more likely for new units to overpower existing ones or so we think I'm pretty sure most of us can agree that version 2 3 and soon to be Four's five-star characters vastly outperform most of the ones from version 2 with obvious exceptions of course but surprisingly the inverse is more so the case for fourstar units and it all goes back to what I will unofficially be dubbing the power five benett Shang Ling fishal shingo and sucros made up five of the first 14 fourstar characters engage an impact and all five of them have managed to not only be viable throughout the evolution of the game's meta but even get stronger to the point where they Eclipse even five stars and performance and usage while that may appear a good thing as four stars are more accessible characters the existence of these five units have led to problematic consequences for all four stars and that's what we're going to talk about for this video exceptions apply of course but in every gacha game standard for the power budget of a character to be associated with their Rarity that is to say one star units are expected to be significantly weaker or less versatile than a fivar one genin follows this code to a degree but the difference in performance between a five and fourstar is a lot less measurable than in other games some of the best characters happen to be four stars and on the flip side some of the worst units are five stars that being said there's still a visible difference in capability between the two Rarities more stats higher damage ceiling or more influential constellations with the idea that the average five star is stronger than the average fourar star I mean I would hope so given that it cost you upwards of $200 to get one when a lower star character is highly sought after or is considered stronger than some other units it's often due to their propensity to enable other characters using external elements to their advantage or occupying a niche that few if any others do that's usually how they make four stars viable by making them good but only if certain conditions are met or for a certain party five stars are intended to be more versatile and more practical in most situations though even so the vast majority of four-star units in any gacha game are over shadowed by five stars for obvious reasons leaving many to write them off as junk units that you get because the game needs to have them for the sake of accessibility although this is mostly endemic to old gacha games whereas new ones are more generous with giving very powerful characters of a lower rating geni ones like this at first of the power five these characters were intended to be viable if not excellent options for players who lack the wherewithal to acquire the powerful yet prohibitively expensive five stars making it so non whales could still competitively keep up with the game's content I'm sure by now everyone knows what all the rages with them but to briefly paraphrase phrase what each unit can do Bennett can increase the attack set of the active party member by staggering amount effectively multiplying their DPS in addition he provides consistent AP regeneration up to a percentage cap and applies pyro to them cleansing them of all other element statuses like cryo hydro and Electro to name a few he's the poster child of a one button character Shino provides a myriad of offensive and defensive Buffs to the active character offensively he can follow up on their normal attacks with the flurry of hydro sords which do very solid damage on their own but can allow for one person Hydro reactions and the implications that come with them defensively he offers damage reduction a token amount of healing and stagger resistance changling has some of the best do field damage output out of any four-star character known to man and even some five stars like Bennett she's sort of a one button character creating a spinning blade of fire that orbits the active user for a very long time damaging all nearby enemies what makes it so powerful is that all Buffs applied to her upon casting her ultimate remain in effect even after the duration elapses he turn the genin community has coined snapshotting suos is equipped with less straightforward yet equally powerful supportive tools in the form of crow control resistance sh provided you have a certain artifact set and Elemental reaction support she can increase the elemental Mastery and damage of her entire party while providing a steady stream of area control and swirling making her optimal for teams that rely heavily on coverage and reaction DPS FAL takes with suos thus and applies it to all your Electro related needs she has by leaps and bounce the highest electro application in the game by virtue of Elemental skill which can be extended via her burst outside of her seamless driving she also has very respectable damage due to her constant uptime all while being off field while each me of the power five excels in their own criteria there are two shared characteristics that lend Credence to their effectiveness the first is that none of them have to be the active character to use their skills conservation of field time is a huge Factor when determining the strength of a character despite being able to rapidly swap between party members since only one unit can be present at a time occupying less Field Time reflects better on a unit's performance as it lowers a chance of them depriving it from others thus making them more versatile in team cups secondly all of them have fairly Universal niches as mentioned earlier fourstar characters are generally generally only good in specific scenarios while five stars tend to be more vers stop however if that scenario just so happens to frequently occur then that ironically makes them very Universal for instance benett provides a staggering attack boost to the active character because of the one person at a time system genin's combat has most of not all teams are built around three supports and the main damage dealer making Bennett an ideal choice for many teams since all of them will have a carry unit who very much would like to have more attack another one would be shinel widely considered the best four star in the game the way he deals damage and applies Hydro a couple with the small bits of utility he brings makes him your best choice for all teams that even remotely make use of reactions associated with hydro and with every character using normal attacks to some degree it's a very easy activation condition to exploit his burst these two factors have not only allowed them to find a lot of use cases but also enabled them to be some of genin's best characters despite only being four stars without fail theyve penally been some of the game's most popular even as more and more units came out attesting to their ease of use and versatility but this also has resulted in a situation that has been called into question by a lot of people maybe not in this specific way but four stars and genin have been a hot topic for debate across all discussion platforms there are a number of issues with the group but the biggest one in my opinion is that four stars have been trapped in a catch 2 2 situation from the very beginning of genin and it's all because of the power five genin's gameplay is very simple and enough to where most of the game's content can be completed with any assortment of characters or teams other games May impose restrictions or challenges that explicitly mandate you to use a certain type of character or strategy but genin isn't as uncompromising about so on one hand this affords the player with a ton of freedom in what parties they want to use but on the other it means that all characters are essentially competing with one another for usage seeing as you can only ever use four at a time or eight for spiral Abyss all that is to say gin's elements and especially weapon types are mostly nominal it's true that some enemies are better handled with pyro damage than cryo but there are no hard rules that set apart one element from another for example in honai starl you can only inflict weakness break on an enemy with elemental attacks corresponding to the ones displayed above their toughness meter as opposed to ginch and where barring immunities any elements can damage a shield is just as some do it better than others likewise there are no vulnerabilities or resistances to weapon types as of right now a claymore is no different from a pole arm which is no different from a sword four stars are made viable by the niche they fulfill and if that Niche coincidentally happens to be in high demand then the character becomes good or at least worth investing into but since genin's combat doesn't have the same level of complexity as other action RPGs even if those niches exist there's seldom a situation where there aren't other options available to the play in other words four stars have to directly compete with five stars more often than not S as it may sound fourstar main DPS units can't and will never be stronger than fir star there is no reality where F cave Yen ning bang and Racers damage ceilings can compete against Alam nalet gutal aaka and lines if they did it would go against the convention of five star being conceptually stronger than four stars since fouring dpsers have been screwed six ways to Sunday only supports and sub dpsers also known as off field units have been able to find widespread use once again five five star supports and off fielders possess an inherent Advantage due to their Rarity but fourstar off fielders can circumvent having to directly compete with them as a result of there being three party slots available instead of just one letting them coexist more easily than main dpsers can the problem is four star off fielders don't just have to deal with five star fielders they also have to deal with the power five let's use Candace as an example even though she has one of the most beautiful character designs and a pretty unique play style to go along with it prior to hydro traveler she was one of the worst Hydro units in the game if not the absolute worst not necessarily because she had no place in The Meta she was decently useable In Bloom teams but she struggles to gain attention as a result of there being so many better units who can do that job kokami and Yan stand as the five star Front Runners of hydro at the moment and even if you look past that she then has to compete with Shino who can achieve far more practical results than she ever could other supports who are directly in line with the elements covered by the power five also face this challenge animal units will not only have to compete with kasaha and venti's chold over the roster but sugus is extensive coverage as well if a pyro unit has any hope of shining as a support they need need to somehow get past the Great Wall of Bennett and shling the power five does such a good job at covering every aspect of their respective elements functions that it basically prevents any new fory units from ever finding comparable usage in that same field at this point some of you may be typing in the comments what about dendro giio or cryo those aren't covered by the power five others might call to attention that not everyone has all the five star characters so instead of kokomi and Yan they might do shincho and Candace or instead of Shogun and Miko they might do Fel and shinobu let's address one at a time starting with the fact that not everyone has every character that's a very valid point I'm not assuming all players are Giga whales to P for every five star however if you've been playing for a fair bit of time all members of the power five were made freely obtainable at one point or another actually just recently everyone had access to a free benit with a flagship event a 4.0 so I think I can at least act under the assumption that 95% of you guys have them and are not using Candice because you don't have S as to the non pyro hydro elal and animal elements let's all reestablish for the 100th time that Gio is trash Coto and yunin are good characters with the bad element naturally making them unpopular dendro is probably the only one exempt from this as yaoya kirada and dendro traveler are pretty good all things considered then again dendro wasn't even out in version one so that's a moon Point cryo is pretty much the only element that gets away with this diona Leila Rosaria and Kaa all hang around the same relative ballpark but it's not just the elemental aspect of the power five that led to catch 22 for four stars it's the Benchmark they put in place from the very start of the game Bennett shingo official sucros and shling may only cover four The Seven Elements on paper but in practice they cover everything there are no niches or edge cases where a dungeon or boss is resistant to every possible thing they can do essentially giving you little pragmatic reason to use any of the other fourstar characters outside of wanting to use them for your own personal enjoyment they are so powerful so efficient and so easy to use that it sets an almost impossible standard for everyone else to achieve if mihoyo makes fourstar units on the same strength as the power five it indirectly diminishes the value of five stars since the power five are among the best in the game game but if they don't make four stars as strong as them they're forever going to be inferior to them thus making them look bad because of the overinflated expectations the power five imposes a small number of units have managed to break past that catch 22 but only barely so shinobu bedo farasan and Goro again D exemp because dendro didn't exist back then I mean if we're being completely honest Goro is basically poweri material do you see the stuff on this guy the only reason he's not broken is because he's Gio shobo is only good thanks to the increased demand for multitasking on D teams she's basically carried by Dental farzon Dodges kasaha venti and sucros by going into animal hyper carry which in and of itself is very Niche and even then practically speaking sucros can go into so many other comps for so much less investment in a way the power five are basically five stars under the guise of four stars they have the same strength and versatility is top tier five stars while having the accessibility of four stars their coverage is so vast that they basically have a monopoly over the fourstar market especially in their respective elements and even for the elements or niches they don't cover those niches are not efficient enough to be be popular or are only there out of necessity that out of the however many dozens of fourstar units we had since version 1.0 only like six or seven are even useable not even good useable shows how influential ficial sukos shin shanling and Bennett were it would be one thing if Bennett or shanling came out in version 4 but the fact that they came out on day one made it so every new five star that isn't at minimum 80% as strong as them appears complete garbage even though so at a specific Niche can feel worse to play because they don't produce the same eye popping numbers and stuff that the power five has four stars are just in a really tough spot at the moment on top of being just as expensive to gear up as five stars in terms of materials and whatnot and on top of them implicitly requiring Max constellation just to be useable they also have to compete against a standard that can't even be met because if they did it would totally break the game's balance and our perceptions of four and five stars alt together see the thing is I can't even call it an exclusively bad thing it's awesome that we can have very powerful teams with units accessible to everyone the power five makes it so free to- playay players can still complete even the hardest content in the game it also makes it so you can for whoever you want even if they're not that good and those units can let you get away with it yet at the same time that comes with the sacrifice of making virtually every four sty unit looks so much worse in comparison I feel like the only way mi Hoya can fix this is by biting the bullet and making more characters like the power five units like Dory Mika shyan SAU Candace from they just feel so disappointing even though they have really colorful and interesting play Styles but anyways that's about all I have to say for today if you have any solutions on how to solve this dilemma feel free to share in the comments down below for now though if you enjoyed the video I'd appreciate if you like this video a like and subscribed don't forget to follow me on Twitter at fars join my Discord server and check out my other discussion videos if you haven't yet but till next time thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon take [Music] care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vars II

Views: 227,074

Keywords: genshin, genshin impact, vars genshin impact, genshin why no one plays, genshin impact gameplay, genshin discussion, genshin impact analysis, mihoyo, hoyoverse, genshin sucrose, genshin fischl, genshin xingqiu, genshin xiangling, genshin bennett, genshin impact four stars, genshin best four stars, genshin four star characters, genshin units, genshin impact graphics, genshin impact version 4, genshin impact fontaine, genshin furina, genshin neuvillette, genshin meta

Id: ZBX6pmcXgHw

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023