What Happened To Razor? | Why People Stopped Playing Him | Genshin Impact

hey guys welcome back to another episode of why no one plays okay so just a quick announcement i apologize for how i sound in this video it's just that allergy season is at its worst right now and i'm very congested so i apologize in advance but i hope you enjoyed the video nonetheless today's episode is a little different this time for the most part all the characters i talked about in this series have been unpopular from release at the time of making their respective installments this character in particular actually had a rather strong presence during the early days of genji at one point there was even discussion over whether or not he was the strongest damage dealer in the game at least relative to the investment required but as the game progressed and new units were added to the roster people gradually winged off of using him in favor of other more powerful dps characters and the public's declining opinion on him soon followed so today i wanted to discuss what happened to razer and why people have stopped playing him for those who joined the game later on in his lifespan razer may come off as your garden variety electro dps unit and well he is but his reputation was vastly different early on than it is now unless you were lucky enough to land either d-luke or coaching with your early pulse razer would more often than not be the first damage dealer you run into and he seems pretty cool story-wise you encounter him when you complete the questline to unlock andreas and he embodies the trope of a strong and capable fighter with very few words to say his rugged and disheveled appearance contrasted with monstat's prim and proper characters like the knights of evonius and when you got to experience this play style for yourself it also felt a lot different game designers frequently tend to replicate a character's personality into their play style as a means to establish a connection between the player and their character for example a gentle and good nature type like barbara will likely have a very fluttery soothing and supportive motif to her abilities and attacks someone with a strict and by-the-book attitude will likely have rigid but swift and decisive forms such as gene in the same way razer was fostered by a pack of wolves and has likely assimilated their instincts and behavior in other words his playstyle is very aggressive wild assaulting his target hard and fast further expressed by his where wolf spirit attacks in tandem with him he's very violent and feral in this regard of the three examples i just listed which one do you think speaks to the average gamer the most razer right especially with a ninji sounding name like that funnily enough as you get to know him you realize he's nothing more than an adorable a social dork and is rather timid when it comes to any matters involving people whether you're an anime fan or not gab moy is a term used in reference to characters to describe once that character behaves in a way completely contradictory to what their usual habits personality and appearance dictates one of the reasons why kuching is so popular is that despite her strong sense of independence from gods very much like a closet weeb she secretly collects memorabilia of zhong li subversion of expectations is what adds depth to characters whether in video games or stories and that contributed a lot to razer's initial appeal mod's dead characters were colorful and varied but they were all at the end of the day kind of linear this was a breath of fresh air the other part of its early popularity was directly correlated to the fact that there weren't many practical options for a main damage dealer at the time your choices were pretty much coaching d luke maybe ninguan and razer give or take because of the handling issues with catalysts along with jio being the worst element in the game prior to jungli and albedo ninguan gained little to no attention clutching and d-lube were superior to razer but their rarity and by extension launch paywall made acquiring either of them quite challenging especially for free to place through process of elimination that left us with just razor his early widespread usage wasn't solely a result of the lack of choice however considering the fact that both the luke and coaching's constellations were ostensibly unattainable and a viable 5 star weapon not having been released yet for the latter razer was far easier to gear up in terms of weaponry and constellations if we're splitting hairs kuching is better than razer but that's assuming you're crazy enough to pursue multiple copies of her on the standard banner where there's no guarantee of her no matter how many off banners you pull so in the end many players were using razer out of necessity damage dealers as you know are interchangeable since the existing content doesn't mandate specific characters or combinations of units to be deployed barring edge cases and when i say mandate i mean like you explicitly need say animal units for this dungeon any other element does 90 less damage type thing we do have things like the electors and whatnot but virtually everything we have at the moment is brute forceable to an extent alongside that for the first two months or so there was a lot of propaganda circulating the web regarding the scarcity of resources in the game chess don't respond resonates how much you can do per day you don't get a lot of experience or more of farming things normally and there are few if any reputable quests that aren't commissions fast forward to a year and a half later i think many of us have gotten to a point where we're too lazy to use the resin we have already but at the time a lot of players bought into the sentiment that they should be as parsimonious as they can and acting on that players immediately saw racer as a low cost high return option for damage as far as overall numbers were concerned there was no one who came remotely close to his total damage output relative to the amount of investment required you could make do with prototype archaic a four-star weapon that was forgivable in-game and load upon percent attack artifacts before kristas became all the rage he was the most cost effective damage dealer until the advent of new five-star dps's like xiao and ganyu on that note within the purview of main damage dealers there are three factors that determine their efficiency burst consistency and synergy with how genqing's combat was designed burst damage takes precedence over consistent damage by way of elemental reactions unless future systems changes are implemented to where each elemental application lasts that number of time during which you can apply as many reactions pertaining to that element as much as humanly possible it's generally better if the character is able to dish out a single powerful blow as opposed to death by a dawson cuts putau is the best representative of this as she's all about nailing targets with one really heavy blast of flame of course you need to be able to easily access that burst damage there are a good number of characters with extremely high damage ceilings yet they struggle to consistently reach that high point due to either circumstance or insufficient wherewithal xiao is one such example at max constellation he's arguably the single most powerful damage dealer if we go by individuals but to achieve c6 you have to be prepared to spend upwards of a thousand dollars on average the other is eula whose glacial illumination outclasses any other 5 star in sheer power but that's only under the very difficult if not impossible condition of landing 30 separate attacks within 7 seconds not an easy feat by any means synergy is also of great import damage dealers work best when supported by a well-constructed team one that can ideally boost their damage enough time so as not to only augment their dps but to ensure they can use it in the most efficient way possible even though i said earlier that one strong hit is preferable to many small hits ayaka and ganyu are top tier dps users on account of freeze being the definitive best reaction in the game so while they technically follow quantity of attacks they can do so by virtue of their element anything that allows them to induce chain freeze makes them catastrophically more dangerous razer's performance in all three departments is middling at best his primary method of applying damage is through rapid attacks which means he effectively loses access to burst combos and quick swap as either option can only afford to have him fielded as the active member for no more than 5 seconds or so he doesn't have a very easy way to one-shot hordes of enemies because you can only do that with elemental bursts and his is a steroid type buff not a burst of damage this does come with a pleasant side effect of being very consistent thanks to his elemental skill and passive talents he has no trouble maintaining his provided he's always attacking stuff that's part of why he was the unit of choice in version 1.0 coaching d-look and razor were all consistent damage dealers in that they didn't put much focus on quick swap chaining that of course changed with the advent of child ganyu and hutao causing quickswap to become exponentially more effective than any alternative in addition to this physical damage is curtailed way more than elemental since enemies are more likely to have high physical resistance than elemental i made a video detailing the challenges behind physical damage a while back but one thing i forgot to mention is that physical damage falls off much faster since enemy durability scales more in that regard than the other that's also what contributed to race's early success enemies had little physical endurance to speak of compared to now where a lot of them do although that can be mitigated with superconduct on the subject of superconduct physical damage units are more restricted when it comes to team building as they're heavily dependent on a cryo and electro unit to perform at a reasonable level thankfully racer meets one part of the equation already he simply needs to cry unit to fill the rest and there are plenty to choose from however that just boils down to using either rosaria or diona because if they possess ganyu ayaka or yula they'll probably use them as their main damage dealer not racer furthermore lack of elemental burst story into damage and his physical damage nature causes many top level support characters to be inefficient if not potentially unusable on him the five best supports we have right now are bennett shinto kazuha shogun and zhong li bennet can only be used a razer if you don't unlock its final constellation and most people don't but losing out on the 15 pyro damage bonus matters a lot more than you think shinto is completely worthless on razer since his entire shtick is to catalyze a one-man hydro reactor and physical damage does not interface with hydro at all kazuha is also useless on him as his bonus elemental damage and elemental mastery is dead in the water in regards to enhancing physical damage shogun's introduction has orchestrated quick swap burst rotation compositions as the most effective approach to combat in this game by leaps and bounds raises elemental burst doesn't do much damage that and having her on his team would be redundant since razer is already electro what's ironic is that yula and shogun work marvelously together not only because the latter completes the necessary requirements for superconduct but shogun's burst amplification is better the higher your base damages and we just went over how euless has the highest in the game that leaves us with just zhong li his jade shield reduces nearby elemental and physical resistance so he's the only tier zero support who can help out razer but that's really it in this game synergy is the number one metric to determine a unit's longevity how future-proof they are as new units are released the reason bennett shangning and shinto have maintained their status as the trinity of four star supports is due to the fact that they work well with just about anyone and will continue to so long as they don't get replaced by someone who can do the same things they do but more efficiently or powerfully the inverse is also true a main dps unit's viability hinges on how receptive they are to new supports and combinations if they aren't compatible with this new top tier unit that means everyone receives an indirect buff except them which causes them to lie behind the rest of the cast it's not their individual strength not entirely anyway it's how well they mingle with everyone else that's the basis of how genji's character system functions razer is one of the few units in genji who doesn't synergize with any major support character not only is hoyle trying to emphasize elemental damage over physical but the way reis's kit was designed just so happens to be incredibly team unfriendly he's a very independent character that was part of his appeal early on he didn't really require supports or a tailored party to function properly and that worked back then it doesn't anymore there is almost never an instance where you want to stay on one party member for more than five to eight seconds at a time even a persistent attacker like danyu fires off only three or four charge level 2 arrows before switching around razer needs to be out for a very long time to really get going there is also one major problem that has nothing to do with him but affects him all the same lack of proper physical support is severely hindering his ability to stay relevant against the momentum of elemental burst damage counts since it's very clear he's not going to get much mileage from elemental supports he needs to draw from physical support except there isn't a whole lot of that this is mostly exclusive to razer as ula's case is a bit different in this regard her numbers are still ridiculously overinflated to compensate for having less options to boost her damage externally and glacial illumination happens to allow her to at least utilize shogun to the fullest that and she has a personal weapon a really dang good personal weapon at that razer on the other hand was balanced to have more or less the same numbers as regular elemental units which means he's slightly better than them up until those elemental units start scaling more speaking of scaling something completely absent in his kit is a physical damage booster lightning fangs doesn't boost his auto attack damage the way noel's big big-ass geosaur does it simply causes follow-up electro damage technically you could equate the attack speed bonus to increased auto attack damage but he's still much slower than a sword or spear user a quality of life change in this regard would be if the follow-up electro damage scaled off of his physical damage bonus that would give him the same kind of internal power as eula since he's not getting it anywhere else physical damage scales linearly while elemental damage scales multiplicatively because there's nothing that allows you to amplify physical damage beyond superconduct what this essentially means is that racer is by all accounts fantastic for beginner and mid-game players who don't have a lot of units weapons constellations and such that's partly the reason why the community didn't recognize shinto and bennett as the five stars without actually being five stars that they are until several months after genji's release they take a while to get going razer doesn't does this mean he can't be a worthwhile unit to mean long term no of course not you can still use them to complete all of the game's existing content and many people have as long as you're aware that by choosing razer as your main you don't have a lot of ways to upgrade him in terms of supports and stuff that and he has a very straightforward playstyle which can work for or against you depending on the situation he sort of reminds me of zordon online where everyone is a melee dps and there's no magic or ranged weaponry there's only so much you can do on razer a limitation you don't really encounter on any of the big name five stars though there is one thing that could potentially bring him back into the meta tier zero units share a fatal weakness in that they're almost relying on other units to access their full potential whereas razer does not quick swaps are also vulnerable to momentum disruption any opponent who can drain energy with their attacks such as the primordial viscaps can cancel out your combos forcing you to wait for your cooldowns to come off if this sort of mechanic were to grow in frequency it could serve as a counter to parties that rely on elemental bursts or the bulk of their damage much like how riptowns nerf shields by damaging you through them we don't have very many big consistent damage dealers in this game besides ganyu and ayaka so that's one thing going for him any instance where you need a singular unit out on the field for extended periods of time is where he thrives there's just not very many of those right now anyways what do you think about razer do you think he still has a lot of potential or is he just another victim to power creep and will never get that chance feel free to share your opinions in the comments for now if you enjoyed the video it would be awesome if you could leave a like and subscribe consider following me on twitter joining my discord server and checking out my other why no one plays episodes after this one until next time though thanks so much for watching apologies again if i sounded really bad in this video but i look forward to seeing you again soon take care [Music] you

Channel: Vars II

Views: 271,337

Keywords: genshin, genshin impact, vars genshin impact, genshin why no one plays, genshin impact gameplay, genshin discussion, genshin impact analysis, mihoyo, hoyoverse, genshin impact game, genshin impact graphics, genshin 2.7, genshin impact yelan, genshin impact razor, razor genshin, genshin impact razor build, razor dps, razor 2.7, why no one plays, why no one plays razor

Id: cV3YjDFFkH8

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2022