Genshin Impact developer Mihoyo recently admitted that there are several issues with Zhongli, the most recent character to be added to the critically-acclaimed RPG. However, this admission only partially acknowledged the larger issue at hand - while Zhongli’s abilities are slightly bugged, the main problems raised by the community over the last week have had to do with his Constellation levelling - something Mihoyo has refrained from commenting on.
Mihoyo recently posted a tweet on the official Genshin Impact Twitter page pertaining to the issue. At face value, it appears to be pretty sincere - you can check it out for yourself below.
I’d like to acknowledge that I wrote about how great Mihoyo is at incorporating community feedback less than a month ago when the studio decided to decrease the difficulty of the Childe boss fight. However, this recent fiasco has given me just cause to reconsider that claim.
The tweet embedded above links to the official Mihoyo blog post on the Zhongli situation. The blog post starts with the following paragraph:
“We have recently received a lot of feedback from Travelers regarding issues with the character Zhongli. The developers have placed great importance on Zhongli’s performance since offline testing began. We have been collating, reviewing, and analyzing everyone’s feedback and have had many discussions about it internally.”
The same sentiment is echoed throughout the entire post - “we know the community is upset, and we’ve listened to your feedback in order to rectify that.” It then goes on to clarify that Zhongli is supposed to be more of a support character than a DPS one, but that’s something most players will already know.
Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the issue at hand. Zhongli is a limited-time 5-star character, meaning that players are only able to obtain him via Wishes for three weeks. Now, let’s remember that you’re only guaranteed the poster character of a limited-time banner once every 180 Wishes, which is approximately $380. Zhongli isn’t actually good until Constellation 6, and the only way to obtain Constellation 6 is to get a duplicate Zhongli six times after you originally pull him - that means Zhongli Constellation 6 could cost up to $2,660. To reiterate, this character is only available for three weeks, meaning people who are $500 in the hole won’t even be able to upgrade him further after December 22.
Instead of balancing Zhongli’s earlier Constellations, Mihoyo has decided to patch a minor bug that occasionally affected some players. Here’s what the studio had to say:
“In addition, we have discovered from player feedback that there is indeed a bug affecting Zhongli at present: After Zhongli’s Lv. 2 Constellation “Stone, the Cradle of Jade” is activated, casting an Elemental Burst may not trigger the DMG boost of the Elemental Resonance effect “Enduring Rock.” The developers are currently working on a fix and we estimate that the issue will be fixed in an update on 12/10/2020. Travelers will also be compensated accordingly.”
To break down exactly what’s happening here, let’s refer to a recent Zhongli analysis posted on Reddit by u/DesireForHappiness. In this breakdown, the Redditor concludes that Zhongli’s utility was stripped from him at Constellation 0 - when you originally get him - and his full potential as a support was locked behind Constellation 6.
At Constellation 1, Zhongli gets two pillars as opposed to one. Constellation 2 unlocks an auto-shield, while Constellation 4 increaes Zhongli’s area of effect radius. A fully-buffed Zhongli at Constellation 5, however, can actually function in the healer slot of a party by cycling shield with his massive HP pool, which is the one thing Mihoyo notes in the blog post. This is how Zhongli is supposed to be played, and his entire viability relies on this exact style - except you can’t access it until you’ve pumped over two grand into an impenetrable paywall.
The Constellation system in Genshin Impact is something casual players won’t pay a whole lot of attention to, and even some more regular players reckon it’s not immensely important. That being said. Constellations are how you max out a character, and if a character is only available for three weeks and is completely useless until reaching his last Constellation… well, it doesn’t bode well for the future. Zhongli is an example of a character that people will pay big money to get, as is the case in the vast majority of new additions to gacha games. In this instance, though, you need to go through what could be anywhere up to 180 individual wishes seven times in order to play the Zhongli that Mihoyo describes in the blog post. The community never complained about a bug - they complained about a character who is pointless unless your pockets are deeper than the Mariana Trench. It’s ironic to see the studio say it has taken community feedback on board, when it has, in fact, done the exact opposite.
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