Genshin Impact is a free-to-play action role-playing game (RPG) developed by Hoyoverse (earlier known as Mihoyo), which is set in an open world.
In Genshin Impact, players are spawned in a fantastical world where they can choose different characters and weapons to fight enemies and complete quests which will earn them rewards, which can be used to buy more characters and weapons.
Many combinations are possible, and there are almost infinite options.
1. Gacha System in Genshin Impact
The characters can be bought from the character banner, while the weapon banner allows players to buy weapons. Genshin Impact uses a term called wish, based on the gacha system.
The Gacha or gambling system involves luck to unlock random in-game items by rolling for them.
Players can wish on the wish page using Primogems, the in-game currency for Genshin Impact, to unlock special and rare items (in Genshin Impact, they would be 5-star characters or weapons or similar 4-star options like 4-star weapons), which have a lesser chance of popping out than other lower rarity options.
Primogems can be earned by doing daily tasks and playing the game regularly or bought with real money.
2. The 3 Banners
Genshin Impact has three different banners, which are:
- Featured character banner (changes every few weeks)
- Weapons banner (changes simultaneously with the featured character banner)
- Standard banner (permanent banner)
- Other banners include a bonus ten wish banner featuring the 4-star character Noelle (you can only wish ten times, and then this banner disappears) and sometimes a second featured character banner
3. Pity System
Of course, earning Primogems by playing the game is very difficult. Hence most players opt for the easy route by spending real money to wish on the Gacha.
However, if purely luck and rarity were involved, it would become frustrating for people as they would hardly get any good items.
This is where Genshin Impact’s pity system comes into play. The pity system in Genshin Impact provides a guaranteed high-rarity item like a guaranteed 5-star character or 5-star weapons after a certain number of wishes.
This gives people hope that they are not making a wish deadbeat and makes a profit for the company as people keep wishing to claim their guaranteed 5-star or 4-star item from the banners.
Pity resets after you pull the high rarity 5-star or 4-star items, but the cycle of wishing continues.
4. How does the Pity System Work?
There is a full-fledged pity system in Genshin Impact, which calculates when you will get your guaranteed higher chance item for a different banner.
I will try to explain it below.
4.1Â For both the featured little character banner and the standard banners, the pity system works in the same way:
- Guaranteed 4-star pity at 10 pulls, meaning that if you wish ten times, you will get a 4-star character or weapon.
- Guaranteed 5-star character pity at 90 pulls, which means if you wish 90 times, you will get a 5-star character.
- Pity will carry over when the limited-character banner resets. Example: If you had 89 wishes in the Hu Tao banner, your next wish in the Venti banner is a guaranteed 5-star (Hu Tao and Venti are character names).
4.2Â For the weapon banner, pity works in the following way:
- Guaranteed 4-star weapon pity at ten wishes.
- Guaranteed 5-star weapon pity at 80 wishes.
- 75% rate up for a featured weapon
- 50-50 chance for a featured weapon
5. Soft Pity and Hard Pity
The 90th wish is called the hard pity, the worst luck of getting a 5-star rarity item on a limited character banner.
After the 75th wish mark, the chances to get a 5-star character increase drastically, and getting it in this range is called soft pity. So soft pity goes from 75-89 wishes.
Getting 5-star characters before the 75th wish means you got it early. Players use different strategies to utilize soft pity, like wishing for single pulls to save Primogems for the upcoming character event banners or doing a 10-pull to get multiple 5-star characters.
6. 50-50 System
There is always a featured character on the limited-time character banner in Genshin Impact. Genshin impact guarantees you this featured character once every two 5-star character pulls.
This effect also carries over. Let us assume you pull a Jean (another character) on the Hu Tao banner the next time you roll for a 5-star character; you will be guaranteed the character featured on the next banner, for example, Venti.
If you pull the featured character, your next pull is a 50-50 chance of getting the featured character or any other 5-star character.
50-50 system also works the weapon banner, which I will explain later.
7. The Problem with Featured Weapons
Genshin Impact’s weapon event banner always has two featured weapons in the same banner. Though this might seem good on the surface, in reality, it is a trick played by Hoyoverse to make players spend more money.
The problem is that players usually want only one of the two promotional weapons in the weapon banners, but since the 50-50 guarantees a featured weapon, which can be any of the two, there is no way of knowing which weapon you will get.
Players repeatedly keep getting the wrong weapon, costing them a lot of money.
7.1Â Epitomized Path
Thankfully, Genshin Impact added epitomized path, which allows you to chart a course to a particular promotional weapon.
Players can accumulate fate points for every wrong 5-star weapon pull, and after accumulating two fate points, the players are guaranteed the weapon they set the epitomized path for. Fate points do not carry on to the next weapon banner.
8. Tips and Tricks
8.1Â History button
Obviously, with all the banners rolling out, it’s hard to keep the pity count, but luckily, you don’t have to.
A history tab shows all your wishes for that particular banner, including how many wishes you had before you reset your pity by having a 5-star pull. After a pull, it takes about 30 minutes for that pull to be registered on the history tab.
8.2Â Building pity
Sometimes, players build pity by making a wish on a limited banner whose character they don’t want.
Since pity carries over, when the new banner pops up, they now have to make fewer wishes to get the 5-star weapons or character, and this reduces the burden, and players can save enough wishes for their next banner.
9. Scam or Not?
Well, though, I feel that the way the Gacha and Pity system works is a scam; at the same time, Genshin Impact is a wonderful game that is free to play. Also, Hoyoverse takes care of its F2P community, as F2P players can still survive well in the game and have to make money somehow.
Did you like our thoughts and opinions? Comment below to let us know if we missed anything crucial on Genshin Impact’s pity system. Click here to learn how to connect a PS4 controller to an Android device.
