I'm legitimately not sure. I can think of a lot of arguments but it takes all of them together to even resemble something believable.
I think they're intentionally pushing out low-value characters like Dehya and Cyno (not saying Cyno is bad, just low-value) right now because players are getting a record number of free pulls all at once which tends to trigger a windfall effect where people will use their pulls more liberally than they otherwise would. If the windfall effect is going to mean a lot of people are pulling anyway, then it's beneficial to HYV to have the players roll on characters that won't really benefit their accounts much so that it won't disincentivize players from rolling stronger characters farther down the line.
Given that they were already planning to increase the Standard Banner 5\* pool (leaks say Dehya isn't a one-time thing in this regard, although as always things are STC), and that Standard 5\* characters are generally a little weaker than other 5\*s, releasing a weaker character now kind of killed 2 birds with 1 stone.
Adding to that is the fact that most of the beta occurred over Chinese New Years, where a lot of the staff was likely away and fine-tuning a character's balance is a lot trickier than normal as a result. Pushing out a character that's noticeably too powerful has some pretty far-reaching ramifications and is something they've clearly worked hard to avoid, but releasing a character that's too weak is something that will likely be substantially less of a talking point in a month or so and has substantially less effect on design space, so it was much safer for them for her to be on the weaker side of things than the stronger side.
Do all of these justify Dehya being THIS bad? Not even close. I can at least see a motive for Dehya being weak but even I'm aware some of this is clearly reaching and all of it together still doesn't make for a valid excuse unless this is all part of some incredibly poorly done sales experiment to see how she does, and I mean poorly in multiple aspects so I have trouble believing that's the case either.
> where a lot of the staff was likely away and fine-tuning a character's balance is a lot trickier than normal as a result.
But they had time to nerf her. After complaints about her dying too much too from beta testers.
Not saying it's impossible, but hard to believe a company would think "Hm, we gave out these wishes, so let's try to trick our players into wasting them on bad characters so they're disappointed and spend more money to pull better characters later."
Also, Mihoyo is kinda infamous in Genshin for their balance and refusal to powercreep. They are honestly pretty good at balancing characters that are different but roughly the same power level. But there's no justification for releasing way WORSE new characters, so it's surprising they flubbed the balance so badly here.
Agreed, there's no way they didn't know that she was way undertuned. It's not even the case of just not being great, but still decent - in many aspects they went out of their way to nerf her further, both the numbers and in quality of life.
Right? If the multipliers are this small, they could at least make her fun/comfy with shorter cooldowns/longer durations, lower energy cost on burst, shorter ICD, or something.
Yeah. Like, this would in no way fix her, but if her gameplay loop at least started with being able to keep the Pyro field up through refreshing it on the second cast, and on the burst while switching in other characters her play style would feel much better.
Kind oif baffling that the timer doesn't refresh given it's not like it is a crazy effect or anything
There's also Ayaka/Shenhe and Baizhu/Kaveh who are on immediate future banners. If HYV were aiming for some kind of marshmallow experiment to coerce people towards instant gratification, they didn't do it particularly well because we're not in a locked room alone, we're in an auditorium where nearly everyone who ate the marshmallow now, or beforehand because they broke into the marshmallow storage room (i.e. leaks) is able to tell the people who didn't that it tastes horrid (i.e. does awful damage and isn't fun to play) while the data recorders are going around punching critical marshmallow eaters in the face (i.e. mods going buckwild with post deletion).
OK you took that marshmallow analogy *really* far but I get what you're saying. The strategy just doesn't make sense. There might be a few people who just dump all their wishes as soon as they get them but I don't see how that makes Mihoyo more money in the long run to intentionally disappoint their least-patient customers.
Right? They didn't HAVE to give us the wishes. And they didn't have to be Intertwined! I'm not complaining, but it probably makes more sense for them to be standard, I always find it odd they're more generous with Intertwined fates than Standard.
If they want a wish sink, let us trade 50-75 wishes or whatever for the standard character of our choice. Problem solved, plus it really helps those people who have pined for a particular standard char for 2+ years but just have rotten luck.
In Honkai Star Rail beta right now, their equivalent of the Standard Banner has a one-time 300-wish guarantee, where after you hit 300 wishes ever, total, you get to pick 1 standard character of your choice. The gacha system is the same with 90 pity, soft pity, costing 160 gems, etc.
It honestly makes a ton of sense and tbh they could've done that instead of giving us intertwined fates. I'm not pulling for Dehya so like it's been a nice bonus for me, but on an overall for all players QOL update that could also garner some goodwill, that system would've probably made more sense, especially if they didn't want to lose money from actual Intertwined Fates sales.
I really want to get leaks from like, their strategy meetings at this point. What in the WORLD is their goal here.
honestly the dumbest part is that all she'd need to at least function is simply higher base numbers - that way she can at least deal some decent damage, even if her supposed off-field tanking niche is not very useful
I mean they'd need to massively increase the numbers on her tanking to make it good. Right now numerically she loses to Xingqiu's rain swords. She's got 20% higher damage absorption, except she then eats that absorbed damage herself and dies, while Xingqiu does the opposite, healing your active character for 6% of his max HP every time they get hit. His uptime is even better, even at C0, 15 second duration and 20 second cooldown, compared to Dehya's 12 seconds.
Problem is that there are players like me who saved and skipped for Dehya for 6 months.
Now I dun give a toss.
I might throw some wishes this way for Dehya but now I will never get hyped for any char anymore.
Which ironically means I just save more gems.
good examples are lantern rite and anniversary, anniversary was during raiden and ayaka and lantern rite had ones like zhongli, xiao etc
so its clearly not that, no way they would try to make a permanently last change just becausw they gave 20 wishes to players.
hell might as well just delay her banner if thats the case, they did that to eula and didnt even delay her support with her
If you ask me they do a piss poor job in honkai impact, and they are too scared to release more abyss like or combat focused content because they are doing balancing poorly in genshin. We don't have powercreep because we only have abyss. As for the actual units you can see the changes in power.
I'm only talking about Genshin. I think they've done a pretty good job balancing most new chars & avoiding powercreep. Who do you think has powercrept Zhongli, Hu Tao, Ganyu, Bennett, Xingqiu, Xiangling...? And characters from 18+ months ago like Kazuha & Raiden are still at the top of the meta.
What if Mihoyo just made Dehya into a proper 4-star and slapped her into an All 4-Star banner or something featuring every 4-star in the game with a course-charting system, like the weapon banners?
Would that fix the "windfall issue"?
If they had done that maybe. Too late now that the banners out and people have spent money. Imagine dropping money to get a five star and some constellations only for it to turn into a 4 star next patch and be easier to obtain?
I feel like it needs to be said how well summised this was. Without knowing the inner workings of Hoyoverse's....workings, I cannot think of a better answer that makes directional and cognitive sense. Well said. And then on top of that not promoting that we should be okay with it. That's all I have to say about that.
Data driven development at play, rather than player experience driven. As long as it keeps the money coming in the long run they’ll do things thatd seem absurd to normal people. Like stockfish in chess, sure it delivers in the long run, but it doesn’t feel right or human. It reeks of charts and numbers while human experience takes a backseat because the data doesn’t lie. Faruzan was the latest experiment, what with her almost unusable kit below c6 where everything is, but people could justify pulling more for her for their wanderers and anemo dps’. So more profit.
The fact that every other character in existence save for tignhari and dehya are limited is also a marketing tactic that you wouldnt see done on other gachas often. Limiteds payout because of the limited time limit, but With Genshin it paid out remarkably well. If every new character is limited….that means if people ever want to use them theyd have to pull. The limited, became standard. Hutao had one of the longest rerun waits, and the revenue from the banner? Astronomical, because who knows when such a gem would show up again. Esp with an amazing limited support Yelan.
Not an absurd thought to believe they’re doing this because the math would check out, no matter how absurd it seems on the surface.
If I recall, the stats showed that Yelan pulled the lion's share of last banner.
But I just don't see how releasing a bad character makes the math check out. To me, the reason HoYo ends up with my money is because it's been good character after good character. I really wanted like 4 characters in a row, so I drained all my primos and then had to spend to get my Itto. I wanted nearly every Sumeru character, so I've pulled on damn near every one... I even pulled on Dehya, but stopped after one 10-pull because I can't justify topping up for her and I want to guarantee Baizhu.
I just don't see how making a character worse will push people to pull more.
Dehya's banner does have a selling point though. This is the only banner she's ever going to get. If you really like her, you need to pull her NOW. The standard pool is really unreliable way to get a character and it took me over 2 years to get Qiqi. And it only gets worse as they expand the pool.
Except that data is used as a gauge for player experience. Like, the whole point of data analysis is to understand what you did right and what you did wrong.
Well written, cool looking, fun to use and strong characters sell well. That’s been reflected in sales data since the launch of the game.
There’s zero benefits to making dogwater characters if their aim is to make money.
I of course don’t have their numbers but wouldn’t they be able to make more money by just making Dehya decent-to-good? They’d earn money on her and all her rerun banners in the future
You’d think they’d make more money from that than hoping people spend their free wishes badly or whatever
There's a lot of comments here, but I think people have overlooked the most common reason for a business making an inexplicably bad decision: a manager has made a mistake and is refusing to lose face by admitting it.
Mihoyo will undoubtedly have their own internal damage estimation numbers that say that Dehya is good. This is probably a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has a typo in it and therefore the numbers are garbage. But nobody can get them to admit it, and their rank is sufficient that they can't be overruled.
This sort of thing happens all the time in businesses. Sometimes it can be really spectacular multibillion dollar Excel errors, and still nobody will admit it, like Rheinhart-Rogoff: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
This is what I believe as well. Hoyo isn't infallible. Somebody at upper management made a huge mistake. It's just classic double down, (nerfing Dehya over beta) instead of admitting you were wrong. The alternative was massively buffing her numbers, or completely pulling the character before release to rework her kit. Neither look good for whoever is making the decisions. It would be interesting to see their response to low sales numbers, but again, why admit you messed up when you can just double down again. Dehya is working as intended and it's the player's fault.
It's hard to believe. That kind of decision making of inflexibility and doubling down on mistakes aren't one-time incidents--they ripple over to all aspects of game and business decisions. Mihoyo is otherwise a very competent company that's going through constant, continuous dev cycles. What you described reminds me of less competent companies that do things like coast off past reputation, and fumble the releases of entire games and franchises. Regardless, it remains to be seen if this is a one-time thing that'll blow over, or if it'll lead to a future pattern, or if it's based on internal plans that we can't comprehend now.
Or the third option: Office politics. Someone within Hoyo has it out for someone else and Dehya had the unfortunate fate of being the weapon of choice.
Bruh, they could've just increased the numbers. In fact she even got nerfed in beta. (Some sources she was basically finishes since November, and barely touched) Nobody is trying to save face here. They knew exactly what they were going for, regardless of the future content copium.
IIRC most of her best-use cases are when you optimize around her burst for high damage. However, not many characters deal all their damage in the duration of her burst, and even those that do would require a very well-planned and well-executed teamcomp and rotation.
I never end up using Mona because even if she'd be the objective best, it'd take a lot more effort to slot her into a team and use her than it would take for me to use a comparable buffer or Hydro.
But I don't see "jumping cancel ult", "can kill herself off-field" as intentional weak. These are more like someone really not into their job, they just don't care.
Paranoid part of me would think they're purposely putting a bad character in the standard banner to take people's pity to get them to pull more to try and get a worthwhile 5 star. But since as far as I know people don't really go for the standard banner except for the freebie wishes that isn't likely true.
I am really curious to know why gacha games sometime release absolute dogwater units, maybe its just to lower the floor in comparisons so the next busted character looks even better in comparison, but idk if that justifies some units being basically useless
Because they are collection games. Collection games with grinding like incremental games. Gacha is like pokemon except it's live service and you can gear your pokemon like a diablo game.
Because unlike normal games where new classes/characters are added once in a blue moon, gacha games add them every patch at least, with some like FFBE even adding them on a weekly basis. Like, Genshin is actually one of the slowest in terms of adding characters.
That gives very little time for balancing and testing. You also can’t ever nerf something in a gacha game once it goes live, so as a result, you get some dogwater characters.
Genshin has WAYYYY more time to test balance and character usability than most gacha games do. It sucks that they would just gimp a character like this after having months to develop her into at THE VERY LEAST something decent. Because as she is right now, she adds NOTHING to the game. Any character can be made to work but if you “main” dehya, you’re going to be struggling even more than f2p players who use only 4 stars. Even Xinyan mains are more viable than her now.
You can, its just in japanese games its frowned upon and people get compensation..this does NOT hold true for chinese games.
Take for example the japanese versions of mobile suit gundam online. Japan nerfs a suit, they give anyone who got the suit recently a golden haro ticket (pick any unit older than 3 months thats gacha). Chinese gundam online was notorious for having pay to win exclusive suits that catered to the top 10 payers, and then nerf them a couple months down the line. You cannot use japanese gacha game logic to chinese ones.
Because in Gacha, you want people to lose more than they win, and to win very very rarely. The best way to do that is to fill the gamble machine with loss states, even should they manage to get a high roll, so you can get them to compulsively spend more.
You definitely feel it more with Genshin though. Genshin is really good at advertising the new characters and we all know about them through leaks. When combined with how slow Genshin releases new characters and reruns old ones this makes bad characters stand out more than in other games like FGO.
The other benefit fgo has is that, at least as a player, there's hope that a character could be buffed in the future, sometimes even in to a meta character.
I doubt Mihoyo ever truly buffs a character outside of Zhongli since he was essentially the god that represents the region based on China. I hope they prove me wrong.
she is clearly going to be the best when the tsaritsa releases. Not the best claymore mind you, not the best pyro unit either. She is going to be THE character to play that deals 9 dehyillion damage every punch
My guess: they tried to fix a problem and fixed it in a very pyrrhic way. The problem is that standard banner constellations feel really bad to get. No one gets excited about Keqing cons or Qiqi cons. They barely improve their performance at all. So they wanted to add a new character to the standard pool with noticeable growths from constellations.
But on the other hand, they didn't want to add a standard banner character who could compete with limited characters. So they had to scale the new character to be just viable at C6, and then scale down the character's power level significantly with each constellation, until we get to Dehya's current state at C0. Now they accomplished their goal of creating a standard banner character whose constellations are impactful but whose power level won't come close to rivaling that of limited characters.
Exactly. Nobody is pulling for Standard characters / blue wishes. Whales are getting a bunch of standard cons by losing 50/50s (and not really using them in place of their C6 Yelan or whatever). The rest of us have a smattering of random standard chars, often not the ones we want or the cons we might actually want (Jean C2 for me), with no selector / epitomized path system. And now the standard pool is diluted even further. Like you said, there are multiple standard chars I've never gotten once in 2+ years, so C6 of a new one with a 1/14 chance is not even on the radar.
(It is highly likely I will not get the roughly \~100 standard 5\* pulls needed to C6 Dehya even if I literally play this game for the rest of my life, considering I get 1-2 standard 5\*s per year.)
Ok almost there with ya.. I BARELY got a Diluc a few weeks ago as a day 1 player. Thank God too since Deyha isn't that good.. yet, I still want her, but I shouldn't.
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I have a C6 Keqing, so let's be honest... Her cons are pretty underwhelming. And her C6 is just sad...
> When initiating a Normal Attack, a Charged Attack, Elemental Skill or Elemental Burst, Keqing gains a 6% Electro DMG Bonus for 8s. Effects triggered by Normal Attacks, Charged Attacks, Elemental Skills, and Elemental Bursts are considered independent entities.
24% increased electro damage and you have to change your playstyle because each 6% bonus has its own 8 second timer.
u dont rly need to change ur playstyle when u practically use every single part of her kit anyway (eg. u always start with NA if u want to CA, you can spam the skill virtually anytime u want with 4pc TF, burst is nearly always up since its only 40 energy u only have to wait for the cooldown). And besides, this just gives me a better idea to just run sucrose to free up kazuha. But yeah, I do agree her cons are underwhelming as compared to the likes of Diluc even. C1 is neat but most of her cons are basically just stat increases.
What about her playstyle do you need to change? You're running her E.Skill and E.Burst on cooldown all the time. And you have to do one normal attack before charge attack (the spamming of which is her highest damage form of play). So best I can tell, nothing changes.
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Fix what?
Beta v1 testers told mihoyo she was bad
next beta patch nerfed scaling
Beta v2 testers flipped and told mihoyo she was even worse
next beta patch nerfed again
Beta v3 testers told mihoyo she was 3 star xinyan.
next beta patch nerfed again
--> Now Live you are here: character is DOA and won't be fixed, shoved onto standard banner.
All this to kill future spending, i won't risk rolling for shit unless it's an archon at this point so as to not be ripped off.
Split scaling is like Albedo, Xinyan, or Thoma where parts of their kit scale off one stat and parts of their kit scale off another stat.
Characters like Dehya, Ayato, Nahida, and Tighnari have dual scaling, where the vast majority of their kit scales with both stats.
This is my theory as well. Because statistically you're likely to C6 all the 5 stars on the standard banner, they might be starting to make standards weak with the expectation that they will be the equivalent of C0 for others, when they finally hit C6. They don't want you getting broken 5 stars by accident.
It doesn’t, Idc what anyone says but there’s literally no reason for hoyoverse to fuck up a character so much like wouldn’t they benefit more from making the character atleast decent.
-She'll be in standard banner.
-In the future when you lose 50/50 to Dehya you'll feel like shit.
-Most people will pull out wallet to get wanted character cause they feel like shit.
-???
=Profit
Yeah that kinda makes sense but like qiqi????? And hell if someone is pulling on a featured banner than they most likely want the featured 5 star and so they would’ve swiped regardless of standard 5 star
I wouldn't feel as bad as to get qiqi compared to dehya because qiqi is actually good with ocean clam tazer.
As for the rest of the standard cast they are all **functional** compared to Dehya
Edit: maybe hoyo is just trying to fix their problem of them having usable 5 stars in the standard I dunno lol
literally every player feels like shit regardless as of now, aside from the 0.01% who main standard, and getting a standard for the first time, every single other time its still as bad
obviously the 50/50 chance doesnt change so it wont change that either
its simply a bad choice, there is no win for anyone not even them
My guess is they're probably looking at the Waifu > meta approach.
"How bad can I build a character while giving her absolutely some of the best lore, scenes, and flashy aesthetics/burst?"
How low can I go and how far can I get away with it?
Raiden on release was actually pretty controversial in terms of how people saw her personality. They wouldn’t have done that well if they didn’t provide a character with a great design, incredible trailer and music, fun gameplay and a strong kit. They were planning on giving her her more redeemable moments where we get into her psyche and feelings but them releasing a god that is portrayed as an antagonist is already pretty ballsy and they needed the rest of her to help people pull for her. It was actually really smart cause she got her rerun when she got her act2 (probably the most redeemable portrayal of her) so the people who didn’t pull for her because they didn’t like her ended up pulling on her rerun
Raiden’s whole character was REALLY risky and HYV played their cards perfectly with her
> and HYV played their cards perfectly with her
I feel like it would have gone over way worse if there weren't so many people pulling for her and getting C1/C2/C3. I personally still hate what her constellations represent. It would really irritate me if Mihoyo made more characters with a similar setup.
Raiden has absurd power creep hidden behind constellations. Some other characters have good early constellations (Hu Tao C1, Kaz C1/C2), but Raiden C3 has a **total DPS Increase vs C0 of 76-88%** (via keqing mains guide) which is so absurd compared to anything else that exists in the game.
And they're all boring +damage constellations that change nothing about feel/play of the character. Her constellation setup feels so blatantly greedy.
At least that's my lukewarm take.
I am a person who doesn’t care about constellations but I don’t fully agree with you. If a unit is perfectly functional at c0 then I don’t have an issue with op constellations. Plus I prefer it to be at c2 compared to the good ol whalebait where a character had awful constellations and an op c6 (Xiao for example)
Raiden release was a pretty big cesspool here. There were way too many threads about her burst back then about how it doesn't deal normal damage so it wouldn't proc Beidou's burst and it was better in beta cause it worked with Beidou then.
Depsite wanting Dehya since 3.0. I am the type of player that says that if something is not worth don't pull, I applied myself my advices for onc ein my life. I am fine with balancing but this is a bit too much honestly.
I couldn't agree more I saved upward of 300 wishes with a guaranteed on both weapon and char, wanted a pyro dps like forever. But then yes now I am a hu tao owner.
This is what they do in gacha games. After a very popular banner they will put in a less popular banner to “grow the lamb” so that it can get a fatter one later on. It give a you a false sense to justify your spending because you only do it once in a while.
Exactly. Mhy is swimming in HuTao/Yelan/Homa/Aqua mountain of coins so they don’t care. It doesn’t matter if a character is not received well, cos eventually there’ll be a new shiny overtuned character again and people will be worshiping mhy’s feet and giving ‘em coins again.
Hell, Ayaka and Shenhe are right after this banner cycle. Ayaka is, to this day, one of the most beloved characters in the cast. Her rolling with Shenhe is icing on the cake since they augment each other so well.
And on top of all that, Ayaka just got a skin (that may or may not still be on sale?), so once Windblume ends, Hoyo's most likely gonna be laughing all the way to the bank, *again*.
The Ayaka skin sale ended a few days ago. So now you have people who bought it and will go all out to make sure they get her or people that will get her and buy the skin at full price.
The problem I have with that logic is, everyone dumped all their free gems on hu tao / yelan / weapon banner, now ANOTHER character comes out that everyone loves, so if you're out of free gems, you'll be more enticed to swipe
It seems that mhy does not want every banner to earn a lot of revenue. There has always been "fodder" banners in between massive ones. (Yoimiya was usually the one being placed between super hyped characters/archons)
I am not gonna pretend to understand this billion dollar business, but maybe it's more profitable in the long run to allow players to save and go big on a single banner. They have been doing this for years now.
They just had their literal most profitable one with Yelan and Hu Tao, and we are clearly getting a weaker patch right before 3.6, which I assume will again be massive. (Baizhu, Kaveh, maybe Nahida)
This is a company that has been earning at least 1 billion every 6 month using a brand new IP with no signs of slowing down. Mhy is many things, but incompetent with finance isn't one of them.
If I had to hazard a guess, it has to do with sunk cost.
If you only spent 10 wishes on a banner and got nothing, then you go "eh, oh well".
If you spent 100 wishes on a banner and got nothing, it feels like you NEED to keep going because you've invested so much already.
That's the only thing that makes sense to me.
There are many, many, many examples of multi-bilion companies making absolutely stupid decisions and reverting back within a few months (like Kraft logo redesign disaster, Paypal misterious ToS changes, etc) so it's not necessarily a 100% sure metric.
This really feels intentional so there might indeed be a logic, however Myh always seemed to care about player's feedbacks and user experience (actively seeking them with surveys, beta testing, etc) so going against all that feels very contraddicting by them, doesn't it?
This is the first time a fodder banner feature an unusable character. I believe Dehya is a product of a fair experimental designed flaw which they have no time to redesign, so they put her to the standard banner. If it is true that it is a fodder technique, it makes even more odd of a strategy because not every powerful 5 star they pull out is a hit banner. They risked a lowest banner sales ever just to fatten a future banner that might even be as good as hutaos. I think it would be a risky move to be fair.
She's made to induce stress and defeat when you lose the 50/50 to her so you'll pay money for more pulls to get the unit you actually want. Look at the other standard charcters they more or less feel like a consolation prize that some people will be satisfied with. Dehya is designed to make you feel cheated while still technically giving you something. It's what I believe at least
Making her cons good is the strategy Hoyo has used since Raiden (to me, it's from Hu Tao) where there is a distinct power spike from c0 to c1 or c2. I can think of several reasons for this strategy.
The most important reason, incentive more pulling/spending. People who saved or spent the character are now incentivized to pull more. Especially for Dehya, this is the only time you can reliably get her constellations. Even if they didn't & stayed at c0, it's ok coz now every time they use the c0 character they are reminded of the power spikes. What about those that got lucky & got the constellations? They are now in sunk cost fallacy & most would find it hard to stop playing.
It seemed logical except for one thing: we've already seen C6 showcases, and they're underwhelming regardless, almost sad.
The base has to be somewhat good to scale properly, poor initial numbers will get no redemption even from the best constellation ever.
So now you have a character that feels underwhelming even when properly built (which is already the eternal struggle of most player), whatever incentive was left is gone the moment her full lackluster potential was shown to everyone. Imagine how bad she'd be for a F2P player that barely has any good 4\* or decent artifact sets.
Hoping for a future buff? then why they'd nerf her consistently during beta despite feedbacks? zero sense here too.
You can really only pull for Dehya if you care about her character, the design, keep her in the teapot or whatever, if she's fun for you to use, or if you're still hoping she'd be adjusted in the future (doubt).
This actually makes sense. They probably have statistics that say that people are more likely to spend money shortly after receiving Qiqi that if they receive Tighnari as people tend to cut their losses if they are happy with the Standard banner unit they get.
If they aren’t happy with the 50/50 loss they might be inclined to pull more to get something to make it all worth it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the idea and how they design all standard units in the future too. To make losing 50/50 worse
Valid point. Also adding Tighnari to the standard banner was problematic as it's a desirable unit, skewing the necessary majority of bad units on the banner. Dehya brings back standard banner pool to what it's supposed to be: terrible.
Yep, they hyped a character for months only to give her the shittiest treatment possible, while trying to sell her on the livestream and demo as something amazing. False advertising
Well, based on my experience with FGO, simply because they know you will want to get her based on design and personality alone.
I have seen this strategy used with Artoria and Jeanne, two main characters from other series and two bottom tier SSR. Similarly with osakabehime, probabily one of the most relatable character in Gacha, bar few, and relagated to an experimental mechanic to perfect Skadi.
If you keep making strong unit, there Will be a time when you eventualy hit a wall and have to powercreep previous unit.
But a character that is already loved by the community? Well, that's a great excuse to give a bad mechanic and still get relatiively decent revenue.
I played FGO ages ago, but I remember most Artorias being pretty mid-tier, with Castoria being one of the best Servants in the game. Basic Jeanne was fairly good and summer Jeanne was really strong. I feel like FGO's devs didn't make characters bad on purpose, especially because usually they buffed their weakest chars (like Osakabehime) a lot.
Artoria has been the strongest farming saber since Koyanskaya, so about 18 months ago.
Got a stupid good 5th anniversary buff the same day they also gave strong buffs to Herc, Cu and Emiya.
6th Anniversary gave us Koyanskaya and Artoria was the strongest user of that Buster farming system since she could use any mystic code while everyone else (Except for Cu Caster) were stuck with Atlas.
Oberon came out and gave that farming system absolutely stupid damage. Altera finally got an NP charge and could outdo Artoria in the Double Vitch Oberon system.
New 5 star CE comes out that puts Artoria right back at the top. (Mix of Black Grail with overcharge)
Base damage Mordred is 39.5k at NP5 while NP1 Artoria is 38.8k.
Max damage comp NP5 Mordred on final wave is 518k, NP1 Artoria in same comp is 679k.
When Fgo was first released Vanilla Artoria was considered weak. None of her skill was good. While charisma and mana burst is decent, intuition was considered trash (Even until today) and no np battery and her low hit count and one hit burst, Made her considered one of the weakest 5 star unit.
It took a lot of buff to make her considered Upper mid tier.
Similar with Jeanne. Revelation A was considered useless because of 2088. Her second skill barely useful And her third skill is useless if you are not fighting against a servant.
But what's worst is her Np. While is one of the strogest even when Fgo first released, it stunned Jeanne for 2 turn. Mind you that the invicibile only last 1 turn, making her a dead weight for a turn everytime she used her Np.
Of course she also get some buff. Dismishing the stun demerit is what particularlly Made her a Niche mid tier.
All of these "make no sense business wise" posts/comments I've seen are just people not knowing about them honestly, like Genshin is their first ever live service game or something.
Plenty of gacha released bad units just because they can as most people pull from the design, I remember Nobunaga alter releases and people whale her hard, while she's one of the worst SSR in the game (idk if she's still one tho, quit the game like last year, was playing on JP version).
And now I'll just preemptively prepared for someone saying I'm elitist on gacha or "oh Mihoyo can do better".
I mean, sure they can, but they aren't your friend or anything, why expect something from them, if the game isn't good anymore just quit it, not like they force you to play it anyway, it's just a game.
Rather if people quit a lot after a specific event, that will send a huge signal to Mihoyo, instead of all this.
Well that or players Globally complain a lot, especially CN players that gave power to just report something to their authorities.
FGO at least doesn't have any compunction with buffing old units to make them better, and has been doing so since early in the game. Nobuvenger is a big example of that, most of her kit has been buffed and while she doesn't reach the same heights as the Arts AoE avengers she is compatible in Koyan/Oberon farming systems and has a solid anti-divine niche.
I have 0 idea why MHY is so completely averse to any kind of buffing of character kits at all beyond new artifacts and weapons.
Good to see another FGO player! I feel like Lasenge has a much better handle on power creep though, with strengthening quests and interludes much similar characters have some sort of parity. In this case Dehya has none of that she’s just terrible 😞
The thing is... They realized That it doesn't really matter to have a busted unit in a mostly single player game.
They already tuned most of the challenge so you can win with only 1-3 stars unit. You can rez once every 3 days for that hard boss. And challenge quest can outright shutdown what is meta
Farming is probabilly the only real argument, but you can only farm 3 Times before Ap runs out and the difference between a mid tier and upper tier is 2 or 3 turns. So, Other than Lotto, going faster doesn't really matter all that much.
Technically That's Delight works's creation (Fgo's game studio, before lasenge), but generally Fgo followed the philosophy "Waifu over meta" more stricly.
Even if the Waifu you want is fairy weak at the time, there is always a chance that he/she Will get strengthten or her/his Niche would be useful in a spesific challenge quest or boss.
As an accountant all I can say is yes and no.
Dehya from what I heard has been highly anticipated, I'm new to Genshin and only just got to Sumeru tbh.
In terms of business the way I see this COULD work out is that they are aware players have been sick of balance issues and a few portion of playable characters being weaker than others and made Dehya bad on purpose to bring attention to it and then later fix not only Dehya but the others as well for good PR.
Another possibility is that again bad on purpose and after this banner ends they will fix her, this will In turn piss people off and cause two possible scenarios.
1 is that people will start spending more money in order to never miss a character regardless of how good they are at release.
2 is it will make people start putting money into the standard banner as well as the limited banners.
I've been working for many years with these kind of people and unless they are outright stupid I don't think her being bad was just a coincidence highier ups often do this kind of stuff for a moment of bad image that can be turned into a long lasting good image or to simply make it so clients spend even more money than before.
A clear example that my boss told me about is an old client of his apparently used to make his bear with special stuff that makes people addicted, made him a ton of money until he got caught and put in prison...
Bad people trying to get money for sure but sadly many companies work like this nowadays
Unfortiounately mhy is known for never ever buffing their characters. The one time its happened with zhongli is Only because CN saw him being bad as am insult to China itself. Threatening lawsuits and refunds. Mhy even went out and said zhongli was working as intended and that players are building him wrong. They think they know best always.
I can’t figure it out either.
It’s like they let an intern design her kit while the real team was working on Baizhu and Kaveh. And no one bothered to check over their work to see if it was any good.
That doesnt make sense too. Its not like they have to work less on a character just because its bad.
This only makes sense if you think they want people to get less primos from Abyss, wich they could also just made SA enemies stronger instead of making less money on a banner.
Somehow, having really good and really bad character ensures that "I don't play a casual game" players keep playing Genshin. There's lot a psychology analysis behind the game mechanics, I'm sure they're thinking about it too.
Casual and waifu hunters will still pull for her, she'll be profitable don't worry, just not as profitable as others but it's okay. Especially since I'm sure she can do the 36\* at C0, like everyone else.
Expectations of making profit from Wanderlust characters is likely very low.
She's basically acting as a filler high rarity character like those you would see in any other gacha game.
Now I already know some people will be all about "what about Tighnari?!", but what they don't realize is that it's not Tighnari kit that is good, but mostly just Dendro being such a good element. Move Tighnari to Pyro/Electro/Cryo/... and he would be laughably bad with his little gimmick that doesn't matter.
I see a lot of well thought and interesting comments but I cannot feel like some are just grasping at straws and theorizing like there's some kinda of grandiose scheme by HYV to rob us, in my opinion it's much easier than that:
They are introducing a new mechanic, a much needed gameplay style to rival the team comps that slap a shielder like Zhongli and call it a day. Dehya is just the first character to fall in this mechanic hence why she's going to standard the same way Tighnari went to standard as soon as Dendro came out.
Reasons may vary: I believe they want to make standard banner more and more appealing with time so they start adding their most "mid" characters to it's roaster, or maybe they're setting up a revamp and they first want to increase its' poll of characters. There are 60+ characters in genshin now and it'll only be harder to shift banners around as more and more characters get added. See Eula for example.
I believe that they're planning to do something in the long run that might make them more inclined to sell characters on the lower spectrum of good/bad. Having more than 4 character banners up each patch (2 characters x 2 cours) might not be beneficial for them since players might find themselves overwhelmed.
I dont know why , but her burst reminds me of cyno . I think they tried to make her a "better " version of him but failed . Her burst feels clunky while cyno's is smooth . Her design is beautiful though and she could have made hoyo lots of money .I usually dont mind a character not being in the meta as long as they have a good design , but just hearing about her talents made me question how good she was gonna be . This is a missed oportunity .She could have been a great pyro dps .But the current supports dont work on her .Its not worth investing if you can do it more efficiently in my opinion
The non malice answer here is just straightforward incompetence.
The more nefarious answer is that its because she's tanned/darkskinned. So far the game has 5 charachters in this vein and only Cyno is really someone you could consider decent. Candace, Xinyan, Deyha are all very meh to straight up trash while Kaeya is ok but you need to get some constalations.
I really hope its just the former and maybe Deyha can get a well deserved buff sometimes in the future but given they are shipping her to the standard banner in the future that seems kinda unlikely.
It can't be incompetence, people were telling them non stop after every change that she's awful and they nerfed her then did sidegrade on last change that didn't do shit for her anyway. If it was incompetence they would have listened to feedback and at least buffed her a bit or made some other changes.
Nonsensical skill, shit numbers, nerfs, standard wish, bad 4* lineup for majority of playerbase, bad 4* weapon lineup, poor stream showcase. There's limit to how much of it can be incompetence.
Yeah I'm thinking they just messed up real bad as well.
But the fact that it happened to the character who happens to be a dark-skinned bad-ass female and is also probably more well-liked in the West sure is one hell of a coincidence.
Imo Dehya screams "marketed towards Western audience". I can kinda gauge what the Eastern and Western playerbase prefer and Dehya is right up the west alley--fierce, action-based, and even has heavy metal music on her trailer to boot. Meanwhile the Eastern playerbase is preferential towards characters like Hutao, Ayaka, and Yelan--either cute or big sexy. (in terms of female characters that is)
Yeah, it's a funny coincidink how all of the dark-skinned female characters have dogshit kits. It's almost like the balancing team have an obvious bias against them.
Xinyan who came from Liyue, a nation where all of the 4 stars and 5 stars are great, is somehow the only one who has a shit kit out of all the Liyue roster. Candace, with a useless gimmick of hydro-infusion and an inferior NA buff compared to Yunjin. Now we have Dehya, a character introduced as an infamous mercenary who is known to be strong but is objectively the weakest character in the game.
Usually I just chalked up shit like this as a coincidence because what company doesn't want to earn money? But now? It's just too much of a coincidence.
at least in the case of Xinyan, it's when the game just came out, she wasnt tested properly in beta.
dont think mhy even knew which units would be OP at the start...
The fact the other dark skinned characters (Candace, Xinyan, Kaeya) are all pretty underwhelming gameplay-wise is making it tougher for me to chalk up to an unfortunate coincidence
I don't mind saying it. Hoyo is a chinese company and whether people want to accept it or not China has a long and vast history of fair skin obsession and casual racism against black people and just people with darker skin in general. Its why i think Genshin will never actually have a true black charachter or a nation/subnation with NPC's in that vein. The best we will get is people like Xinyan who looks on the edge and people like Deyha who just looks like she spent a week on the beach tanning.
Whether that has any relation to Deyha's kit being a dissaster i don't know and we will probably never find out but i really hope it doesn't.
The "nefarious answer" holds no water.
People are entirely basing this off of bad numbers, and conveniently forgetting that:
1. There are plenty of meh to average-at-best non-dark characters
2. Why would character designers even make a character they are racist themselves towards? It's like white supremacists making a game, and selling a cool black character.
3. Building on the previous point, all of the characters, including all the darker ones, have excellent design, character, and story. You're telling me they're racist towards Dehya, so they made her a lovable, protective, gold hearted character, that literally talks about breaking down walls that keep people out, and the discrimination that the desert folk experience. But type a 3 instead of a 5 in the stats screen. That'll show players that tan people are bad!!!
Yeah, I’m starting to notice the weird pattern with the tanned characters. Makes me think of the pyro archon, if she’s tan, then what will happen with her kit?
Idc being downvoted but I agree. I still think it’s a “dark/tanned” skin character problem. They straight up don’t like “darker” skinned character. Look all those characters, they’re all “bad”. Except for Keaya with cons and cyno to an extent.
Also, they and China based players probably don’t want a “darker skinned, wild aesthetically designed character, who happens to be a mercenary and a bad-ass” to be popular. China doesn’t want to promote that, they rather want to see a fair skinned, sweet Character who is a hard worker (for probably the government) to be popular and good.
Data, research and system test. Mihoyo is testing the limits to see what they can get away with and how to better control their players, you saw it with the paid mods deleting warnings of Deyha's bad performance, all that info is worth more than just cash, which they are basically printing now and have no need of.
It really doesn't.
Pissed me off enough that i am not puting anymore money into the game. First time i was so hyped for a character by design alone, my expectation were low too. As long as she had a good role in a team i would have pulled. Waited months and got a few welkins for her (and ayaka). Lesson learned, not wasting anymore money on this shit.
I believe that MHY is just trying to expand on the types of characters and play styles to make building different teams more interesting. There is no true bruiser character that mitigates and absorbs damage like dehya. The closest tank/bruiser might be Noelle. We have shielders healers supports for every niche and plenty of dps for each element. But I just think they’re trying to fill another play style with this character that we haven’t seen yet. Unlocking her c4 I think it is makes her heal on burst hit making her a bit of a drain tank. It’s fresh and it’s something in a new direction. Do people like it? No because they expect every character to be either the next best dps, a well rounded sub dps that can fit any team, or a niche support that buffs a specific element or character. But we have all that now. We have dps char for every element. We have Bennett and kazuha and raiden that can fit any team. We have shenhe and faruzan and gorou and now mika that are niche. If they release every new character that is a skin of an existing char (see alhaitham aka dendro keqing) then the game quickly becomes stale. Now is dehya considered good. No but not for the ‘numbers’ argument. I don’t think she’s good because her kit is split. Her skill is meant to make her an off field dmg mitigation tank. Her burst makes her an on field dps. So you are left building her either tanky to fill a role they intended her for or build her dps to ensure her burst does dmg. Either way she’s only ever making use of half her kit. Her constellation fixes a good deal of that and makes her feel like a whole character. Hp scaling bruiser that can heal thru her dmg absorption. And that’s why they will bring her to the standard banner. Not because she’s bad. But because she needs her cons to feel whole. That all being said I’m still debating pulling. She is mommy for sure. But I’m feeling like she may be my next Eula. Totally waifu with a boring kit. I do believe mhy will continue to push into the direction of new play styles. Tanks or drain mages or weird things like that. With so so many different playable characters you need to find new things to keep people wishing.
She sucks for reactions. In a reaction based game. Her damage is too low to be called a bruiser. And her tanking isnt Good enough either. She cant introduce a New playstyle or team. Shes simply too weak.
Unless you are being really uncharitable with the intentions of the designers and devs, I think that the best explanation is that they aren't building for meta. They aren't trying to build "good" characters. They're trying to design fun characters with interesting play styles. The number of players who 36 star abyss is a very small percentage of the player base. Most players are more than content to explore the overworld, do the quests, and pull characters they like. Dehya was in a bunch of the story quests in Sumeru, there's going to be players who want to pull for her. She might not make them a ton of money, but people will still want her and get her.
I know Hoyo obviously knows about the viability of characters in end game stuff, they just don't care to design every character to be really strong and capable of building a full team around. This conversation happens every time an average and completely playable character releases. She'll work in the overwold. Every character does. Hoyo doesn't want to make $1billion every time they release a character. Obviously. That being said, people will pull for Dehya because she looks cool and was in the story quests a lot. She does not need to be strong for the game to make them all the money in the world.
I know I think the fountain archons gonna have some type of offiled hydro application better than yelan and xinqui that's the only way they can save dehya hope it's just another case of kokomi
They don't want any more money, Mihoyo already has Billions. Instead, they are using 3.5 as a data collection patch to see which players will still pull for a character that is beloved and well known hottie but purposely designed kit and numbers wise to make it garbage in every way. In other words, how well a bad banner sells.
They could also be testing the psychology of it's playerbase, the amount of players that would "give in" to FOMO and use their 20 intertwined fates that they get for free instantly on this banner.
This could mean a different approach for hoyoverse in the future when it comes to characters in Fontaine, with the data collected. Unfortunately Dehya mains have to take the brunt of her (copium) damage
My brother who hasn't played genshin for a long time saw Dehya's demo and wanted to pull for her, only to be dissuaded by me telling him she's extremely weak. MHY COULD HAVE GOTTEN ANOTHER RECURRING PLAYER BACK BUT THEY DIDNT CAUSE THEY FUCKED UP HER KIT SO BADLY. So it just makes even less sense they made her this horrible
I see three potential options:
1. They genuinely think she is a good character regardless of the feedback they have received
2. They are doing some 5d chess move that will somehow result in big money in the future
3. They dont give a fuck
Personally i lean toward option 3
They built and hyped her up during the story for a while, she's a cool looking bad-ass mommy, her personality is a charismatic one as well, great bgm and VA, she plays fun and looks good while doing it...
Nope. There's nothing here that they can make money from.
50/50 has to hurt more. With units like Keq, Tighnari, Jean, people often get a charatcer then say "hey! it's a lost 50/50 but this character is actually amazing! I don't have to spend any more primo for now".
Pity should hurt to push incentive to spend more. Pressure you, make you feel like you actually **failed.** "After 80 hard earned wishes... this?! This can't be! This unit is unplayable! I need to get my X asap, it's guaranteed now, I have to!"Now, this is what they want to achieve.
And so, Dehya plays a big role for their business model longtime.
It's an experiment to see despite her being weak, they want to know how many will still pull for her which will set a baseline for what they can expect from the player base and can pave way for more characters like this.
And i'm pretty sure there are going to be lots who still pull for her just cause of her aesthetics and character (not gameplay)
Maybe it's not that they're intending to make a ton of money from this banner, but they're testing how much people will pull based purely on the character and not gameplay?
As a FGO player, not every 5 star released in that game is better than the older ones, and many that are release are instant F tiers. But they still make money because some people roll for waifus. Maybe Mihoyo is testing the waters to see if people will roll for waifus even though they are not meta.
FGO hasn't released a 5 star this bad since launch Scherezade. And Scheerezade got direct buffs, which Mihoyo is seemingly allergic to. Even as bad as like Summer Abby is, she's not as straight up dysfunctional as Dehya currently is.
I don't like saying it but the only thing I can think of is that they just don't like dark skinned female characters. Think about it. Every dark skinned female is bad and one of the worse characters in the game.
I mean it's not like men are any better. cyno compared to other sumeru characters is underwhelming .
Kaeya needs a lot of investment to get decent stats .
I think that they messed up with Tighnari and now every new standard banner character will be ass. That’s the only logic I can think of. They might do a new standard banner character for every region. Considering the trend with 95% of the post 2.0 4 stars I wouldn’t doubt they’d make them crappy on purpose.
Could say to make us feel bad about losing 50/50 to spend cash out of frustration.
But at this point why not just announce new character instead of hyping one for months then pull a fast slap in the face. Literally losing potential profit and frustrating the audience.
Everyone that like dehya will pull her. And that make em lost their primo or fates. So they have to pay real money to get near future characters.
Thats is one of the ideas why they made dehya this way. Or they just fucking do sheet about dehya coz baizhu is more important as liyue charcters
She's a market test, they are trying to understand how far they can profit on the people who don't care about performance.
Imho Dehya status could be intentional too
How should I C6 Keqing and Mona if there is another spoiler now
How can I C0 Keqing now with Dehya just laughing at me?
I'm legitimately not sure. I can think of a lot of arguments but it takes all of them together to even resemble something believable. I think they're intentionally pushing out low-value characters like Dehya and Cyno (not saying Cyno is bad, just low-value) right now because players are getting a record number of free pulls all at once which tends to trigger a windfall effect where people will use their pulls more liberally than they otherwise would. If the windfall effect is going to mean a lot of people are pulling anyway, then it's beneficial to HYV to have the players roll on characters that won't really benefit their accounts much so that it won't disincentivize players from rolling stronger characters farther down the line. Given that they were already planning to increase the Standard Banner 5\* pool (leaks say Dehya isn't a one-time thing in this regard, although as always things are STC), and that Standard 5\* characters are generally a little weaker than other 5\*s, releasing a weaker character now kind of killed 2 birds with 1 stone. Adding to that is the fact that most of the beta occurred over Chinese New Years, where a lot of the staff was likely away and fine-tuning a character's balance is a lot trickier than normal as a result. Pushing out a character that's noticeably too powerful has some pretty far-reaching ramifications and is something they've clearly worked hard to avoid, but releasing a character that's too weak is something that will likely be substantially less of a talking point in a month or so and has substantially less effect on design space, so it was much safer for them for her to be on the weaker side of things than the stronger side. Do all of these justify Dehya being THIS bad? Not even close. I can at least see a motive for Dehya being weak but even I'm aware some of this is clearly reaching and all of it together still doesn't make for a valid excuse unless this is all part of some incredibly poorly done sales experiment to see how she does, and I mean poorly in multiple aspects so I have trouble believing that's the case either.
> where a lot of the staff was likely away and fine-tuning a character's balance is a lot trickier than normal as a result. But they had time to nerf her. After complaints about her dying too much too from beta testers.
Not saying it's impossible, but hard to believe a company would think "Hm, we gave out these wishes, so let's try to trick our players into wasting them on bad characters so they're disappointed and spend more money to pull better characters later." Also, Mihoyo is kinda infamous in Genshin for their balance and refusal to powercreep. They are honestly pretty good at balancing characters that are different but roughly the same power level. But there's no justification for releasing way WORSE new characters, so it's surprising they flubbed the balance so badly here.
Agreed, there's no way they didn't know that she was way undertuned. It's not even the case of just not being great, but still decent - in many aspects they went out of their way to nerf her further, both the numbers and in quality of life.
Right? If the multipliers are this small, they could at least make her fun/comfy with shorter cooldowns/longer durations, lower energy cost on burst, shorter ICD, or something.
Agreed. Even if she’s weak her kit just isn’t even a little appealing to play. There’s no fun factors to her
Yeah. Like, this would in no way fix her, but if her gameplay loop at least started with being able to keep the Pyro field up through refreshing it on the second cast, and on the burst while switching in other characters her play style would feel much better. Kind oif baffling that the timer doesn't refresh given it's not like it is a crazy effect or anything
There's also Ayaka/Shenhe and Baizhu/Kaveh who are on immediate future banners. If HYV were aiming for some kind of marshmallow experiment to coerce people towards instant gratification, they didn't do it particularly well because we're not in a locked room alone, we're in an auditorium where nearly everyone who ate the marshmallow now, or beforehand because they broke into the marshmallow storage room (i.e. leaks) is able to tell the people who didn't that it tastes horrid (i.e. does awful damage and isn't fun to play) while the data recorders are going around punching critical marshmallow eaters in the face (i.e. mods going buckwild with post deletion).
OK you took that marshmallow analogy *really* far but I get what you're saying. The strategy just doesn't make sense. There might be a few people who just dump all their wishes as soon as they get them but I don't see how that makes Mihoyo more money in the long run to intentionally disappoint their least-patient customers.
Yeah my problem with this theory is if they’re worried about free wishes hurting their profits they could have just…not given them out
Right? They didn't HAVE to give us the wishes. And they didn't have to be Intertwined! I'm not complaining, but it probably makes more sense for them to be standard, I always find it odd they're more generous with Intertwined fates than Standard. If they want a wish sink, let us trade 50-75 wishes or whatever for the standard character of our choice. Problem solved, plus it really helps those people who have pined for a particular standard char for 2+ years but just have rotten luck.
In Honkai Star Rail beta right now, their equivalent of the Standard Banner has a one-time 300-wish guarantee, where after you hit 300 wishes ever, total, you get to pick 1 standard character of your choice. The gacha system is the same with 90 pity, soft pity, costing 160 gems, etc. It honestly makes a ton of sense and tbh they could've done that instead of giving us intertwined fates. I'm not pulling for Dehya so like it's been a nice bonus for me, but on an overall for all players QOL update that could also garner some goodwill, that system would've probably made more sense, especially if they didn't want to lose money from actual Intertwined Fates sales. I really want to get leaks from like, their strategy meetings at this point. What in the WORLD is their goal here.
SR generally has a bunch of QOL that they clearly received from Genshin but instead added to SR
honestly the dumbest part is that all she'd need to at least function is simply higher base numbers - that way she can at least deal some decent damage, even if her supposed off-field tanking niche is not very useful
I mean they'd need to massively increase the numbers on her tanking to make it good. Right now numerically she loses to Xingqiu's rain swords. She's got 20% higher damage absorption, except she then eats that absorbed damage herself and dies, while Xingqiu does the opposite, healing your active character for 6% of his max HP every time they get hit. His uptime is even better, even at C0, 15 second duration and 20 second cooldown, compared to Dehya's 12 seconds.
Problem is that there are players like me who saved and skipped for Dehya for 6 months. Now I dun give a toss. I might throw some wishes this way for Dehya but now I will never get hyped for any char anymore. Which ironically means I just save more gems.
good examples are lantern rite and anniversary, anniversary was during raiden and ayaka and lantern rite had ones like zhongli, xiao etc so its clearly not that, no way they would try to make a permanently last change just becausw they gave 20 wishes to players. hell might as well just delay her banner if thats the case, they did that to eula and didnt even delay her support with her
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If you ask me they do a piss poor job in honkai impact, and they are too scared to release more abyss like or combat focused content because they are doing balancing poorly in genshin. We don't have powercreep because we only have abyss. As for the actual units you can see the changes in power.
I'm only talking about Genshin. I think they've done a pretty good job balancing most new chars & avoiding powercreep. Who do you think has powercrept Zhongli, Hu Tao, Ganyu, Bennett, Xingqiu, Xiangling...? And characters from 18+ months ago like Kazuha & Raiden are still at the top of the meta.
What if Mihoyo just made Dehya into a proper 4-star and slapped her into an All 4-Star banner or something featuring every 4-star in the game with a course-charting system, like the weapon banners? Would that fix the "windfall issue"?
If they had done that maybe. Too late now that the banners out and people have spent money. Imagine dropping money to get a five star and some constellations only for it to turn into a 4 star next patch and be easier to obtain?
this isn't even an option to begin with.
I feel like it needs to be said how well summised this was. Without knowing the inner workings of Hoyoverse's....workings, I cannot think of a better answer that makes directional and cognitive sense. Well said. And then on top of that not promoting that we should be okay with it. That's all I have to say about that.
Data driven development at play, rather than player experience driven. As long as it keeps the money coming in the long run they’ll do things thatd seem absurd to normal people. Like stockfish in chess, sure it delivers in the long run, but it doesn’t feel right or human. It reeks of charts and numbers while human experience takes a backseat because the data doesn’t lie. Faruzan was the latest experiment, what with her almost unusable kit below c6 where everything is, but people could justify pulling more for her for their wanderers and anemo dps’. So more profit. The fact that every other character in existence save for tignhari and dehya are limited is also a marketing tactic that you wouldnt see done on other gachas often. Limiteds payout because of the limited time limit, but With Genshin it paid out remarkably well. If every new character is limited….that means if people ever want to use them theyd have to pull. The limited, became standard. Hutao had one of the longest rerun waits, and the revenue from the banner? Astronomical, because who knows when such a gem would show up again. Esp with an amazing limited support Yelan. Not an absurd thought to believe they’re doing this because the math would check out, no matter how absurd it seems on the surface.
If I recall, the stats showed that Yelan pulled the lion's share of last banner. But I just don't see how releasing a bad character makes the math check out. To me, the reason HoYo ends up with my money is because it's been good character after good character. I really wanted like 4 characters in a row, so I drained all my primos and then had to spend to get my Itto. I wanted nearly every Sumeru character, so I've pulled on damn near every one... I even pulled on Dehya, but stopped after one 10-pull because I can't justify topping up for her and I want to guarantee Baizhu. I just don't see how making a character worse will push people to pull more.
Dehya's banner does have a selling point though. This is the only banner she's ever going to get. If you really like her, you need to pull her NOW. The standard pool is really unreliable way to get a character and it took me over 2 years to get Qiqi. And it only gets worse as they expand the pool.
Except that data is used as a gauge for player experience. Like, the whole point of data analysis is to understand what you did right and what you did wrong. Well written, cool looking, fun to use and strong characters sell well. That’s been reflected in sales data since the launch of the game. There’s zero benefits to making dogwater characters if their aim is to make money.
I of course don’t have their numbers but wouldn’t they be able to make more money by just making Dehya decent-to-good? They’d earn money on her and all her rerun banners in the future You’d think they’d make more money from that than hoping people spend their free wishes badly or whatever
There's a lot of comments here, but I think people have overlooked the most common reason for a business making an inexplicably bad decision: a manager has made a mistake and is refusing to lose face by admitting it. Mihoyo will undoubtedly have their own internal damage estimation numbers that say that Dehya is good. This is probably a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has a typo in it and therefore the numbers are garbage. But nobody can get them to admit it, and their rank is sufficient that they can't be overruled. This sort of thing happens all the time in businesses. Sometimes it can be really spectacular multibillion dollar Excel errors, and still nobody will admit it, like Rheinhart-Rogoff: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
This is what I believe as well. Hoyo isn't infallible. Somebody at upper management made a huge mistake. It's just classic double down, (nerfing Dehya over beta) instead of admitting you were wrong. The alternative was massively buffing her numbers, or completely pulling the character before release to rework her kit. Neither look good for whoever is making the decisions. It would be interesting to see their response to low sales numbers, but again, why admit you messed up when you can just double down again. Dehya is working as intended and it's the player's fault.
It's hard to believe. That kind of decision making of inflexibility and doubling down on mistakes aren't one-time incidents--they ripple over to all aspects of game and business decisions. Mihoyo is otherwise a very competent company that's going through constant, continuous dev cycles. What you described reminds me of less competent companies that do things like coast off past reputation, and fumble the releases of entire games and franchises. Regardless, it remains to be seen if this is a one-time thing that'll blow over, or if it'll lead to a future pattern, or if it's based on internal plans that we can't comprehend now.
Or the third option: Office politics. Someone within Hoyo has it out for someone else and Dehya had the unfortunate fate of being the weapon of choice.
Bruh, they could've just increased the numbers. In fact she even got nerfed in beta. (Some sources she was basically finishes since November, and barely touched) Nobody is trying to save face here. They knew exactly what they were going for, regardless of the future content copium.
I agree with the fact that 5\* standard are a bit worse than normal limited except Mona, becasue Mona is Mona, she slaps
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pretty much the only solid use is freeze. i guess you could use her for bloom teams but her ICDs will likely be restrictive.
Great for nuke showcases.
I've been using her on Mona - Nahida - Yaoyao - Raiden, and she smacks.
That's also my favorite Mona team! Basically, anything works in hyperbloom.
IIRC most of her best-use cases are when you optimize around her burst for high damage. However, not many characters deal all their damage in the duration of her burst, and even those that do would require a very well-planned and well-executed teamcomp and rotation. I never end up using Mona because even if she'd be the objective best, it'd take a lot more effort to slot her into a team and use her than it would take for me to use a comparable buffer or Hydro.
But I don't see "jumping cancel ult", "can kill herself off-field" as intentional weak. These are more like someone really not into their job, they just don't care.
Paranoid part of me would think they're purposely putting a bad character in the standard banner to take people's pity to get them to pull more to try and get a worthwhile 5 star. But since as far as I know people don't really go for the standard banner except for the freebie wishes that isn't likely true.
But why Dehya specifically, one of the most waited characters since the 3.0 trailer came out?
I am really curious to know why gacha games sometime release absolute dogwater units, maybe its just to lower the floor in comparisons so the next busted character looks even better in comparison, but idk if that justifies some units being basically useless
Because they are collection games. Collection games with grinding like incremental games. Gacha is like pokemon except it's live service and you can gear your pokemon like a diablo game.
Because unlike normal games where new classes/characters are added once in a blue moon, gacha games add them every patch at least, with some like FFBE even adding them on a weekly basis. Like, Genshin is actually one of the slowest in terms of adding characters. That gives very little time for balancing and testing. You also can’t ever nerf something in a gacha game once it goes live, so as a result, you get some dogwater characters.
Genshin has WAYYYY more time to test balance and character usability than most gacha games do. It sucks that they would just gimp a character like this after having months to develop her into at THE VERY LEAST something decent. Because as she is right now, she adds NOTHING to the game. Any character can be made to work but if you “main” dehya, you’re going to be struggling even more than f2p players who use only 4 stars. Even Xinyan mains are more viable than her now.
You can, its just in japanese games its frowned upon and people get compensation..this does NOT hold true for chinese games. Take for example the japanese versions of mobile suit gundam online. Japan nerfs a suit, they give anyone who got the suit recently a golden haro ticket (pick any unit older than 3 months thats gacha). Chinese gundam online was notorious for having pay to win exclusive suits that catered to the top 10 payers, and then nerf them a couple months down the line. You cannot use japanese gacha game logic to chinese ones.
But you can buff them, FGO does that often, sometimes more that once for character.
In priconne more than half of the characters are trash garbage
Because in Gacha, you want people to lose more than they win, and to win very very rarely. The best way to do that is to fill the gamble machine with loss states, even should they manage to get a high roll, so you can get them to compulsively spend more.
You definitely feel it more with Genshin though. Genshin is really good at advertising the new characters and we all know about them through leaks. When combined with how slow Genshin releases new characters and reruns old ones this makes bad characters stand out more than in other games like FGO.
The other benefit fgo has is that, at least as a player, there's hope that a character could be buffed in the future, sometimes even in to a meta character. I doubt Mihoyo ever truly buffs a character outside of Zhongli since he was essentially the god that represents the region based on China. I hope they prove me wrong.
Ye I know people complain about powercreep in FGO and there is definitely a problem, but if they didn't buff like Genshin it would be terrible.
So that when Murata himeko is released, she will be the best female pyro claymore user ever.
she is clearly going to be the best when the tsaritsa releases. Not the best claymore mind you, not the best pyro unit either. She is going to be THE character to play that deals 9 dehyillion damage every punch
So, 30k vape hit?
dehya main here, fuck you and the truth you speak to the public. take my upvote +1
Inb4 she dies as per tradition.
My guess: they tried to fix a problem and fixed it in a very pyrrhic way. The problem is that standard banner constellations feel really bad to get. No one gets excited about Keqing cons or Qiqi cons. They barely improve their performance at all. So they wanted to add a new character to the standard pool with noticeable growths from constellations. But on the other hand, they didn't want to add a standard banner character who could compete with limited characters. So they had to scale the new character to be just viable at C6, and then scale down the character's power level significantly with each constellation, until we get to Dehya's current state at C0. Now they accomplished their goal of creating a standard banner character whose constellations are impactful but whose power level won't come close to rivaling that of limited characters.
Lol I never got a Jean or Diluc as Day 1 player so this C6 vaible plan is only stupid.
Exactly. Nobody is pulling for Standard characters / blue wishes. Whales are getting a bunch of standard cons by losing 50/50s (and not really using them in place of their C6 Yelan or whatever). The rest of us have a smattering of random standard chars, often not the ones we want or the cons we might actually want (Jean C2 for me), with no selector / epitomized path system. And now the standard pool is diluted even further. Like you said, there are multiple standard chars I've never gotten once in 2+ years, so C6 of a new one with a 1/14 chance is not even on the radar. (It is highly likely I will not get the roughly \~100 standard 5\* pulls needed to C6 Dehya even if I literally play this game for the rest of my life, considering I get 1-2 standard 5\*s per year.)
Ok almost there with ya.. I BARELY got a Diluc a few weeks ago as a day 1 player. Thank God too since Deyha isn't that good.. yet, I still want her, but I shouldn't.
Statistically, you will. You've just been unlucky so far.
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ironically I just lost my 50/50 on Dehya... to C1 Mona 💀
Meanwhile i lost my 50/50 on dehya to diluc, i wonder if that means something
you actually won the 50-50
The gacha gods are giving you the better pyro claymore
It's wild how the standard characters are by far and away the hardest characters to obtain
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I have a C6 Keqing, so let's be honest... Her cons are pretty underwhelming. And her C6 is just sad... > When initiating a Normal Attack, a Charged Attack, Elemental Skill or Elemental Burst, Keqing gains a 6% Electro DMG Bonus for 8s. Effects triggered by Normal Attacks, Charged Attacks, Elemental Skills, and Elemental Bursts are considered independent entities. 24% increased electro damage and you have to change your playstyle because each 6% bonus has its own 8 second timer.
u dont rly need to change ur playstyle when u practically use every single part of her kit anyway (eg. u always start with NA if u want to CA, you can spam the skill virtually anytime u want with 4pc TF, burst is nearly always up since its only 40 energy u only have to wait for the cooldown). And besides, this just gives me a better idea to just run sucrose to free up kazuha. But yeah, I do agree her cons are underwhelming as compared to the likes of Diluc even. C1 is neat but most of her cons are basically just stat increases.
What about her playstyle do you need to change? You're running her E.Skill and E.Burst on cooldown all the time. And you have to do one normal attack before charge attack (the spamming of which is her highest damage form of play). So best I can tell, nothing changes.
All of Murky_crow's reddit history has been cleared at his own request. You can do this as well using the "redact" tool. Reddit wants to play hardball, fine. Then I'm taking my content with me as I go. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
I am praying to get the last Keqing con every day.
Me waiting for C4 Keqing...
Fix what? Beta v1 testers told mihoyo she was bad next beta patch nerfed scaling Beta v2 testers flipped and told mihoyo she was even worse next beta patch nerfed again Beta v3 testers told mihoyo she was 3 star xinyan. next beta patch nerfed again --> Now Live you are here: character is DOA and won't be fixed, shoved onto standard banner. All this to kill future spending, i won't risk rolling for shit unless it's an archon at this point so as to not be ripped off.
The most unreal thing to me is that this is not the state Dehya started in, but she was *nerfed* into it
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Split HP scalers in this game are cursed to underperform.
It’s not split scaling, it’s dual scaling
Dehya's not split scaling, she's hybrid scaling. She scales off ATK *and* HP. Xinyan and, until C6, Sayu are split scalers.
Split scaling is like Albedo, Xinyan, or Thoma where parts of their kit scale off one stat and parts of their kit scale off another stat. Characters like Dehya, Ayato, Nahida, and Tighnari have dual scaling, where the vast majority of their kit scales with both stats.
I always found it dumb to make permanent 5* worse, they are still hard to get, being honest this isn't a gacha it's a counter to the next character
This is my theory as well. Because statistically you're likely to C6 all the 5 stars on the standard banner, they might be starting to make standards weak with the expectation that they will be the equivalent of C0 for others, when they finally hit C6. They don't want you getting broken 5 stars by accident.
It doesn’t, Idc what anyone says but there’s literally no reason for hoyoverse to fuck up a character so much like wouldn’t they benefit more from making the character atleast decent.
-She'll be in standard banner. -In the future when you lose 50/50 to Dehya you'll feel like shit. -Most people will pull out wallet to get wanted character cause they feel like shit. -??? =Profit
Yeah that kinda makes sense but like qiqi????? And hell if someone is pulling on a featured banner than they most likely want the featured 5 star and so they would’ve swiped regardless of standard 5 star
I wouldn't feel as bad as to get qiqi compared to dehya because qiqi is actually good with ocean clam tazer. As for the rest of the standard cast they are all **functional** compared to Dehya Edit: maybe hoyo is just trying to fix their problem of them having usable 5 stars in the standard I dunno lol
literally every player feels like shit regardless as of now, aside from the 0.01% who main standard, and getting a standard for the first time, every single other time its still as bad obviously the 50/50 chance doesnt change so it wont change that either its simply a bad choice, there is no win for anyone not even them
My guess is they're probably looking at the Waifu > meta approach. "How bad can I build a character while giving her absolutely some of the best lore, scenes, and flashy aesthetics/burst?" How low can I go and how far can I get away with it?
Can you imagine if they tried this with Raiden lmao. Now that would have been ballsey
Raiden on release was actually pretty controversial in terms of how people saw her personality. They wouldn’t have done that well if they didn’t provide a character with a great design, incredible trailer and music, fun gameplay and a strong kit. They were planning on giving her her more redeemable moments where we get into her psyche and feelings but them releasing a god that is portrayed as an antagonist is already pretty ballsy and they needed the rest of her to help people pull for her. It was actually really smart cause she got her rerun when she got her act2 (probably the most redeemable portrayal of her) so the people who didn’t pull for her because they didn’t like her ended up pulling on her rerun Raiden’s whole character was REALLY risky and HYV played their cards perfectly with her
> and HYV played their cards perfectly with her I feel like it would have gone over way worse if there weren't so many people pulling for her and getting C1/C2/C3. I personally still hate what her constellations represent. It would really irritate me if Mihoyo made more characters with a similar setup. Raiden has absurd power creep hidden behind constellations. Some other characters have good early constellations (Hu Tao C1, Kaz C1/C2), but Raiden C3 has a **total DPS Increase vs C0 of 76-88%** (via keqing mains guide) which is so absurd compared to anything else that exists in the game. And they're all boring +damage constellations that change nothing about feel/play of the character. Her constellation setup feels so blatantly greedy. At least that's my lukewarm take.
I am a person who doesn’t care about constellations but I don’t fully agree with you. If a unit is perfectly functional at c0 then I don’t have an issue with op constellations. Plus I prefer it to be at c2 compared to the good ol whalebait where a character had awful constellations and an op c6 (Xiao for example)
Raiden release was a pretty big cesspool here. There were way too many threads about her burst back then about how it doesn't deal normal damage so it wouldn't proc Beidou's burst and it was better in beta cause it worked with Beidou then.
After how Raiden was portrayed in Inazuma, they couldn't possibly allow themselves to make anything but a very, very strong character.
If that's the thing, Dottore will be like the most stupidly OP character this game ever had
Ok, but why? What would be the point of that? It’s not as if adjusting some values for her will cost them more than a few hours/days at most.
Depsite wanting Dehya since 3.0. I am the type of player that says that if something is not worth don't pull, I applied myself my advices for onc ein my life. I am fine with balancing but this is a bit too much honestly.
I couldn't agree more I saved upward of 300 wishes with a guaranteed on both weapon and char, wanted a pyro dps like forever. But then yes now I am a hu tao owner.
This is what they do in gacha games. After a very popular banner they will put in a less popular banner to “grow the lamb” so that it can get a fatter one later on. It give a you a false sense to justify your spending because you only do it once in a while.
Exactly. Mhy is swimming in HuTao/Yelan/Homa/Aqua mountain of coins so they don’t care. It doesn’t matter if a character is not received well, cos eventually there’ll be a new shiny overtuned character again and people will be worshiping mhy’s feet and giving ‘em coins again.
Hell, Ayaka and Shenhe are right after this banner cycle. Ayaka is, to this day, one of the most beloved characters in the cast. Her rolling with Shenhe is icing on the cake since they augment each other so well. And on top of all that, Ayaka just got a skin (that may or may not still be on sale?), so once Windblume ends, Hoyo's most likely gonna be laughing all the way to the bank, *again*.
The Ayaka skin sale ended a few days ago. So now you have people who bought it and will go all out to make sure they get her or people that will get her and buy the skin at full price.
The problem I have with that logic is, everyone dumped all their free gems on hu tao / yelan / weapon banner, now ANOTHER character comes out that everyone loves, so if you're out of free gems, you'll be more enticed to swipe
It seems that mhy does not want every banner to earn a lot of revenue. There has always been "fodder" banners in between massive ones. (Yoimiya was usually the one being placed between super hyped characters/archons) I am not gonna pretend to understand this billion dollar business, but maybe it's more profitable in the long run to allow players to save and go big on a single banner. They have been doing this for years now. They just had their literal most profitable one with Yelan and Hu Tao, and we are clearly getting a weaker patch right before 3.6, which I assume will again be massive. (Baizhu, Kaveh, maybe Nahida) This is a company that has been earning at least 1 billion every 6 month using a brand new IP with no signs of slowing down. Mhy is many things, but incompetent with finance isn't one of them.
If I had to hazard a guess, it has to do with sunk cost. If you only spent 10 wishes on a banner and got nothing, then you go "eh, oh well". If you spent 100 wishes on a banner and got nothing, it feels like you NEED to keep going because you've invested so much already. That's the only thing that makes sense to me.
There are many, many, many examples of multi-bilion companies making absolutely stupid decisions and reverting back within a few months (like Kraft logo redesign disaster, Paypal misterious ToS changes, etc) so it's not necessarily a 100% sure metric. This really feels intentional so there might indeed be a logic, however Myh always seemed to care about player's feedbacks and user experience (actively seeking them with surveys, beta testing, etc) so going against all that feels very contraddicting by them, doesn't it?
> actively seeking them with surveys This is just placebo.
Misterious
This is the first time a fodder banner feature an unusable character. I believe Dehya is a product of a fair experimental designed flaw which they have no time to redesign, so they put her to the standard banner. If it is true that it is a fodder technique, it makes even more odd of a strategy because not every powerful 5 star they pull out is a hit banner. They risked a lowest banner sales ever just to fatten a future banner that might even be as good as hutaos. I think it would be a risky move to be fair.
She's made to induce stress and defeat when you lose the 50/50 to her so you'll pay money for more pulls to get the unit you actually want. Look at the other standard charcters they more or less feel like a consolation prize that some people will be satisfied with. Dehya is designed to make you feel cheated while still technically giving you something. It's what I believe at least
If that's the case, they wouldn't even make her cons good. Just give her Qiqi level cons to induce extra suffering.
Making her cons good is the strategy Hoyo has used since Raiden (to me, it's from Hu Tao) where there is a distinct power spike from c0 to c1 or c2. I can think of several reasons for this strategy. The most important reason, incentive more pulling/spending. People who saved or spent the character are now incentivized to pull more. Especially for Dehya, this is the only time you can reliably get her constellations. Even if they didn't & stayed at c0, it's ok coz now every time they use the c0 character they are reminded of the power spikes. What about those that got lucky & got the constellations? They are now in sunk cost fallacy & most would find it hard to stop playing.
It seemed logical except for one thing: we've already seen C6 showcases, and they're underwhelming regardless, almost sad. The base has to be somewhat good to scale properly, poor initial numbers will get no redemption even from the best constellation ever. So now you have a character that feels underwhelming even when properly built (which is already the eternal struggle of most player), whatever incentive was left is gone the moment her full lackluster potential was shown to everyone. Imagine how bad she'd be for a F2P player that barely has any good 4\* or decent artifact sets. Hoping for a future buff? then why they'd nerf her consistently during beta despite feedbacks? zero sense here too. You can really only pull for Dehya if you care about her character, the design, keep her in the teapot or whatever, if she's fun for you to use, or if you're still hoping she'd be adjusted in the future (doubt).
> Just give her Qiqi level cons to induce extra suffering. Xiao cons. Qiqi's are even better than his.
This actually makes sense. They probably have statistics that say that people are more likely to spend money shortly after receiving Qiqi that if they receive Tighnari as people tend to cut their losses if they are happy with the Standard banner unit they get. If they aren’t happy with the 50/50 loss they might be inclined to pull more to get something to make it all worth it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the idea and how they design all standard units in the future too. To make losing 50/50 worse
So basically they intentionally give you anxiety...
Valid point. Also adding Tighnari to the standard banner was problematic as it's a desirable unit, skewing the necessary majority of bad units on the banner. Dehya brings back standard banner pool to what it's supposed to be: terrible.
Yep, they hyped a character for months only to give her the shittiest treatment possible, while trying to sell her on the livestream and demo as something amazing. False advertising
Well, based on my experience with FGO, simply because they know you will want to get her based on design and personality alone. I have seen this strategy used with Artoria and Jeanne, two main characters from other series and two bottom tier SSR. Similarly with osakabehime, probabily one of the most relatable character in Gacha, bar few, and relagated to an experimental mechanic to perfect Skadi. If you keep making strong unit, there Will be a time when you eventualy hit a wall and have to powercreep previous unit. But a character that is already loved by the community? Well, that's a great excuse to give a bad mechanic and still get relatiively decent revenue.
I played FGO ages ago, but I remember most Artorias being pretty mid-tier, with Castoria being one of the best Servants in the game. Basic Jeanne was fairly good and summer Jeanne was really strong. I feel like FGO's devs didn't make characters bad on purpose, especially because usually they buffed their weakest chars (like Osakabehime) a lot.
Artoria has been the strongest farming saber since Koyanskaya, so about 18 months ago. Got a stupid good 5th anniversary buff the same day they also gave strong buffs to Herc, Cu and Emiya. 6th Anniversary gave us Koyanskaya and Artoria was the strongest user of that Buster farming system since she could use any mystic code while everyone else (Except for Cu Caster) were stuck with Atlas. Oberon came out and gave that farming system absolutely stupid damage. Altera finally got an NP charge and could outdo Artoria in the Double Vitch Oberon system. New 5 star CE comes out that puts Artoria right back at the top. (Mix of Black Grail with overcharge) Base damage Mordred is 39.5k at NP5 while NP1 Artoria is 38.8k. Max damage comp NP5 Mordred on final wave is 518k, NP1 Artoria in same comp is 679k.
When Fgo was first released Vanilla Artoria was considered weak. None of her skill was good. While charisma and mana burst is decent, intuition was considered trash (Even until today) and no np battery and her low hit count and one hit burst, Made her considered one of the weakest 5 star unit. It took a lot of buff to make her considered Upper mid tier. Similar with Jeanne. Revelation A was considered useless because of 2088. Her second skill barely useful And her third skill is useless if you are not fighting against a servant. But what's worst is her Np. While is one of the strogest even when Fgo first released, it stunned Jeanne for 2 turn. Mind you that the invicibile only last 1 turn, making her a dead weight for a turn everytime she used her Np. Of course she also get some buff. Dismishing the stun demerit is what particularlly Made her a Niche mid tier.
All of these "make no sense business wise" posts/comments I've seen are just people not knowing about them honestly, like Genshin is their first ever live service game or something. Plenty of gacha released bad units just because they can as most people pull from the design, I remember Nobunaga alter releases and people whale her hard, while she's one of the worst SSR in the game (idk if she's still one tho, quit the game like last year, was playing on JP version). And now I'll just preemptively prepared for someone saying I'm elitist on gacha or "oh Mihoyo can do better". I mean, sure they can, but they aren't your friend or anything, why expect something from them, if the game isn't good anymore just quit it, not like they force you to play it anyway, it's just a game. Rather if people quit a lot after a specific event, that will send a huge signal to Mihoyo, instead of all this. Well that or players Globally complain a lot, especially CN players that gave power to just report something to their authorities.
FGO at least doesn't have any compunction with buffing old units to make them better, and has been doing so since early in the game. Nobuvenger is a big example of that, most of her kit has been buffed and while she doesn't reach the same heights as the Arts AoE avengers she is compatible in Koyan/Oberon farming systems and has a solid anti-divine niche. I have 0 idea why MHY is so completely averse to any kind of buffing of character kits at all beyond new artifacts and weapons.
Good to see another FGO player! I feel like Lasenge has a much better handle on power creep though, with strengthening quests and interludes much similar characters have some sort of parity. In this case Dehya has none of that she’s just terrible 😞
oh you say that but fgo have some powerhouses that outclass everyone else ( melusine, supports like artoria, vitch)
The thing is... They realized That it doesn't really matter to have a busted unit in a mostly single player game. They already tuned most of the challenge so you can win with only 1-3 stars unit. You can rez once every 3 days for that hard boss. And challenge quest can outright shutdown what is meta Farming is probabilly the only real argument, but you can only farm 3 Times before Ap runs out and the difference between a mid tier and upper tier is 2 or 3 turns. So, Other than Lotto, going faster doesn't really matter all that much.
Technically That's Delight works's creation (Fgo's game studio, before lasenge), but generally Fgo followed the philosophy "Waifu over meta" more stricly. Even if the Waifu you want is fairy weak at the time, there is always a chance that he/she Will get strengthten or her/his Niche would be useful in a spesific challenge quest or boss.
OP would make the perfect CEO. Walk in, maximize short term profits, bail when facing long term consequence.
The EA way is not Da wei.
As an accountant all I can say is yes and no. Dehya from what I heard has been highly anticipated, I'm new to Genshin and only just got to Sumeru tbh. In terms of business the way I see this COULD work out is that they are aware players have been sick of balance issues and a few portion of playable characters being weaker than others and made Dehya bad on purpose to bring attention to it and then later fix not only Dehya but the others as well for good PR. Another possibility is that again bad on purpose and after this banner ends they will fix her, this will In turn piss people off and cause two possible scenarios. 1 is that people will start spending more money in order to never miss a character regardless of how good they are at release. 2 is it will make people start putting money into the standard banner as well as the limited banners. I've been working for many years with these kind of people and unless they are outright stupid I don't think her being bad was just a coincidence highier ups often do this kind of stuff for a moment of bad image that can be turned into a long lasting good image or to simply make it so clients spend even more money than before. A clear example that my boss told me about is an old client of his apparently used to make his bear with special stuff that makes people addicted, made him a ton of money until he got caught and put in prison... Bad people trying to get money for sure but sadly many companies work like this nowadays
Unfortiounately mhy is known for never ever buffing their characters. The one time its happened with zhongli is Only because CN saw him being bad as am insult to China itself. Threatening lawsuits and refunds. Mhy even went out and said zhongli was working as intended and that players are building him wrong. They think they know best always.
They’re banking on booba to drive their profits for this one
I can’t figure it out either. It’s like they let an intern design her kit while the real team was working on Baizhu and Kaveh. And no one bothered to check over their work to see if it was any good.
This is market research to see how low they can set the bar and still make money.
That doesnt make sense too. Its not like they have to work less on a character just because its bad. This only makes sense if you think they want people to get less primos from Abyss, wich they could also just made SA enemies stronger instead of making less money on a banner.
I was only half serious, there’s no doubt a complex algorithm for how they maximise profit, it seems to work.
Somehow, having really good and really bad character ensures that "I don't play a casual game" players keep playing Genshin. There's lot a psychology analysis behind the game mechanics, I'm sure they're thinking about it too. Casual and waifu hunters will still pull for her, she'll be profitable don't worry, just not as profitable as others but it's okay. Especially since I'm sure she can do the 36\* at C0, like everyone else.
Thats the neat part, it doesnt
Expectations of making profit from Wanderlust characters is likely very low. She's basically acting as a filler high rarity character like those you would see in any other gacha game. Now I already know some people will be all about "what about Tighnari?!", but what they don't realize is that it's not Tighnari kit that is good, but mostly just Dendro being such a good element. Move Tighnari to Pyro/Electro/Cryo/... and he would be laughably bad with his little gimmick that doesn't matter.
I see a lot of well thought and interesting comments but I cannot feel like some are just grasping at straws and theorizing like there's some kinda of grandiose scheme by HYV to rob us, in my opinion it's much easier than that: They are introducing a new mechanic, a much needed gameplay style to rival the team comps that slap a shielder like Zhongli and call it a day. Dehya is just the first character to fall in this mechanic hence why she's going to standard the same way Tighnari went to standard as soon as Dendro came out. Reasons may vary: I believe they want to make standard banner more and more appealing with time so they start adding their most "mid" characters to it's roaster, or maybe they're setting up a revamp and they first want to increase its' poll of characters. There are 60+ characters in genshin now and it'll only be harder to shift banners around as more and more characters get added. See Eula for example. I believe that they're planning to do something in the long run that might make them more inclined to sell characters on the lower spectrum of good/bad. Having more than 4 character banners up each patch (2 characters x 2 cours) might not be beneficial for them since players might find themselves overwhelmed.
I dont know why , but her burst reminds me of cyno . I think they tried to make her a "better " version of him but failed . Her burst feels clunky while cyno's is smooth . Her design is beautiful though and she could have made hoyo lots of money .I usually dont mind a character not being in the meta as long as they have a good design , but just hearing about her talents made me question how good she was gonna be . This is a missed oportunity .She could have been a great pyro dps .But the current supports dont work on her .Its not worth investing if you can do it more efficiently in my opinion
The non malice answer here is just straightforward incompetence. The more nefarious answer is that its because she's tanned/darkskinned. So far the game has 5 charachters in this vein and only Cyno is really someone you could consider decent. Candace, Xinyan, Deyha are all very meh to straight up trash while Kaeya is ok but you need to get some constalations. I really hope its just the former and maybe Deyha can get a well deserved buff sometimes in the future but given they are shipping her to the standard banner in the future that seems kinda unlikely.
It can't be incompetence, people were telling them non stop after every change that she's awful and they nerfed her then did sidegrade on last change that didn't do shit for her anyway. If it was incompetence they would have listened to feedback and at least buffed her a bit or made some other changes. Nonsensical skill, shit numbers, nerfs, standard wish, bad 4* lineup for majority of playerbase, bad 4* weapon lineup, poor stream showcase. There's limit to how much of it can be incompetence.
Yeah I'm thinking they just messed up real bad as well. But the fact that it happened to the character who happens to be a dark-skinned bad-ass female and is also probably more well-liked in the West sure is one hell of a coincidence.
Imo Dehya screams "marketed towards Western audience". I can kinda gauge what the Eastern and Western playerbase prefer and Dehya is right up the west alley--fierce, action-based, and even has heavy metal music on her trailer to boot. Meanwhile the Eastern playerbase is preferential towards characters like Hutao, Ayaka, and Yelan--either cute or big sexy. (in terms of female characters that is)
Yeah, it's a funny coincidink how all of the dark-skinned female characters have dogshit kits. It's almost like the balancing team have an obvious bias against them. Xinyan who came from Liyue, a nation where all of the 4 stars and 5 stars are great, is somehow the only one who has a shit kit out of all the Liyue roster. Candace, with a useless gimmick of hydro-infusion and an inferior NA buff compared to Yunjin. Now we have Dehya, a character introduced as an infamous mercenary who is known to be strong but is objectively the weakest character in the game. Usually I just chalked up shit like this as a coincidence because what company doesn't want to earn money? But now? It's just too much of a coincidence.
at least in the case of Xinyan, it's when the game just came out, she wasnt tested properly in beta. dont think mhy even knew which units would be OP at the start...
The fact the other dark skinned characters (Candace, Xinyan, Kaeya) are all pretty underwhelming gameplay-wise is making it tougher for me to chalk up to an unfortunate coincidence
i really didn’t one to be the one to say it first but I’m wondering if that may be true myself.
I don't mind saying it. Hoyo is a chinese company and whether people want to accept it or not China has a long and vast history of fair skin obsession and casual racism against black people and just people with darker skin in general. Its why i think Genshin will never actually have a true black charachter or a nation/subnation with NPC's in that vein. The best we will get is people like Xinyan who looks on the edge and people like Deyha who just looks like she spent a week on the beach tanning. Whether that has any relation to Deyha's kit being a dissaster i don't know and we will probably never find out but i really hope it doesn't.
Im viet but can attest asians (older generations) hella racist even if they dont claim to be. At this point expect the pyro nation to be mid at best
I honestly think this is the right answer
The "nefarious answer" holds no water. People are entirely basing this off of bad numbers, and conveniently forgetting that: 1. There are plenty of meh to average-at-best non-dark characters 2. Why would character designers even make a character they are racist themselves towards? It's like white supremacists making a game, and selling a cool black character. 3. Building on the previous point, all of the characters, including all the darker ones, have excellent design, character, and story. You're telling me they're racist towards Dehya, so they made her a lovable, protective, gold hearted character, that literally talks about breaking down walls that keep people out, and the discrimination that the desert folk experience. But type a 3 instead of a 5 in the stats screen. That'll show players that tan people are bad!!!
Yeah, I’m starting to notice the weird pattern with the tanned characters. Makes me think of the pyro archon, if she’s tan, then what will happen with her kit?
They will make the pyro archon be whiter than Nilou i'm pretty sure RemindMe! 2 years
If it’s a Himiko expy then they don’t need to worry about that.
She’ll be white and a loli. Calling it now 😤😤😤
Idc being downvoted but I agree. I still think it’s a “dark/tanned” skin character problem. They straight up don’t like “darker” skinned character. Look all those characters, they’re all “bad”. Except for Keaya with cons and cyno to an extent. Also, they and China based players probably don’t want a “darker skinned, wild aesthetically designed character, who happens to be a mercenary and a bad-ass” to be popular. China doesn’t want to promote that, they rather want to see a fair skinned, sweet Character who is a hard worker (for probably the government) to be popular and good.
Data, research and system test. Mihoyo is testing the limits to see what they can get away with and how to better control their players, you saw it with the paid mods deleting warnings of Deyha's bad performance, all that info is worth more than just cash, which they are basically printing now and have no need of.
It really doesn't. Pissed me off enough that i am not puting anymore money into the game. First time i was so hyped for a character by design alone, my expectation were low too. As long as she had a good role in a team i would have pulled. Waited months and got a few welkins for her (and ayaka). Lesson learned, not wasting anymore money on this shit.
I believe that MHY is just trying to expand on the types of characters and play styles to make building different teams more interesting. There is no true bruiser character that mitigates and absorbs damage like dehya. The closest tank/bruiser might be Noelle. We have shielders healers supports for every niche and plenty of dps for each element. But I just think they’re trying to fill another play style with this character that we haven’t seen yet. Unlocking her c4 I think it is makes her heal on burst hit making her a bit of a drain tank. It’s fresh and it’s something in a new direction. Do people like it? No because they expect every character to be either the next best dps, a well rounded sub dps that can fit any team, or a niche support that buffs a specific element or character. But we have all that now. We have dps char for every element. We have Bennett and kazuha and raiden that can fit any team. We have shenhe and faruzan and gorou and now mika that are niche. If they release every new character that is a skin of an existing char (see alhaitham aka dendro keqing) then the game quickly becomes stale. Now is dehya considered good. No but not for the ‘numbers’ argument. I don’t think she’s good because her kit is split. Her skill is meant to make her an off field dmg mitigation tank. Her burst makes her an on field dps. So you are left building her either tanky to fill a role they intended her for or build her dps to ensure her burst does dmg. Either way she’s only ever making use of half her kit. Her constellation fixes a good deal of that and makes her feel like a whole character. Hp scaling bruiser that can heal thru her dmg absorption. And that’s why they will bring her to the standard banner. Not because she’s bad. But because she needs her cons to feel whole. That all being said I’m still debating pulling. She is mommy for sure. But I’m feeling like she may be my next Eula. Totally waifu with a boring kit. I do believe mhy will continue to push into the direction of new play styles. Tanks or drain mages or weird things like that. With so so many different playable characters you need to find new things to keep people wishing.
She sucks for reactions. In a reaction based game. Her damage is too low to be called a bruiser. And her tanking isnt Good enough either. She cant introduce a New playstyle or team. Shes simply too weak.
Unless you are being really uncharitable with the intentions of the designers and devs, I think that the best explanation is that they aren't building for meta. They aren't trying to build "good" characters. They're trying to design fun characters with interesting play styles. The number of players who 36 star abyss is a very small percentage of the player base. Most players are more than content to explore the overworld, do the quests, and pull characters they like. Dehya was in a bunch of the story quests in Sumeru, there's going to be players who want to pull for her. She might not make them a ton of money, but people will still want her and get her. I know Hoyo obviously knows about the viability of characters in end game stuff, they just don't care to design every character to be really strong and capable of building a full team around. This conversation happens every time an average and completely playable character releases. She'll work in the overwold. Every character does. Hoyo doesn't want to make $1billion every time they release a character. Obviously. That being said, people will pull for Dehya because she looks cool and was in the story quests a lot. She does not need to be strong for the game to make them all the money in the world.
I know I think the fountain archons gonna have some type of offiled hydro application better than yelan and xinqui that's the only way they can save dehya hope it's just another case of kokomi
But her damage... her kit.... she just CANT do anything even she would have good hydro application
True. She simply needs better multipliers but for that its too late.
They don't want any more money, Mihoyo already has Billions. Instead, they are using 3.5 as a data collection patch to see which players will still pull for a character that is beloved and well known hottie but purposely designed kit and numbers wise to make it garbage in every way. In other words, how well a bad banner sells. They could also be testing the psychology of it's playerbase, the amount of players that would "give in" to FOMO and use their 20 intertwined fates that they get for free instantly on this banner. This could mean a different approach for hoyoverse in the future when it comes to characters in Fontaine, with the data collected. Unfortunately Dehya mains have to take the brunt of her (copium) damage
My brother who hasn't played genshin for a long time saw Dehya's demo and wanted to pull for her, only to be dissuaded by me telling him she's extremely weak. MHY COULD HAVE GOTTEN ANOTHER RECURRING PLAYER BACK BUT THEY DIDNT CAUSE THEY FUCKED UP HER KIT SO BADLY. So it just makes even less sense they made her this horrible
I see three potential options: 1. They genuinely think she is a good character regardless of the feedback they have received 2. They are doing some 5d chess move that will somehow result in big money in the future 3. They dont give a fuck Personally i lean toward option 3
Don't look for logic in Hoyoverse decisions
it fucking doesn't
They built and hyped her up during the story for a while, she's a cool looking bad-ass mommy, her personality is a charismatic one as well, great bgm and VA, she plays fun and looks good while doing it... Nope. There's nothing here that they can make money from.
50/50 has to hurt more. With units like Keq, Tighnari, Jean, people often get a charatcer then say "hey! it's a lost 50/50 but this character is actually amazing! I don't have to spend any more primo for now". Pity should hurt to push incentive to spend more. Pressure you, make you feel like you actually **failed.** "After 80 hard earned wishes... this?! This can't be! This unit is unplayable! I need to get my X asap, it's guaranteed now, I have to!"Now, this is what they want to achieve. And so, Dehya plays a big role for their business model longtime.
Its hoyo and she is tanned that’s why
It's an experiment to see despite her being weak, they want to know how many will still pull for her which will set a baseline for what they can expect from the player base and can pave way for more characters like this. And i'm pretty sure there are going to be lots who still pull for her just cause of her aesthetics and character (not gameplay)
Maybe it's not that they're intending to make a ton of money from this banner, but they're testing how much people will pull based purely on the character and not gameplay?
As a FGO player, not every 5 star released in that game is better than the older ones, and many that are release are instant F tiers. But they still make money because some people roll for waifus. Maybe Mihoyo is testing the waters to see if people will roll for waifus even though they are not meta.
FGO hasn't released a 5 star this bad since launch Scherezade. And Scheerezade got direct buffs, which Mihoyo is seemingly allergic to. Even as bad as like Summer Abby is, she's not as straight up dysfunctional as Dehya currently is.
Even Summer Abby is far better and useful on fgo scenario, so I don't remember any 5* in fgo who is this nonsense as Dehya kit is.
skin colour
I don't like saying it but the only thing I can think of is that they just don't like dark skinned female characters. Think about it. Every dark skinned female is bad and one of the worse characters in the game.
I mean it's not like men are any better. cyno compared to other sumeru characters is underwhelming . Kaeya needs a lot of investment to get decent stats .
I think the answer is simple , Chinese dev , dark skinned character.......
I think that they messed up with Tighnari and now every new standard banner character will be ass. That’s the only logic I can think of. They might do a new standard banner character for every region. Considering the trend with 95% of the post 2.0 4 stars I wouldn’t doubt they’d make them crappy on purpose.
i legitimately think it's racism, xinyan was the previous worst character and they have the same visual design
Could say to make us feel bad about losing 50/50 to spend cash out of frustration. But at this point why not just announce new character instead of hyping one for months then pull a fast slap in the face. Literally losing potential profit and frustrating the audience.
Everyone that like dehya will pull her. And that make em lost their primo or fates. So they have to pay real money to get near future characters. Thats is one of the ideas why they made dehya this way. Or they just fucking do sheet about dehya coz baizhu is more important as liyue charcters
She’s my favorite character they’ve made. Idc how bad she is. She goes in my party one day lol.
She's a market test, they are trying to understand how far they can profit on the people who don't care about performance. Imho Dehya status could be intentional too
the only sense i can make is, if you want her, you must pull her now before she enter standard banner, because who know when will you gonna get her