Thoma’s release, albeit a popular one, has been met with a weird amount of disappoint surrounding his overall impact as a playable character, and I was a bit surprised to see this at first, until I realized a lot of it had to do with expectations that Thoma would be a flexible support that could deal massive damage, which he, like many recent 4 stars, is not. As to why, though, I’ll explain in the video and discuss what this might mean for future 4 stars and why it’s a GOOD thing, overall.
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edited by meeee
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music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSNJ_es1BKY
by Eric Godlow
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0:00 Intro
0:26 Thoma’s Expectations
1:20 Thoma’s Reality
2:50 Future Characters
#genshinimpact #genshin #thoma
source
is thoma underwhelming? up for debate.
is thoma a great, wholesome human? no doubt.
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Excellent analysis of Thoma and his role/niche in the game. As grateful as I am for all the early broken 4* characters that are good at multiple things, Thoma is a good example of how 4* units should have been designed from the beginning.
So how about 4 piece Thundering Fury Thoma?
I think Thoma isn't bad at all. His fire can be triggered once every sec, for comparison, Xingqiu rain sword is 1.5 sec, Albedo E proc is 2 sec, Xiangling's pyronado is 1.7-2 sec. And he has AOE while Xingqiu is single target. For a shielder to do even more damage is power creeping both Zhongli and Albedo
Support character that is one dimensional is not a great character, no matter how good his shield is. Even Diona offers a shield with healing, and even an EM buff at C6. MHY does not need to power creep but they should try to make more unique characters with specific utility aspects or combos thereof.
this is just GENSHIT
Frankly, this is a wrong way to go about dealing with powercreep. Sayu wasn't meta breaking but people still liked her because she had a unique skillset. Thoma is really just a harder to build pyro Diona with more limitations for a better shield. If you want to make a niche character, then at least make his kit a bit more interesting.
Genshin always innovating! I never expected to see a reverse powercreep, where the old characters are way better than the new ones! Outstanding work as always lmao
His burst should be 65 from the start. 80 cost is way too expensive for for just a shield with a tiny bit of damage. Like hell it could even be 40. All of a sudden he isn't that bad now. It just didn't make sense to make a support character that needs 200% energy recharge to function.
people say hes a great shielder but thats only when auto attacking, which i find devalues him by a lot. theres so many situations where you cant auto attack that it makes his shield a lot less valuable IMO
The problem that I have with him is how hard it is to maintain and stack his shield.
If the shield breaks early you cannot stack. If you can’t produce enough energy or have too low ER the duration of the shield will just end. Or if you just forget to use it or are careless you will lose all stacks. Too much micromanaging for an only shield character.
This is literally the opposite of power creep. It still imbalances af since XL XQ and benett still irreplaceable. MHY should at least make characters near their power level before pumping out mediocre one.
You need to build him with EM
I literally have thoma at c3 with emblem and tenacity and with 183 ER with favonius. he literally is a match made in heaven for hutao. I just run him on triple hp. I had no trouble 36 staring the abyss with him and I didn't have to switch teams or anything. glad I can put my zhongli somewhere else
No. I dnt think it's about powercreep. I think at this point mihoyo doesnt even know what they are doing.👍
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The problem with Thoma is not that he can't DPS, the problem is that with full HP build he barely a better shielder, than Diona….
I guess Mihoyo really scared to make a substitute for Zhongli, cause chinese fans will eat them alive…
I think what people forget is that most of the starter 4 star characters aren't broken, get way better with constellations, and we didn't realize how good a lot of their kits were for a long time. Bennett, Xingqiu, and Xiangling are obviously broken, and keep getting more broken with the release of new weapons and artifact sets. Noelle and Barbara are useful early game, but have no use for late game players. Fischl and Beidou are really good supports, but only for certain team comps. Beidou also kinda needs c2 to be really good. Sucrose, Razor, Chongyun and in some cases Ningguang get power crept by 5 stars. I do think that the 5 star Inazuma characters are more niche, but it's not like version 1.0 4 stars are all broken 10/10 must haves
The thing about creating characters that could do more than one thing and excels on all of the things they can do, people will no longer appreciate characters built to do only one role and only excel on that one role, which is pretty sad in my opinion. I'm still building Thoma regardless.
It's unfair to compare original 4 star characters, especially supports to new ones. Because of the low character pool in the release of Genshin, available characters needed to fullfil a lot of roles, why Bennet has heals, buffs, damage, etc.. Xingqui has, heals, damage mitigation, off field damage etc… even Noelle, has shield, heal, damage, etc..
With more characters in Genshin now, Mihoyo can now focus on a character to do 1 or maybe 2 things well to not make older characters be irrelevant. Also even for newer characters to not feel irrelevant but that's difficult since we already have characters like Bennet, xingqui, xiangling as base of comparison.
Those who complain are probably meta slaves so I don't care, I got my Thoma and I'm happy whether he is dmg or support
The main issue imo is that if you make characters that are too niche, they become arguably inferior. The main issue with Thoma as a shielder is that unlike him, other shielders either 1. Have access to a Sacrificial weapon for uptime or 2. Are Zhongli. This means that the strength of Thoma's shields fall to the wayside as you have to build for so much energy recharge just to keep it up.
Another thing is that the og characters, like Xiangling, have no ICD while newer 4stars have the ICD
From now on I would save for weapon banner instead, as new characters 5* or not tend to be more weaker than what we have before Inazuma.
I'd say Xinyan is more usable than Thoma on many aspects.
The problem I think with recent characters is that we have been spoiled with the all rounder sub-DPS/support power level of Xingqiu and Bennett. Even Xiangling fits into so many teams because she brings incredible off-field DPS and support. Thoma is meant to be niche and fit in with Hu Tao, but I would argue that having a character support only one or two main DPS character is not great design, especially in a gacha game.
Power creep is something that will happen, but making characters with innate flaws will ultimately come back to those characters being overlooked for general use characters.
i wanted him c6 now im okay with c0
I have him at c4 and I'm having a blast with him. I use 2pc tenacity/emblem and I find that that is a good balance of stats for him. I have 170 er (which is a lot considering he's c4) and I use favonious lance too. In most scenarios, I can have 100% shield uptime. I finally have a taste of what zhongli players go through cause I usually face tank everything now haha
(Also maybe power creep isn't a bad thing for 4 stars rn cause while I love the national team supports, I want more diversity 😔😔😔)
what i cannot understand is this truth about thoma being something sad i mean why would it be sad to limit new characters but make them extremely strong in certain aspects so they can result in interesting combinations and not outpowering old characters at the same time, far better than making characters incredibly overpowered in every single aspect and making them necessary in every team you could imagine
The Power creep is Ganyu.
He’s bad unless used with Hu Tao smoge
Seriously why is his ascension stat ATK? It makes no sense at all
c'mon can u just bear it 🐻?!and stop find the good or bad truth 😂 bear it okay for GENSHIT okay 👍
The most sense would be to BUFF current and newer characters rather than nerf the overpowered ones. I don’t know how people would feel if their invested characters got nerfed. Plus Genshin is PVE so it’s not like buffing the niche characters would be bad or p2w
Just like Sara being a good raiden support, Thoma is the same as well. He gives really good shielding, pyro applicator allowing swirl, all and all perfect for hu tao, but also very mediocre for other teams as he could only provide shield and nothing else
The fact that my Xinyan at level 80 with decent artifacts is has much stronger shields than Thoma is worrying. I hope Mihoyo buffs him a little bit to compensate to his lack of gameplay options other than shielding……..which he even suffer to excel at.
Having a big shield and almost nothing else is kinda useless tbh, I mean sure you have a big shield if that's what you want buuuut it's still not that great.
sacrificial polearm is not gonna make Thoma great
his damage scaling is extremely mediocre so he's basically a shield slave bot like Zhongli
yeah a boring slave shield bot Zhongli and Thoma
I knew when I read his kit and constellations that he's not worth the fates
Very nice discussion! New sub! Looking forward for more
No new endgame content after 1 year and still the same old supports in every team….gj MHY.
If this will be the case, then fuck 5 Stars , i'll build Noelle c6.
Hating tohma for no reason imo. As someone who doesnt have a shield character he is great
His C1 literally useless in co-op… what an expensive constellation
Genshin community is pathetic, XQ and Bennett are ridiculously overpowered and people actually think that new 4* characters should be a failure in balancing as well.
XQ/B are terrible characters because the entire meta revolves around them. Hell, one of the biggest pros for Childe is, that he frees XQ for the other teamy that's just obscene. How does that make any sense?
in life and gacha games you should always lower expectations or you'll end up underwhelmed since anything can happen….
Why his basic attack animations so smooth though?
i think the issue is not the simple fact that the characters are niche (like if you want an amazing hu tao team without zhongli and with pyro resonance, thoma's your guy) but more with the time and resources of investing in these characters. it can take a whole week to get talent books all while totally neglecting artifacts, weapon mats, talent books, mora and bosses (which is even harder to manage if you're f2p.)
just like with how they cut costs for weekly bosses, mihoyo should think about what they should do once there's too many characters to manage or everyone will stick to the all-rounder supports that can be used on lots of teams without sinking resin repeatedly on niche supports that only work on a few teams.
i think if mihoyo made it easier to level characters, it wouldn't be such an issue, but bc genshin is more of a resource management game than anything else, picking from a roster of supports when you're focusing on building your new 5* dps before anything else is going to leave you leaning towards your tried and true that are only outperformed by the niches at high investment.
Bennett, Xiangling, and Xingqiu: hehhehe, look at these new 4 star characters that are niche as hell
Tbh, I thought thoma will be a pyro xingqiu w/ shield. I shouldve kept my expectations low. The reason why there is no sacrificial polearm is that the sacrificial weapon series belongs to old mondstadt during the leadership of the nobilities. The nobilities feared the polearms because they see it as an act of rebellion; thats why they didnt include polearms for sacrificial events but after the lawrence clan was overthrown by vennessa w/ the help of the dawn knight, Ordo of favonius restored the use of polearms.
Sac spear probably won’t be added because of lore which is hilarious
The part I personally disagree with is the reverse powercreep section. While I do understand that they want to avoid making every character stronger releasing these weak asf units just makes everything the same… I mean really the abyss teams haven't changed much since like 1.2 and people still run the same 3 unit team cores with a flex slot here and there and I would love to see more inazuma characters besides kazuha ayaka and Raiden take the spotlight but it seems mihoyo just wants to make inazuma shitty…
It's over a year now and it still feels like they don't understand their own game. Even if you look past Thoma's insultingly low base stats, the biggest wtf to me is why can't Thoma's shield be applied to other players in co-op. For someone who's all about protecting, MiHoYo can't even think to implement this detail?