An in depth analysis of the gameplay design of Yae Miko, limited 5-star character recently released in Genshin Impact’s 2.5. Hopefully you can tell why I feel that her kit is very poorly designed in many different ways.
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Intro: 0:00
Elemental Skill Problems: 0:51
Elemental Burst Problems: 3:41
2nd Ascension Passive Problems: 5:47
Forced Weapon Synergy?: 7:04
How I’d Improve Yae: 8:26
Conclusion: 9:54
#Genshin #GenshinImpact #YaeMiko
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for those mentioning that "the triangle is too small" for my proposed idea yeah… I know that
when I said "though it would admittedly be much more difficult to implement" I had assumed everyone would understand that includes the many smaller changes that would also have to be added to make the ability feel right and properly fit the gameplay style it's going for (stuff like sakura tether length and dash length)
100% my fault, that's what happens when I'm the only one proofreading my scripts so everything makes perfect sense in my head lol
i know they play favorite but hot damn
To be honest, I find all characters in GI, both 4 and 5 stars, bland in their kit designs. Their elemental skills and bursts are mostly the same, just with different elements and effects and stats. Mechanic wise there are little to zero difference. Maybe Kazuha, Childe and Xiao are the only ones unique enough in my book, Yae could have been another unique one if they did her kit right but they played safe unfortunately. There are so much potential bc they already have good foundation in their combat system and they only need to develop it. Mihoyo either severely lack creativity or they are too afraid to bring new things to the game, or worst, they are too busy creating unfinished characters that need constellations to be playable to rip off players.
She meant to be a shimenawa set user but her beauty able to charm most player so if they make her strong player will be stick with her very long time so they intentionally screw it up so the next character come out you definitely will pull for it since she just good looking not attacking
could've made her skill explode when expired 🙁
watch ayato come out and be perfectly fine with no bugs or clunkiness lol
As a designer I've always agreed and made the same points that you've had with most of your Genshin Impact videos, but this is the first time where I didn't fully agree with your points. I'm going to type more than I've done in any other comment because I just wanted to voice my own opinion which I don't see being shared.
I've always thought that Genshin was never an amazingly designed game. A lot of its gameplay designs are weaker versions of existing games, and the only element that really is unique is the reaction based team comp builder aspect of it. There are positives and negatives and its just fine. I enjoy playing it for the most part, but also understand that due to being a mobile game, they probably cut back on a lot of designs being pushed.
Yae Miko was actually the only reason why I haven't quit this game yet. I've been having a blast with her and I think she is the most fun character they've released. I will admit, I do have a bias towards movement skills in games, and Yae gives 3 dashes with her e (which i fucking LOVE). But I wouldn't call her kit poorly designed. No more so than any other Genshin character. Lets take my other favorite character for example, Hutao. She also has this concept of a berserker playstyle. Playing around low health and controlling HP bar. Except. After playing with Hutao for over a year. I've realized that the berserker playstyle never comes into play. Her "best team" with xinqiu and zhongli and a flex completely negate you ever worrying about her hp. She just becomes another pyro DPS. I feel that a lot of characters in Genshin are like this, where there are cool concept that get completely changed by team play. Yoimiya just ended up being Hutao 2.0 Even Raiden I don't consider designed to be the best her concept could be. In actual gameplay, she merely adds 1 layer of rotation onto your gameplay where you press q and a bunch of autos. There's not actually a change of gameplay pace or style.
So now about why I started typed this shit noone will read in the first place. Yae Miko was my experience embracing a slower paced gameplay. I've been 36 starring abyss since its 3rd iteration and when I stopped caring about how much damage I did and just enjoyed dancing around the battlefield with Yae E's, I finally experienced a different way to play Genshin. I didn't have to chase enemies around, I didn't have care about what order I did my skills in. It wasn't about big number reactions. I could just place down all this passive damage enjoy the character I pulled. My favorite team to run around with became Yae, Albedo, Fischl, Kokomi. If i put Yae in my Hutao team instead, I can still 36 star abyss. Where there missed opportunities? Hell yeah. But that's literally every aspect of Genshin. I mean even the design of travelling in Genshin is worse than its inspiration, Breath of the Wild. Every aspect of this game has missed chances. All of the amazing elemental reactions we could have gotten and instead we get reactions that – Deal more damage – Heal more -Deal more damage, Deal more damage but less damage than other reaction. Deal more damage but in small amounts. etc.
I highly expect people to not care or flame me about why she sucks because she doesn't do damage. But to me, Genshin impact is not designed to be played at this high stakes calculating level. At least not until they release actual end game content. (Floor 12 abyss is an actual joke in challenging content "Lets just put enemies in a level and they're high level…Anything else? Nope")
I really enjoy the suggestions you gave to improve Yae; critiques are the lifeblood of design. I don't think any of your points are invalid. But. Having kits that aren't fully realized don't make them more or less fun. That is fully subjective. This point is important to me because I feel that if we overfocus on the amount of poor design in a characters kit, Genshin will take even less chances in making different characters. They'll just take the existing braindead designs that should be baseline foundations and never leave. I don't believe that the character's designs are what makes them poorly received, but that more complex designs aren't being taken far enough in implementation. If a design for big damage number dps comes out, who cares if its lackluster and uninspired. It does its job of doing big damage. Something lackluckter about a more complex design of a summoner who is focused on totem placement? People take more notice. If we go even further in critiques Genshin's design, theres a list a mile long of grievances and what ifs.
This was a great watch, I love content that talks about design. Being in the industry, its always a fun listen.
It should have been that depending on the number of Totems on the field the party receives a different buff.
Example:
1 Sesshou Sakura Totem = +ATK SPD%
2 Sesshou Sakura Totems = +ER%
3 Sesshou Sakura Totems = +EM%
This way, the player can decide what kind of buff the party needs, and all three buffs are somewhat viable. This also gives Yae much more value than just being an off-field electro applicator when she's already competing for that role against A-SS Tier units like Raiden, Fischl, and Beidou.
I really hope they're planning to fix Yae's kit somehow. Because right now it's kind of unfair to trick players into spending saved primos and real money for a lackluster character gameplay design that was extremely hyped up in the story for seven months.
when i tried her in the test-run, i genuinely thought you were supposed to "net" the enemies with her skill
i think it's another mihoyo screw up from eternal crunch time nightmare, they fail to finished her kit in time, and change it somewhat just so she can be released, her kit are all over the place, there's those theory in CN that mihoyo often swap things around just so they can release them like kazuha and freedom sword that aesthetically make no sense (freedom sworn fit jean 2nd outfit soo much actually, and they get released at the same time, yet the effect are tailored to kazuha, because chance are they fail to finish kazuha signature weapon on time), same with the 4 star new catalyst that no matter how you look it's definitely kokomi catalyst signature design wise, but they put it for miko somehow, there's also those shimenawa artifact that didn't fit yoimiya, and fit yae better if only she still scaled on elemental mastery, though that part also get scrapped
there are many artifact and signature weapon that didn't fit the character because mihoyo swap their effect to fit other character instead
Yae's Ascension stats feel like the keqing ascension-electro problem but again. They dont mesh well
I tried using her as Main dps instead of sub and it felt much more comfortable
EXCEPT the damage wasn't good
So it makes me feel like they started with making her a main on field dps but scrapped the idea mid way
I needed to see her in ther fox form to pull for her and that did not happen:(
I feel like mihoyo backed down on her initial design for some reason
Yae miko shows bad side of Hoyoverse as far as character design is concerned
Yae miko FEELS like a character who is incomplete without her wep and Constellation and even after that she's still not as great as many of the other 5 stars at C0 or low cons
I like Yae's playstyle, but I do agree that in some ways, her gameplay seems to be overly complicated just to separate her from other characters that would fill a similar spot on the team. Albedo, for example, has a fairly simple and straightforward gameplay: you just place the flower on the ground, switch to other characters, and enjoy from extra damage from his burst when its up. Yae seems to be designed to act in a similar way, but she's fairly more difficult to use. I mean, she had potential to fit into many teams that are based on electro reactions, but with this clunky of a gameplay, Fischl honestly seems like a safer option. Hope they fix the problems the playerbase haz pointed out she, because that could make her a lot more versatile and useful, like many other sub dps
I really want my 150 wishes back
I always knew lisa was gonna be better, nobody can replace lisa. they might have replaced amber with yoemi, but no my lisa.
i really wanted since she was first teased but now i'm leaning more towards ayato because of how weird her kit is and overall clunkiness
What's the name of the bgm?
There's a reason why I hate electro catalyst users XD I wanna die with normal atk auto aim already
I save so much primos and I didn’t know what character to pull
I was gonna pull for her after I played her trial
And boy oh boy my expectations are too high
I am at a point where I lose faith in MHY due to the downfall of recent storylines, character designs etc.. Dont get me wrong, I love the looks of all characters, but their design is continuously getting worse. Imo Kazuha & Raiden have been the best characters of the entire game so far and ever since characters make no "sense" any more. Artifact sets look like Yae but are used on other charactesr, Yoimiya is even worse off in this case. It feels like MHY is changing their plans during execution which fucks ob the entire "image" of the character as a whole.
6:24 the theory about yae being incomplete or changed during the process seems even more true now (if all the points mentioned by others didnt already say that)
Can Mihoyo just reduce the cast time of her elemental skill? That might make her less clunky
My yae miko ulti damage is 18-22+k lol with just cr 59% cd 151% and talent level 5/5/5
her elemental skill swiftly kills enemies in water without making you take damage aswell, it also is usefull when you got to move a bit futher to dodge a attack but out of stamina, i find it fun that her elemental burst can have 4 total strikes instead of one strike of that total damage cause crit rate = RNG, to add on top of that she is a off field dps that works best with raiden and the fact she has so much dmg off field every second is just crazy
Playing Yae Miko:
"Right here!"
"Right now"
"Emerge!"
x infinity
I think, every single one of her problems would be solved if
1) She could cast all her turrets at once, like make them just appear in a triangle around her and that's it.
2) Her second passive buffed all her damage or at minimum Burst and skill damage.
3) They made her turrets able to snapshot, for reference, Yae's turrets will lose Bennet's buff if Yae steps out of her circle for example, but also they will go back at dealing extra damage as soon as she's buffed. Sounds like they made it that way to capitalize her catalyst's buff
The why:
The burst is completely fine, the biggest problem of the burst is that you need to cast everything twice, if for some reason you had to break the rotation (bosses changing phases for example) so slowly casting the 3 turrets and having to cast the turrets after the burst is what makes her to lose a bunch of time. The burst on itself is fine (I'm doing 50~60 with a widsith depending on the buff)
Her second passive would make sense if it buffed her burst damage at least, so she could capitalize from someone like sucrose or any EM buffing character, but maybe they thought it was too strong.
About the weapon, honestly, The widsith is literally second best in slot if R5, that means, being better than all the other 5* catalysts at R1 and probably better than them as long as they don't reach R4/R5, might depend on the catalyst tho. it's disgusting that the catalyst is made specifically to get max buff at 3 casts when most catalyst users have TWO charges, except Yae. it's totally an scumbag tactic.
I wish that they changed it to be 2 times but with the same numbers as when it's 3 times. Since 3 charges on the skill isn't going to be a common thing ever.
I don't get it, Yae is one of my best catalyst user, and same as the kokomi fuss before, I don't see why her kit isn't good enough ? Like i'm based of 12 000 roughly when i crit and 9 000 when I don't, I think it's ok for a catalyst user…