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Just tried Imaginarium Theatre and I absolutely hated it. I don't like the fact that I can only use certain units TWICE. I know I've been playing a gacha game this whole time, and I already have been suffering from the lack of resin, but I absolutely despise artificial scarcity systems in games, like timed combat (yes, I've also hated Spiral Abyss for this) and limited usage for characters. It would have not been much of an issue if Genshin beforehand actually incentivized people to building more characters, but NO. Players did not HAVE TO, and now all of a sudden this content comes along demanding the exact same thing. Building characters are resource intensive and time consuming and the resin cap only increased by 40 with NO RESERVES other than the condensed resin that you have to craft... by hunting crystal flies. I don't know, I'm just confused as to why they decided to make this game mode as it is, when they could've easily implemented similar end game modes from their other games. Imagine a Simulated Universe-like game mode for Genshin, for instance. OR better yet, utilize Genshin's combat focused (kinda) gameplay more with weekly raids, be it solo or co-op with escalating and/or varying buffs/debuffs relative to the difficulty, elemental reactions, and environmental/stage hazards. And you know what? Why don't you make those raids an overworld objective as well, if you wanna make use of the game being open world and make players want to roam much like Bounties, but more? Either way, of course them rewards better be worth it.

My issue with the mode, okay it's two actually: First, the contradiction of the mode itself. It is so easy that anyone COULD clear it, but so restrictive that in reality most people can't even START the mode. And people who do not enjoy levelling a few character to max potential for Abyss probably also don't enjoy building an army of them instead. It's the same amount of investment, but instead of vertical you now have to invest horizontally into all of your characters. And second, you know I wouldn't mind, not even the weird contradictory concept behind the mode, because as it is it feels like a permanent event. And we have been begging Genshin to add permanent events to add more replayable content to the game. But then WHY did hoyo have to remove 50% of the Abyss in return? It did not actually ADD any content, it just exchanged part of the content we already had for the new one. And the new one... really is just not that good, so much so that even hoyo for the first time in 4 years actually admitted that the mode is not good, and are trying to change it. But I doubt they will fix the fundamental issues with it. Also I heavily disagree that hoyo's intention behind this is to force players to make characters that don't synergize with each other to somehow magically synergize. It really just feels like a blatant attempt to motivate players to PULL more characters so they can even play this mode, because many, especially newer players, just cannot realistically fulfill the requirement with all these restrictions in place, unless they just PULL more characters.

too easy for hardcore, too restricted for casual. a game mode that cater for no one

It just feels like a scuffed randomizer. You don’t know which units you will get access to, and most real decisions are “can I beat this level without using up my 2-3 most valuable characters.” Using teams that have no synergy at all is incredibly uninteresting. I also found that almost every round I end up regretting using a specific character because the new characters i get next round now don’t have any cohesion with each other. Ways to help fix it? Add a 4th element. Show what characters will be added to the pool before you choose who to fight with. Let us replace the starter/trial characters with our own characters. Make the buffs matter more. For instance, let us collect more powerful buffs and choose 1-2 to apply during each battle round so that there aren’t a bunch of wasted buffs every other fight.

What happened to your wuthering waves video ? And did you actually post one or was I hallucinating

FINALLYYY someone defending imaginarium :) my favorite part is that this event makes my traveler even more useful! she can be any element i need

i was so happy to see him in recent test run teams with arlecchino and clorinde!

Imagine waiting ✨ ONE WHOLE MONTH✨ for the reset and just finishing it within a few minutes. I hate it because the devs absolutely wasted this whole gameplay, place and lore just to make it unreplayable, they could have added more difficulties/stages and rewards so there's incentive to keep playing it. Now its just another waste of space i visit once a month.

Lmao it is nothing new but an event that they already did. I cleared it in one go, so for ke its nothibg but monthly inconvenience to get 640 primos. I was excited for this but this was not that good, plus ayato'd pose is boring asf, still got it cause i like him

The thing is, team building is the most fun aspect of Genshin Impact for most people including myself. Therefore, most players, don't like the idea of crippling themselves with scuffed teams which (most of the time) have almost no synergy whatsoever because of the elemental and character restrictions Hoyo put into the gamemode. I don't mind playing non-meta teams but being forced to play, for example, Arlechino and Faruzan in the same team just doesn't work. It is just not fun to being forced to play teams with no synergy.

i like it, but i wish the combat scenarios were more interesting. it's literally just circles filled with hit-sponges of enemies. PLEASE make the actual combat more interesting...

Its matter of perspective really but for me the game just keeps eroding. I have more to say but meh : /

11:20 THANK YOU I hate the fact that they buff the characters outside the game mode tbh. I want to know what my charcters' actual strength level is, not some buffed strength level that will dissapear again...

This. Alllllll this. Thank you for being a different CC than the majority who seem to ride each other’s dicks who posts the same shit all over. You’re really a breath of fresh air. Keep it going!

Having a game mode where you needed to find functional teams based on random characters would have been fun. What we got, was a game mode where challenge is exchanged for tedium. You can still beat everything with just one character, and the other three are just present. The restrictions end up being entirely inconsequential, and the game mode is overall very easy.

You like it because you can actually play it. I have competent teams that can clear the abyss sometimes with 36 stars. What does having 2 good teams mean for me in this new mode? I can do the easyest diffculty and absolutely nothing else

obtained plenty primogems, and happy with the results. I don't hate the Theater. Enjoyed the experience. borrowed a character from my cousin to help.

Finally someone who also agrees that IT is a good game mode with a few small downsides. But I think level is just a bad metric to determine how much a character is build. (Thinking back to my chevereuse who was just sitting on bad hp artifacts, lvl 70, and a half leveled weapon but not talent lvl even though I had the materials) If it was me I would put a "build" meter into it (like how the game evaluates why you failed a domain) that considers level, talents, weapon and artifact levels.

What makes theater so annoying for people is how easy but restricted it is at the same time. It's an easy mode, but you can't play all 8 waves without 18 ELEMENTALLY NON-RESTRICTED characters. It's also supposed to be an end-game mode but you can unlock it after AR 35, is this some kind of joke? Yes, early-game players can also participate if they have at the very least 6 characters other than the trial ones at level 60, but that only makes things worse for new players because then how are they gonna invest into the abyss? The theater asks you to do the exact opposite of what abyss asks you to do and that makes the imaginarium theater's existence even more unreasonable and they released it at the worst possible time. Hoyo has been making abysses harder and harder and players were and are doing their best to upgrade their characters to their best possible ceiling, yet half of the rewards of the abyss tranfer into a new game mode that wants you to use your resin in a vertical way. What does that mean, you might ask? WHY ARE YOU MAKING A HARDER ABYSS WHICH MAKES ME WANNA UPGRADE MY CHARACTERS AND RIGHT AFTER THAT GIVE ME A MODE THAT WANTS ME TO DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT THE OTHER MODE ASKS ME TO DO!?!?!? What I'm trying to say is that hoyo doesn't help us with both modes but makes things harder by saying "invest into one and quit the other, pick and play". I'd understand it if the abysses were easy but you give me the hardest content so far in the mode that always existed and then you transfer my guaranteed rewards from it to a new mode that has nothing to do with the old content and you ask me the question "abyss or theater?". I feel like if hoyo were to asnwer this they'd say "Oh WhY dO yOu ThInK wE iNcReAsEd ThE rEsIn CaP?", yeah like it's even enough for someone to build at the very least 6 characters at AR 35 with that amount. "YoU hAvE FrAgIlE rEsIn", then how am I gonna use it when I will need it the most, at AR 45? "NoT mY PrObLeM nOw PiCk AnD pLaY". Hoyo always does the same, they have the possibility to go 2 steps forward and they go 2 steps back.

The problem with borrowing characters from friends currently is that you need to meet the requirements to start the difficulty, so ability to do so doesn't lower the number of characters that need to meet the requirements. I like the idea of the game mode overall, but the execution missed the mark for me as it felt more frustrating than fun.

I also loved it! I am Ar60 and i tend to build most of ky characters, i think there are less than 10 units i haven't build, so I had fun eoth weird teams. The thing i don't understand is how sime people can complaining about it "being impossible for low ar players" like yeah its end game And how people who play only hyperbloom now complain they can't play. Thats the point, you want to build more than one team

6:16 "unlikely" That's exactly what happened with my second account of similar age as yours. This account I invested a lot in Dendro and Hydro units, since hyperbloom teams are a very strong f2p option. The only other DPS I have is Arlecchino which is in the starting cast. I have no usable Anemo units outside of Sucrose.

I quite enjoyed it as well. Theres definitely some room for improvements but its a nice start for a new and different endgame mode. I do also like to build up more characters and i like the challenge of playing unoptimal/bad teams because im trying to save characters for other chambers. One aspect I'm just incredibly confused aboit is the support function. You can choose a support character from your friend list BUT once you "lock it in" by starting IT you can't choose a different character from that friend anymore. I don't have a lot of friends in genshin bc i rarely engage in multiplayer aspects, but i was looking forward to trying out all the characters i dont have from some of the good friends i do have. I just dont quite understand why that is a restriction in the game mode. How would it hurt the gameplay experience by letting me choose a different character from the same friend in another IT run? Why can't i try out my friends Chevruse in one run and the same friends Xiao in another run?

Probably because you joined because of Horizon's co-op activities, you have a fairer attitude towards GI characters, don't invest too much resources in a single character, and IT has less influence on you. But that's not the case for most players

this mod is good only if player havent tried other good rogulike/roguelite games. The moment you play something like SU from Star Rail/ Hades/ Dead Cells you understand that this mod is mid, nothing special. All this restrictions are made to force players to spend money and get more units, its artificial restricitions they doesnt fill natural (devs wanted to manipulate us in the first place making game mod fun was definetly secondary task). About gameplay of the mod: -Yeah, overworld buffs for 6 units is a scummy trick which may mislead new players to believe their new units are stronger than they are in reality. -Unit charges shouldnt prevent us from using our characters in battle, charges should be reward multipliers (Fantasia Flower) -> the more different teams we use the better rewards we get and if we use the same units all the time we dont get curency for upgrades. -Make upgrades have bigger impact in combat. Its pretty easy to beat final boss without any upgrades. -Make Rogulite elements (upgrade theater talent tree like SU from Star Rail) + increase difficulty of bosses (upgrades have a bigger impact so we have to make monsters stronger). Each season fighting final boss straightaway should be difficult, but after several upgrades of tallent tree it should be as easy as now. -Upgrades should be less niche. Devs make charges for unit usage and expect us to have access to gameplay mechanics limited to certain units, it is very unwise decision. For example they sell us buffs for Bond of Life but there are only 3 units which use BoL (Clorinde, Sigewinne, Arlecchino and only 2 of them are DD). Easy fix -> make all BoL upgrades have dual effect: 1-BoL generation, 2-buffing, if you have BoL. -Make more variety for challenges and buffs. There were quite few pretty good player made Divine Ingenuity race maps lets reuse them or random player made Rhythm event tracks (some of them were diabolical). Devs can easily reuse thous assets by chosing top 50 tracks and top 50 race maps. Now both casual and hardcore players can enjoy this mod. Hardcore players may try to chalenge final boss straightaway using the same team all the way, casual players can complete theater on easy mod by upgrading talent tree and using different teams.

I don't think the game mode should be that bad for veteran players. I've been playing for about 4 months so it's fair enough that I can't do all the difficulties right now. I just think that this game mode will take a ridiculous amount of time for newer players to have a decent chance at. The game has pretty limited resin which limits boss,artifact, talent, and weapon material farming and then ascension resources re spawn every 24-48 hours which limits character and weapon leveling. The way the game limits you kind of forces you to level up a few characters instead of a variety. Then getting characters comes down to luck so you might not even get the right element character to level up. The only geo characters i have are noelle and garou because they were pretty much given away. I haven't gotten a single geo character from regular pulls but I have a C5 Barbara. In theory I might get more constellations before I get the right element characters. Basically newer players that don't have a lot of money to spend could be waiting around a year to have a decent shot at that the game mode and I think that's kind of crazy.

I think it all boils down to that abyss is more of a dps check, the more built your characters are, the easier it is to clear while IT is more of an investment check, the more characters you have built, the less the restrictions actually restrict you.

I hate it so much 🔥 i dont have more than 10 fully builded characters

I agreed with many of the complaints you mentioned you've seen, but the biggest downside for me for this new mode was that it took away the primos from the Abyss. I hate not having the option to ignore it, if I do, I'll miss out on like half of the primos I used to get per month. And honestly, I get what you and some comments are saying about Hoyo's intent with this mode, but honestly I think their biggest intent was just to make us feel actually pressured to pull for everyone and spend more money. 😂 I too like to be able to use everyone so I am in the process of building all my characters, but I feel like even if I had everyone decently built I'd still hate the vigor thing. Or the RNG in the characters we get. I mean I feel like the challenges of "Trigger X reaction Y amount of times." and the like would be incentive enough to not use the same team for all 8 acts. But I guess I'm biased 'cause I'm not a combat focused player so I just wanna be done with it asap, so locking me out of using my best available team is annoying for me. 😂 Whatever they do, I just hope they don't make it harder. This game has always been for casuals or chill players and I hope they don't steer from that. And speaking of, now that we have this mode, I hope the trend of making the Abyss harder and harder stops. 🙄

For me, I feel like if they didn't lock you out with level requirements and needing 12 characters that meet that requirement. It would have been received a lot better, The Spiral Abyss doesn't lock you out based on your character level or not having 8 built characters, it let's you mess around and find out, you go in with 8 maxed out characters because you know that otherwise it will be hell. For Imaginarium Theater, It's clear you can beat it with less than 18 characters who are under level 70, there's cards that restore vigor making the 18 character requirement to even start it unnecessary. It would be better if people were allowed to choose how many characters they want and have to learn the hardway that they don't have enough characters, Also, please let people choose less that 4 characters please. With those unnecessary restrictions lifted I can see many challenge runs like, trying to 8 star imaginarium Theater with only 10 characters where they must plan out everything and be extremely efficient. Personally, I enjoyed it a whole lot and the restrictions never really affected me too much because I'm always investing in multiple characters

Your ending statement perfectly sums up why everyone feels the way they do. I've always thought it was weird that so many people hounded everyone saying "you have to invest in only a few characters, otherwise it will bite you later on!" and to that I say "where in the game besides Spiral Abyss does that affect you? No where!" The abyss is the only place that rewards vertical investment. Not everyone wants to do abyss anyways. The rest of the game heavily favors horizontal investment. Especially the open world. Want to survive Dragonspine? Build up your pyro roaster. Want to survive Sumeru? Build up your Dendro roaster. Want to survive Inazuma? Build up your electro roaster etc. Spiral Abyss has been steering everyone in the wrong direction for far too long and Hoyo realized that and made IT to counter that. Too bad it was a little too late as people are already set in their ways. Hopefully people come to realize that abyss (vertical investment) isn't the end all be all of Genshin combat. There's a reason it's so hard to get the perfect build and why there's so many layers of RNG in getting artifacts. It's because you're not ever supposed to. The reason it's designed that way is to discourage players from trying to vertically invest. But Hoyo didn't realize how stubborn people can be as they went and tried to brute force grinding for perfect artifacts anyways. Which caused people to end up hating the system because it was punishing them for playing the way they wanted. Which was not the way Hoyo intended for people to play the game. This is why I think Hoyo's biggest mistake in Genshin is not creating the artifact system, but instead is creating Spiral Abyss.

I totally agree with most of what you said! I like this style of gameplay, and having to fight with suboptimal teams. I also like the added layer of strategy that’s introduced by having to choose characters only a certain amount of times. I think they missed the mark on the buff cards though. There’s no reason to choose specific combinations, because your teams are too random to choose synergistic effects and the effects themselves don’t do enough to allow for combos in of themselves. However I want to stress the point about toggleable buffs for the featured characters - I really hatte them! It’s nice, that they’re there for newer players, but I don’t want it on my own characters. I don’t need even more help with my builds and I actually think it’s misleading when building a new character. And featured characters will obviously be new characters. So in the furore it might be impossible to accurately gauge the true strength of a unit, when wishing on it. And that is terrible. Hoyo won’t habe that though, because it helps sell even weaker characters. Other than that, I think that IT might still be able to evolve into a great gamemode. However I unterstand the frustration in parts of the community, when the mode seems half baked after Hoyo had literally years to work on it.

Perfect video, couldn't have said it better.

I started playing around 5 months ago and after exploring the world my favorite thing to do has been to build my characters so I feel like this mode was tailor made for me haha. I just wish we had more resin, or resources in general. I keep running out of materials 😭😄

They could make it like Divergent Universe in HSR, where even your unbuilt units get a build and decent levels and talents for this mode.

First, this is just like Abyss so new or low AR players can't do hard mode. Second, this Abyss demands strategy if you have not built many characters or have less characters. You have to know where or how to use given characters. I would say it was easy but I struggled a lot with Wanderer since I don't have him, it took me 30 min to learn his rotation with team Faruzan and then using him early cause trial character have low damage, even with buff. For low SOL players even WuWv main Abyss Tower hard mode(hazard zone) follows same rule. And I have not completed it past 21 stars. I will need to wait until I raise SOL level to get 30 or 32 stars whatever. Till then I will not get all rewards every season.

Loved the video and how you pointed to all the different reasons people have for disliking it's current state, even if you didn't agree, that's great. It's not simple at all since different players have different reasonings, but I hope Hoyoverse gets to improve it so it can feel better for everyone.

I adore this game mode, it feels like all the non-meta characters I built have a purpose now! Even Xinyan (One of my favs, but I admit, she is not strong.) carried me through the theatre :]

idk, I completed it 8 stars on the first try and use all but 1 trials characters (Kuki). Its not that hard, its weird and awkward teams yes but not that hard.

I love playing crippled teams, sure. 😂 Why not just reroll account and go out in the overworld with Noelle, anemo MC, Lisa, and Amber? Which basically was "Noelle left-click simulator" when we all started.

Depths of Illusive Realm is way better.

Me too I love theatre, I built all my characters and it's great to use weird teams because those are the teams I use in the overworld anyway. I wish there was more incentive to redo it cause it's just a one and done thing- And to the people who didn't have geo characters built for when it'll get in rotation: sucks to suck

Most people are either having few characters to use or just pushed outside of their comfort zone. It is not bad, just think of it like a rougelike game.

goal: use other non meta characters solution: make them unable to use if you have no luck what happens is people are forced to build dps and dps only. let them carry the team with 3 deadweights forced upon them by rnGOD. "the complaints are cause by disconnect between what players are use to focused on and what hoyoverse want to steer us towards" ay fuck you too bro how about make good characters instead, huh? there's a reason why people dont use Amber in abyss. hell, i doubt people even use her in this new abyss that "supposed" to make unusable character usable sorry about that. no hard feelings. still disagree with your take

yes yes yes!! i am a new player that began this year and i really love the challenge of imaginarium theatre. It’s nice to hear from players that have been around longer that they’re enjoying it too. Hoping this lands on a developers page and they take note of your suggestions 💛

I overall enjoyed Imaginarium Theatre but I did have some problems with it. First off all, the difficulty. Imaginarium Theatre, or at least the first version of it, was easy enough that you pretty much only need 8 characters. A team of 2 relatively well built characters that have any amount synergy and works against the enemies will be able to clear most of the challenges without much issue, and with some help getting energy or VV shred from the last 2 characters on the team it really isnt a hard challenge. Like I was clearing fights with Raiden using a lvl 1 1 star polearm, lvl 70 xiangling with a level 20 catch and 2 leveled artifacts, a level 70 sucrose with level 0 vv artifacts, and a yoimiya that only used burst while equipped with Shimenawas. The mode makes it seem like you will need to build a bunch of characters, but you only really need 8 characters with decent builds, and 10 with whatever random artifacts you have laying around. And the trial characters, while not great, are still more than good enough to be almost all of your damage for nearly any fight. Second is how you get characters. I have done a total of 4 runs of Imaginarium Theatre, 1 on my main account and 3 on my alt account. On 3 of the runs I was fine with the characters I got, I didn't get the exact character I wanted when I wanted them, but it was fine enough. But my second run on my alt account, I got one cards to get more characters, and 1 of the regain vigor mystery caches. For the 7th round I had to choose all of my characters, leaving me with only 1 character + what I could get between rounds to use for the final boss. My team ended up as Baizhu, Sucrose, Xianyun, Kazuha. I was pretty much forced to just leave after that, because I had no damage or a way to deal with Coppelius' cryo shield. My last problem is just that this mode doesn't really work with how Genshin's characters are designed. There is such an overabundance of on-field DPS characters compared to off-field DPS characters and supports, compared to how many teamslots those characters actually get to use. A significant portion of the characters in Genshin do little to nothing when they are not the active character. And that is fine when you can choose your characters freely from all of your characters, but when you have a mode like Imaginarium theatre where you get random characters with limited uses, this becomes an issue. Roughly 40% of the Pyro/ Electro/ Anemo characters not including the starting 6 in the first Imaginarium Theatre, are primarily on-field DPS characters. On the hard difficulty you only really want to choose 1 on-field DPS character, because you already have 3 in the starting cast, and with one more you have enough to use 1 on-field DPS for every challenge without ending up having to put someone like Hu Tao or Diluc on a team with a character like Wanderer. Right now this isn't a big issue because you can clear even with one or two characters on a team that are completely dead weight, but if they increase the difficulty to make having dead weight characters on the team a real problem, then people will start having to build character's they have no interest in using anywhere else, just so they can clear it. Like for me, the only cryo 4 star that I have any interest at all in building is Layla, purely so I can use a shielder for both Yoimiya and Ganyu at the same time in Abyss. The reason why I haven't is that I don't usually play Yoimiya with a shielder, so I would just use Zhongli instead. Every character I have built on my account has been used for several different types of content, like exploring, abyss, domains. Its not fun to spend days worth of resources just so I can use a character for 1-5 minutes in a mode that I play once a month, and the character won't even be usable every month.

1:10 as a long time player who've invested horizontally since day 1 (none of my 30 limited 5*s are above C0), I've always dreamed of using my wacky off meta teams to wreck havoc with the various elemental interactions in the environment. Taking away any semblance of environmental interactions from the endgame of an open world is a huge missed opportunity imo. I love the elemental restrictions (which abyss also have but subtler ; elemental shield, slimes, those flying cyclop thing), but the 4 man team restrictions on top of the vigor system is way too punishing. The idea about allowing a 3 or even 2 man team with debuffs instead is a great fix to challenge vertical invested players. Also as a player who diversifies team every patch, would really love an extra level of difficulty (with artifact/resin centred rewards instead of primos so it's more optional) that just assumes right off the bat you already c6 a limited 5*s and have the power level be adequate to that.

No preference to me. After almost four years it's just Diet Spiral Abyss #999. Breezed through the pointless banter and the fights and such. Done and don't need to do it again until reset. I don't see what the big deal is, but it's always something.

5:49 Heh. I theorized just this morning that some upcoming Theater season will be built around Shatter... Hydro, Cryo, and Geo would fit perfectly.

An argument against the theater that I just couldn't comprehend was people being angry they "had to pull more characters now" for this game mode, with most of these complaints coming from players who have supposedly played since before Inazuma according to themselves. We have, as of patch 4.8, 40 4* characters in the game, 8 of which given for free or guaranteed, 6 more of which in Paimon's Bargains, a free Liyue 4* every Lantern Rite, another 7 of which were given for free via events since 2.2 (not including overlaps with the above), and the Traveler to add in for good measure. Chances are, even if a person has played for even a year and only pulled for specific abyss units, a lot of people should have both limited units and 4*s enough along the way to have the roster to unlock the theater on its hardest mode. It's just about leveling them to 70. That's it. No, no one has to pull for more characters now, and anyone in the position where they literally have to are too early in their Genshin playthrough to even 36* the abyss right now under normal circumstances let alone do hard mode theater.