I think this game mode really highlights some problems with this game that never mattered that much. Like how a surprising amount of characters don't have a good kit, have poor synergy with other characters and don't deal good enough damage to justify playing them. Genshin wasn't made with that in mind, which makes it so that in the theater you're just gonna have a dead slot character in the team to save a good one, and it's frustrating. Also, I think that the characters should go on a 2 wave cool down or something instead of just disappearing out of the run after they have been used up
I mean, for a gacha game that keep producing characters every patch for years, you cant expect each and every characters to be good, especially 4 stars. And this problem is shared with hsr or zzz too when they become as old as genshin.
@@Amir-ry7pp the issue isn't whether characters are good or bad, it's that characters aren't designed with diverse team building in mind at all. Take Bennett and Xiangling, for the evergreen example. The issue isn't that newer units don't measure up to them, the issue is that no new units are even copium alternatives to them - this game is 4 years old and the only two off field pyro alternatives to Xiangling are Thoma and Dehya. Genshin releases disproportionately more on field DPSers than anything else, and it sucks on a gamemode like theater because all of these on field DPSers are fighting for the same 3-4 support units. This was not an issue in Abyss because you only had to build two teams, but when you have to build 4-5 teams for Theater it suddenly becomes very obvious how over reliant Genshin's team building is on these same old characters.
@@Amir-ry7pp There are genuinely way less dud characters in HSR and ZZZ. Some are clearly better than others, but very few feel like they are so useless or undercooked like in Genshin. There are just so many characters in Genshin that seem to just get release to fill a quota and don't actually have any value to the game, even at release. And this has been a problem for Genshin since very early on. I'm still annoyed at what they did with Xinyan, and Zhongli would have gotten similar treatment if not for the CN backlash.
And you must have 4 characters in a team. At first youll have a great team. Nearing the end boss fight, you’ll have a team that is not built, doesnt have synergy, does little to none dmg. Not to mention how many characters you need to reach act 10. Not even all chosen characters will be used
It just solidifies the belief of the vigor caters more on the stonks side, coz how to get more char.? More pulls, More pulls? More stonks where it is a justified reason to not f up ur player base right? both veterans and casual, that is the stats that is intruiging to look into
No, the Vigor systems assumes everyone should pull all their shit 1yearmeta characters. They literally produce 1 dps for each element with a gimmick in each Nation; if you pull all of them and their supports you will have no problems. It's just a whale pleasing mode, which is also ridiculous because it is so stupidly easy once you have broken units all over the place that it shouldn't really please anyone. The Vigor system assumes whales are more important.
@@ping-x7m A great workaround to the shit system is to go the opposite route - bring absolutely dogshit teams that barely clear the star requirement (or even the basic one? I'm not sure if stars are required for the monthly rewards or clearing the stage is enough) and save the good 2-3 character cores for the bosses. You can retry and "upgrade" your team to a better lineup if you unexpectedly end up struggling with a round, but there's little to no way to recover stamina if you overcommitted your good units early. It feels horrendous to do this voluntarily, but if Hu Tao/Kokomi/Baizhu/Gaming clears a mini-boss stage (particularly silly example from one of my stages with a mini-boss Bathysmal VIshap on September's reset), then I won't waste a cohesive team.
clear evidence that they don't listen to the right advice. apparently labyrinth was unpopular in the CN servers (because of course it fucking was) so they didn't want to do that again.
@@plvto1 Yet they made Labyrinth Warriors a weekly thing and also a farming domain for planar ornaments in HSR. That Simulated Universe has got to be the most time consuming low-reward activity they have. Spending 10-15 minutes for 4 trash planar ornament. Good luck to you if you don't have Acheron to skip the mobs.
I HATE that the game forces you to run 4 characters each time The amount of times i had to use supports in teams that just needed 2 characters to clear but lost vigor for this stupid reason sucks Separate from that, I have no urge to play it. I have an urge to play abyss every once in a while but anytime theatre resets, it feels like a fucking chore
@@Naruto_Uzumaki0123this game mode is just how many characters you own, on some levels you can even clear it with 1-2 characters and the rest are just fillers
The problem is thet Theater doesn'T really work with Genshin mechanics at all. The fact thet it is random BS go is antithetical of the whole idea to build teams based on elemental synergise and character's personal kits. Genshin's characters are just not flexible enough to make it work. Other problem is thet because you lose your characters you can'T even use the buffing cards conssitently, the whole idea of a rouge-like/lite is thet as you play you get more and more random/semi-random buffs where you activly try to get the most synergistic ones to achive macimum power, but as the cards work in Theatre you can get a full burning build without any dendro character left in your roster and then your buffing cards all wasted. The whole Imaginarium Theatre fail as a Genshin game mode and as a rouge-like as well.
I think its unlikely that you gonna face with the issue of not having the character with the same element as the buffs you pick, when the mode restricts you to 3 element. And if you invest so much in burning, why didnt you save a few units for it for the final boss? Could be a resource management issue.
Getting humongous buffs in a gamemode feels like shit in genshin anyway, because you spend years building your characters only for them to give you a massive buff and invalidate all of your progression. One of the reasons i despise abyss blessings too, how can i enjoy building mualani when she gets free furina buff and 20% HP on top of that. Rouge like gamemode type deal just doesn't mesh well with this game. They could have gone with the map building event as an endgame, and then community would build endgame by itself, but no, they just had to go with the gamemode who's only purpose is to bait people into pulling more characters.
@@Amir-ry7pp The otherside of the problem I don't talked about only implide it is the oppurtinity cost of the cards. It is possible to not use my dendro units until the last boss, yeah, but then I don't get any buff for any other teams I use in the Theatre. In rouge-like you are not only suppose use your builds ones or trwice, you suppose to play it in the whole game continuosly.
@@musicaddict9058 I agree with the suggestion to implement the Ingenuity as permament game mode. I think one type of rouge-like game mode would work with Genshin. Radnomised Dungeon Crawling where as you go deeper and deeper you can build buffs for your, already builded, units. They can simply balance the game mode around the fact thet you need builded characters AND the buffs to clear the deepest parts of the game mode. Basicly they need to just make it harder then Abyss. Though I agree, blessings are annoying. I really hate how with Theatre we get even more imbalance with the permanent stat buffs. But in a rouge-like this blessings are player controled ones, the whole thing is about make every run different and allow the player to get different buff combos in different runs.
@@reactiondavant-garde3391 I mean, you not getting any buffs for your other character doesn't really be the end of the world. Like, the the start to mid enemies are mostly fodder level anyway.
It's not a roguelike, but it's not a problem. It's more like a puzzle, but quite scuffed atm. And I think that with the last battle event which they've separated into two stages (on the first one damage didn't matter, reactions and character mechanics were more important), they're looking for solutions for the Theater. Basically, to let battle stages use proper teams, and then on "other" stages players could just play with random stuff because of certain effects (like running around with one-shotting circle from this recent event). This way they could also lower entry requirements, because not all teams should be able to do damage at all.
Yea... it could've been so much more. Considering the staggering amount of bosses in this game, it would've been simple for them to add an endless roguelike mode, and randomize the enemy lineups each run, with bosses at the end. And if you remember, there was an event during the chasm patch,... the "Perilous Trail" event was a FANTASTIC way of making us utilize more characters. At the end of every 3 combat rounds, you had to remove 2 party members from your party. That would greatly incentivize people to build more characters, without it feeling "forced" like imaginarium theater.
cant speak of replayability when it differ from player to player but randomization is always there lmao. No way youre clearing the theatre with the same exact team from start to finish.
It does have randomization but lacks any interesting randomization I bet it would be 10x more fun if one of the buff cards you could get gives you good off field elemental application (e.g. "applies pyro to enemies around you when you do x or every x seconds") But they're taking steps in tge right direction so hopefully it'll be fun in another 2 rotations
IT wasn't designed to be roguelike or to be fun. It was designed to solve specific problems Mihoyo has - players not pulling characters and players not building characters (because what they alrdy have is good enuf). Essentially it was designed to make money, so there is no problem from Hoyo perspective. They never cared about making their games fun in the first place, all they care is money.
I feel like I'm the exact target audience for a mode like this, I like pulling and building as many different characters as possible and I can easily hit the requirements to participate. Somehow its still not fun, not even for someone like me. Genshins combat system is so unique bc so much of it is in teambuilding, but you cant really do that in this mode. you just gotta use whatever random unsynergistic bullshit they give you. And even the buffs they give you would make so much more sense if you could freely choose what characters/ teams you want to use. Picking up a buff for a specific reaction or having to decide wether you want more hydro or pyro application for your vape team just feels bad if you cant actually decide to play teams that work with that specific buff throughout your run.
Same. I've got plenty of characters, artifacts and weapons and I still hate this RNG trashfest. Genshin is NOT the kind of game that lends itself to randomized teams. Even if it's still easy to clear random BS go is not fun at all for me.
Not being able to make teams with less than 4 characters pisses me off. It literally forces me to waste characters that I could use later. Also it's a snoozefest. If you have all characters they tell you to have, you clear. That's it. The meta for new players is honestly just to ignore this mode until you have two teams who can clear the spiral abyss consistently. Otherwise, if you build for this mode, you will only build literal garbage.
And when you're forced to waste characters, your immediate question when teambuilding becomes:"Which character is so trash i need to get rid of them ASAP?" Having an endgame horizontal mode make you think that is bad!
It seems like Hoyo is too proud to admit it's mistake with Theater and will still do everything to "fix" it. The entire concept is faulty and like others have said, they already developed events in the past that would be better endgames modes.
I mean there's no "fix" here certain players want to reduce it down to another version of Abyss So basically make it like HI3 Elysium Realm which is far worse and only rewards the type of player who loves Vertical Treadmills
@@demonking-zm3rs What do you mean there is no fix? This gamemode isn't for endgame players because the difficulty is abysmally low, and it isn't for new players either because it will take them years to obtain 22 characters needed to enter the hardest difficulty. Who was it made for you ask? It was only made to milk new players by pushing them to pull for more units. No thought went into it besides that.
@@musicaddict9058 End Game doesn't need to be Difficult that's not a requirement and never has been (Let's remove the discussion on how Genshin Players use the term Endgame and Meta wrong) The rhetoric that's it's supposed to be approachable to beginners is also nonsense. It's a mode that exist for horizontal progression You see a lot of TC complain because they've already deemed most of the roster trash. This is for people who want to play and explore there characters on a mechanical level and be creative You see the complaint of Scuff because a TC for example can't look at a unit like Dori and try to use her ER and Healing along with her Lamp as a trigger and be creative They'll complain and say why can't I just use Fischl That's the scope of it. It's a way of using the limitation to utilize characters that Gamemodes like the Abyss doesn't cater towards People are bitching because teams that are "Meta" are rigged It's not "hardcore" and it's not " casual" and to those who say it's to resources draining...how much resin did you spend this week on Artifacts You don't need high investment that's the point. There's no "fix" because players who truly believe it's bad are asking for it to be Abyss 2.0 It's a mode for most players and the ones complaining are to used to dragging the same 12 units and crushing content Sorry you can't use X character try looking at your roster and leaning into the less relevant character And if you can't well hey that's how a lot of players feel about Abyss its a vertical treadmill that support short burst high multiplier units TLDR its a gamemode for horizontal progression for players who did invest in multiple units. It's not really there to push spending because most players have a lot of units and for the kind of people who crave Power Creep or Meta not enough Meta Units come out or exist to encourage spending This isn't HSR or Hi3 you get 3 or 4 Broken Units per Region so if the idea is to force the "Endgame Players" to spend then low investment doesn't make sense It's for players who want to actually use there characters not spend 3 years getting cons and using the same 2 teams
There are a lot of issues with IT. But he barrier to entry its just stupid, even on my main account I had to level 5 characters to do the last difficulty this patch. Even if the mode was good most people probably wouldnt experience most of it. They had HSR SU and ZZZ HZ to copy from and they cant even get that right.
Slight rant from a fellow Genshin creator: As someone who "fixes" peoples Genshin accounts I see many different types of players accounts, and most of the submissions I get do not care about Theater at all. Nobody really cares about it for anything other than it being a primo source. So I agree with the general take Jstern has with Theater being made for nobody. I basically blanket tell people not to bother building characters just for Theater because it isnt worth it generally speaking (unless you have spare resources and actually want to use those characters elsewhere). I will add that I find "random BS go" in Theater to be fun. But my main account just has enough units leveled to challenge Theater w/o leveling more units for it. And I basicallt never want to go through the same Theater again. IT is a very limited form of fun, and it's fundamental design is opposed to what makes Genshin's combat engaging and what has kept me engaged with the game long term (team building and the nuance of layers of interaction between all the games characters). I genuinely wouldve preferred they just changed the enemy cycle in abyss every 2 weeks to keep it more fresh-more new abyss cycles more often would be more fun than what I get from Theater. I get all kinds of ideas on how to use characters in fun ways all the time-and theater never inspires any of them. And if players like me with ability and desire to be creative with how they use characters still dont find much fun in IT, then imo its a enormous design failure. All in all, IT being the only new permanent combat mode theyve added in five years is extremely disheartening to me. Somehow Theater has honestly made me more pessimistic about them adding future content to the game, when it should make me more optimistic since adding more content at all should be good. It's really hard for me to consider their priority was anything other than "what can we design to make players spend money?" when they designed Theater, quite frankly. Oh, and I do think a gamemode incentivizing players to use more characters rather than doing something stupid like spending 40000 resin farming for Raiden is a good thing, but then I think one of IT's biggest failures is in how it forces building characters to attempt it at all, it doesnt actually necessitate using them. Ive been able to clear IT on my polearm only account by leveling non polearm units, selecting them for teams in IT, but then for the challenge I just never switch to those units (I only use the polearm chars). And none of the Theaters have been hard to clear with only polearm units, because the easiest way to succeed is just by having a really strong dps unit available for some of the Theater chambers. Basically, somehow the easiest way to clear Theater actually seems to be to just use hyperinvested DPS units, not using the different characters they force you to level to attempt the thing. Imo Abyss does a far better job at actually being a form of content incentivizing USING different characters. And then this is all made worse by how great they've done with ZZZ's combat modes thus far (as of version 1.2). It feels like these games are made by different companies almost with how different the philosophy to combat content is between them. Genshin has an excellent combat system framework with so much potential for very fun combat, but the fundamental philosophy for how they approach content in the game is completely different from their other games. I really dont get it. I can only imagine there are many players, including many who have spent money, that have stopped playing because of how stupid theyve been with combat content in Genshin. So if Hoyo designed theater to make more money because they starting making less money on the game due to losing paying players, maybe they should consider actually designing fun content that make me want to PLAY more, rather than cringe mechanisms that seem to just exist to get me to grind more. So here is my message to Mihoyo: I want to play genshin more, but YOU are making me want to play it less! Id love to start telling people that I dont feel bad spending money in Genshin because its a great game that I can have a ton of fun in. But instead the only justification I have for spending money in the game is that I make money by spending money because I am a creator. Is that what you want your creators to say? That it only makes sense to spend money because it makes money for a privileged few? Or would you rather I say I spend money because it is more fun? Would that kind of sentiment not end up making you more money? So make your game better. Its a travesty how much effort I see being put into aspects of Genshins combat when most players just dont meaningfully engage with it due to lack of compelling content. (I love lots of things about Genshin to be clear, I just really want them to improve the game, but imo theyve done very little to meaningfully change things that affect what we can DO in the game...)
It was made for players like me. I built zero characters for IT and full starred IT every iteration. I don’t bother to farm for artifacts, my Akasha rankings suck, but I have a huge cast of characters who are reasonably developed. This and the last round of IT have been fun. I don’t mind if they amp up the difficulty a bit more tho, it’s still too easy.
They could probably solve this problem by having the player use 2 teams to climb some separate floor system, and then in-between each main floor they have you run IT chambers with the random concept in order to earn buffs for the 2 main teams. The IT section should just have your entire 3 specific element characters available from the start. A well invested vertical account (cons and weapons) could just slam past the main floors without help from the IT side, but it would help people with less vertical investment deal with the harder main floors, utilizing snow-ball buff situations if they get lucky enough with the same buff-types that their main teams use, and thereby being rogue-like. While I only 7 starred on my f2p alt, current IT was pretty much made for my accounts, but even then I don't run them more than once on my main.
@@icekyuusame with me, I have around 50 characters already built but not chasing the ranking in Akasha so IT has been fun. But I do agree with Soluna that the mechanic limitation is cringe to others. I hope the mode can be improved so it can be an even more enjoyable experience.
It might just be me, but I despise the idea behind this game mode. In roguelike games, you actually get stronger characters through buffs and items, but in this mode, you end up building the same teams you could play in the Abyss (if you're lucky enough to get the characters in the right order), and that’s just not fun in my opinion. There's no sense of growing stronger with tougher challenges, and I hate that. In my opinion, WuWa does a much better job with the Illusive Realm in keeping players entertained and wanting to replay. I never wanted to replay the Imaginarium Theater even once, to be honest. Get the primos and get out
i super agree with how the lack of teams just fee bad the game just wasn't made for you to be able to put any 4 random characters together and have a cohesive team also it sucks that my good supports cant ever be paired with the dps i intend them to because there's no point in stacking power on a single team. I'd never pair chevvy with arlecchino on theater because arle can clear by herself and chevvy is needed to help the stupid keqing overload floor maybe if the system was build to GIVE energy on mob floors and consume energy on boss floors it would be better, so it incentivizes you to fish for and actively play your good characters. And then on boss floor the team enters cooldown for 2 arcs
there's no need for a cohesive team in the first place. The mobs is not as tanky as the one in abyss and the buffs are way stronger than abyss to help you out.
@@jstern25 i'd argue yes, this mode makes you do things you would never do outside of it, I personally have a whole lot of fun with it because of this reason I'm tired to do the same dps race content for years. There's a strategic element to it when you have to ration your characters out, the forced 4 member composition is exactly for this, people keep complaining about this but removing this restriction would make the mode 10 times more boring because the strategic team management is gone.
@@kskr8610 What "strategic team management"? You mean having 3 trash units you don't even swap to and one actual DPS? Yeah great strategy. Or is playing something like Noelle/Lisa/Gaming/Sara really that entertaining to you? You know you can play random nonsense teams of characters you like against weak enemies in the overworld whenever you want right?
@@azl218xc the way Genshin makes its characters and the elereact system literally makes having a team with zero synergy almost impossible, in the very example you brought up you can use Sara to buff Gaming and Lisa burst for off field damage, even if Sara's burst doesnt last that long it's still something valuable, with Noelle shielding ensuring Gaming doesnt die while hes doing his burst. Synergy doesnt need to be perfect it just needs to be there, in a team you can get value out of anyone if you want. If you think the game is unplayable without perfect synergy then you do you. Yes, it is entertaining to me because its completely novel, you are probably never playing this specific team ever again outside of that one stage, it is a one-time experience that really shines when you have been playing the same dps races for years. It wouldn't have been fun otherwise if you are stuck with the team for more than one fight. I don't get why people want to fix this mode by replacing it with Lab Warriors where you use one single team to do 20 battles it's way more boring and uninspired.
Can confirm. I got my 10 stars on visionary with half my characters at lv. 70 equipped with random or no artifacts at all. Most chambers, only 1 or 2 characters in the team were actually doing anything... until chamber 10, where I saved a "meta team" (Raiden national with Kuki moral support instead of XQ) to deal with ASIMON. I was also able to borrow a friend's C2R1 Arlecchino, and she pretty much soloed 2 of the middle chambers. The only "strategy" on my part was save the Raiden national-ish team for the end, and pick as many companion cards as possible in order to use up the bad/unbuilt characters early.
First 5 stages: trying to use a combination of shit trial characters + shit expendable units to get through mediocre combat sages Last 5 stages: combining 1-3 of your good units with trash units each stage, and hoping that you don't have to rewind because you got element-blocked.
its not just needing 22 characters, its also needing 22 weapons leveled up (how many times i realized i dont have a weapon mid run and its even more stupid that you cant fix that after you enter the game mode) you cant change artifacts or weapons, and cause the game mode has so much randomization many characters need more ER than usual and you cant even fix mid run! i yet to use the IT buff cause i was trying to get the only good characters but still i could not get them in time, still i dont think the buff will be massive cause this IT is overload and only chevy make overload viable and you can only use her twice and it you want to use her then you need a full team of pyro/electro, good luck if the rng of the run allowed that
its so scummy how they realized that the amount of characters they originally went for to full clear was not enough to make people have to invest in new characters they just leveled a couple chars to 70 every rotation and cleared so they just made it higher
Its perfectly in line with the rest of the game. Rng wishing. Rng artifacts. Insane pricing. Limited time events and weapons. Powercreeping characters and weapons to sell the new ones. Daily logins to try and form a habit. The whole thing is a money grab.
I feel they really aren't sure what to do with IT when it comes to making characters, you'd think they'd make more characters like Chevruse or nilou but instead they're just making characters who are hoping for a currently hypothetical pyro character they all can't share at once, really just feels like n excuse to get people to try and pull new characters just to complete it, likeIi dont ever see anyone recommend a character based on how well they could do in IT
They should up the amount of friend characters to at least 3. The problem with adding more trial characters is they are bad and if you own the trial characters you aren't gaining any amount of extra characters. Also increase the vigor to 3 or refresh vigor like you said.
As you said, implementing a "vigor station" or "limited vigor reserves" can help the IT gameplay experience a lot, especially when the entry barrier is more obnoxious than the last iteration simply cus characters are not designed equal, like there is still no alternatives to Xiangling and Bennett. Another thing I wanna add is that the boons are so good now but the enemies are still squishy in the last three chambers. Of course, the enemies need to be normal in the earlier chambers but still make the last chambers have more HP than what they got rn. Another thing is we should get 2 out of 4 units rather than 1 out of 2 units after winning a battle. That way, we get more units while still being able to focus on buying the boons
is it just me being stupid or does the vigor refresh thing from the mystery cache is just not working sometimes? i got my Bennett's vigor refreshed only to not be able to use him in the next battle, it's really weird. granted i ain't read a damn thing lol this game mode is just so bad i couldn't bother.
I agree about everything and also, it feels weird for a roguelike to HAVE TO switch teams completely all the time because even if you end up playing a good team, most if not all your buffs are probably useless because they don't align with the new team, like this theater, I got a bunch of overload buffs but played Lyney Xiangling Bennett Sucrose on the last 2 fights, ignoring all the buffs (and still killed Asimon in 34 seconds before it went invisible) In star rail, in simulated universe, you can play a single team and get a path and blessings that make sense and everything works out perfectly so you can beat worlds while being underleveled or make teams that hyper focus on a path, and even if your team has big weaknesses (like no sustain) your team works so well with itself that you might clear anyways And in Hades, you don't randomly have to switch weapon before a boss, that would break the whole roguelike thing but that's literally what happens in genshin theater
I'm fairly confident that the character requirement is half the reason the mode even exists, they wanted to "incentivize people to build more characters". It's definitely a problem with the new visionary difficulty though. 22 is too many unless you get lucky with starters you don't have and bonus units you do have. 18 was already a lot. I personally don't particularly like roguelikes so the underdevelopment of those aspects doesn't bother me. I get extremely tilted when I get unlucky late into a run in more heavily randomized stuff like Simulated Universe and waste most of it or lose some rare opportunity and I am happy to not have to deal with that in another game.
At least don't force us to use 4 characters at once to artificially use up vigor. I hate that part so much. Or maybe just let us choose between doing IT or 2x abyss. At least abyss still is very, very replayable which is supposed to be a requirement for endgame content. I've never found myself replaying IT because there's no point, but I do go in the abyss from time to time to test out stuff. At first I was gonna build some of my characters for IT, but then my resources still aren't enough at this point. Playing since 3.8 at AR 59, daily, and I'm still running out of mora, books, and ores, so I'd rather save those for characters I like rather than IT fodder.
Do you think a way to fix theater could be for the principle cast to not use vigor so you can always build teams with 1-2 of your own characters and fill them up with the principle cast? That would lower the character requirement and make building teams easier, this rotation chevreuse would always be available for example
One way to fix this game mode would be to instead of selecting up to 22 characters and obtain them randomly, you select 4 o 5 teams that fit the restrictions and you get those teams randomly.
I think they should add an endless mode and allow us to use fantasia flowers to regenerate vigor. The reward can be artifact exp and mora , which is extremely important now that they want us to craft sanctifying elixirs.
Vigor needs to either be unlimited/refreshable or the character acquisition needs to be removed entirely and you get access to your whole roster from chamber 1 but can only use everyone 2x. This mode has too many restrictions and they all are fine individually but mesh together horribly. Why do we need to level the characters to 70 when they could just raise them to 70 or 80 like Divergent Universe? Why all this random nonsense just to obfuscate that we are just playing spiral abyss 2 instead of actually making a roguelike?
Honestly, Imaginary Theater is not really a rougue-like. It's basically just a random team-draft for fighting almost random enemies. It is really a horizontal investment check. Where it comes to skill, it's testing whether you have basic competency, and whether you can compete the final two boss mechanics, or have a team strong enough to brute force such mechanics. Honestly, if they ever did an actual rougue-like, that'd be awesome. However, I don't hate it. The thing about genshin is that there was no proper endgame. If you built 3 strong teams covering different elements, you basically only had to login every 15 days to beat Abyss and Collect the primos. It was not uncommon for me to be done with "the endgame" in half an hour. Now there is an endgame activity, which is building characters for Imaginarium theater, but of course, tons of players are going to hate the increased "homework". As for people with a secondary accounts... unless you already have tons of built characters in your secondary account, it's not worth the time investment to do Visionary Mode. Just focus on hard mode. It is important players realize that Visionary mode is aimed at old, primary accounts. Think well, before deciding if Visionary is worth the hassle, because in a lot of cases, I just don't think it is.
It has various problems and at many levels. 1. The first problem is at what I'd say level 0, where you can't even enter the theatre if you don't have a specific number of built characters. 2. Element check.. Why???? They put asimon in this theatre but the characters allowed are electro, dendro, geo. Like wtf bruh??? Did they forget their own in game mechanics?? 3. Vigour- Characters can be used at max twice. What if I want to use my choice of character without a restriction? Atleast give us an option to "redeem" or "revive" the used characters via those flowers(the in mode currency). 4. Team building- It is essentially random bullshit go. I am forced to play weird combinations of characters which have little to no compatibility. 5. Buffs- do they even do anything?
Agreed! I’m a player with a nicely built roster and easily fills the entry requirements for every season so far and 10-10 with no problem whatsoever but I find no enjoyment in this game mode. One of the most annoying thing about this game mode is the nothing-burger buffs. They’re good don’t get me wrong but what’s the point of picking buffs for specific elemental reactions when most of the time I cannot use the buffs anyways with how quickly my characters run out of vigor and I have to swap out for others which oftentimes don’t produce that specific reaction. Additionally, the mobs usually are swishy enough for me that the buffs don’t even MATTER because my C0 Arlecchino evaporates them in a swipe! Usually I never bother going with the buffs and just try to get as many characters as I can with the fantasia flowers to have as many fillers as possible so I can save the best characters for later stages. Not to mention, some stages are just purely annoying if I haven’t don’t have on hand a specific character, e.g. CC stages without Kazuha/Venti/Sucrose actually forced me to rewind to roll for them. Abyss is annoying, sure, but at least it’s a battle where I can pick what equipments to bring, IT is just a battle where I have to make do with what the game throws at me, which is fine in and of itself but the vigor, the forced 4 characters team, the buffs that are there but are rarely useful make this an incredibly unfun experience.
I don’t have that big of a problem with getting a bunch of filler characters to 70. You don’t need to farm for their talents and artifacts, and you only have to do it once, so it’s very easy to secure a permanent Imaginarium entrance. The real problem that is pretty much guaranteed to happen at some point is the inevitable HP pool inflation.
wanting 22 characters of 3 specific elements to just participate in the highest diffculty is crazy lol cause its not just about levels its also about artifacts and talents for those units, not just this but you cant even focus on upgrading your favourite units to a higher level due to this
@@TamytaummtaI’m an endgame player, but for such a high requirement the gameplay isn’t even rewarding So yes, the game mode is meh, near 0 replayability
@@Tamytaummta genshin players and defending their game on everything still go hand in hand huh. I literally clear ITs visionary mode, it's still a horribly designed mode, also endgame doesn't equal "pull meta or you can't beat it" Even a waifu puller should be able to beat it assuming they are making cohesive teams. In IT you can't even make any team for the most part and also it wants you to have 22 units of 3 different elements each patch and none of those units even get utilized, they are just for bench lol. The problem isn't having an endgame, it's having it be horribly designed.
They had the perfect skeleton for it with the 2.2 Labyrinth event mode.. all they had to do was copy and paste , up the difficulty or make different options for different difficulty and everyone would have been happy.. But no!!! The game's brilliant devs took "how to create FOMO and how to disappoint our players again" route and made Imaginarium theatre... Ok i get it , this is a gacha game , they want to create FOMO so they make players spend their money on their game but like c'mon...
I wish they would give Lv80 trial builds for all characters you own but don’t have leveled up. I don’t mind the 22 character requirement, it’ll come eventually when players pull enough. I do mind having to waste resin leveling characters to Lv70, who I 100% won’t build or use properly anyway and who would be lucky to be switched in once to trigger Scroll That + removing the 4 character requirement for rooms would be the biggest instant improvements to this mode. I like the concept of Theater but this feels like playing an early beta with non fully fleshed out mechanics
I have a 4 year old account that I spent way to much money on it so clearing this game mode is not an issue. But it feels terrible every single time. I have enough build characters to easily make 20 teams that are fun to play yet imaginarium theatre regularly leaves me with a character selection that has zero synergy at all. I can’t even imagine how shit this must feel for new and/or low investment players.
why is genshin so afraid of just letting us experience combat for a long period of time? i want 5 straight minutes of varied enemies to really test energy requirements and i want enemies that dont die in one raiden charged attack. i want ruin guards that have 2 million hp. i want enemies that are ventiable but can live through a full venti team rotation. speedrunning abyss is fun and all but the current one is so piss easy, bosses dying in 15 seconds is boring. shout outs to your trial dehya hitting 5990 crits with her burst
One point I want to make about the lack of "snowballing": The enemies need to be equally gimped to accommodate the expected level of slop you'll be forced to use against them. Becomes very apparent in early boss chambers, where you most often save a few synergestic characters. Throwing a good team against the boss literally melts them like paper, cause of course theyre designed to handle slop. Its a very disheartening affair as a whole, the game breaks your legs and pits you against enemies with broken legs and expects you to have a good time. Giving more access to vigor is going to raise this bar, but the sad reality is even in such a case the absolute best you can still get is your baseline normal team that you'd get in abyss. The ceiling of the "snowball" you can get is literally your normal good team comp cause the stacking buff cards they give are very one dimensional without much impact (not to mention you can't get them half the time cause you need to be spending currency to get more chars anyways.)
LOL people are under the assumption Imaginarium Theater is meant to be a good game mode, its NOT. The mode is designed by the sales team purely for sales, nothing else. You are force to level bunch of characters because the sales team want to make you roll and strain your resources so you pay $$$ for refreshes. Again the mode is purely create a problem, offer a solution with $$$. Trust me, after next region its going to go up to 30 even 40 characters. So pay up or shut up, that's how the sales team work.
-this mode only exist for players who don't do abyss and don't pull "teams" they just pull "characters" (which is admittedly the biggest part of genshin player base just go to hoyolab and see) that's why every time someone brings up the randomness of team building you just get told "but it's part of the strategy!" or "it gives you a chance to play different teams" which is why a lot of people - rightfully so from their own perspective - feel like they finally have a mode to play which isn't a bad thing itself. the problem is, you just separated "endgame" into 2 parts and which you cannot tackle the one without severely jeopardizing the other especially for newer accounts (and by "newer" I mean account that are at least 1 year old minimum and even then it's still a problem). but then they make abyss reset less? so even if you are a "hardcore" player and you 36 star abyss consistently you are locked out of halite rewards you can normally get unless you participate in the arbitrary character building requirement they put. also my tinfoil hat tells me this is them trying to bring star rail into genshin because they cannot powercreep as fast to make people impulse pull as much units as they possibly can just to keep up with endgame modes flavor of the month requirements (which you can argue is already happening) so they said "fuck it, just make a mode where an account need as much characters as possible". essaying
Its nothing changed to abyss. Because before you didnt get monsters reset but just rewards so nothing changed in terms of NEW ABYSS RESET with NEW gameplay in it.
5:30 ...What a terrible way to start off... Girl, do Dehya, Keqing and Ning and whatever bad character you've gotten from select random character card. 12:00 ... Maybe because the point of a game mode is to make random teams and figure out synergies you can use to clear content in one go. Unlike Abyss that people play on repeat on hardest mode only to test their favorite teams. It's not the same thing.
I think IT shines a light into genshin's biggest character design issue: creating too many on-fielders compared to off-fielders. it is kind of a 50/50 share, but it makes little to no sense playstyle-wise since there's only one slot for on-fielders and 3 for off-fielders. It'd be much easier and unoticiable to build diferent random teams if you weren't locked into half of a cast of on-field dps who can't really play with each other; like how the hell am I supposed to feel good playing a mode that implies the need of off-field pyro characters when we have now only four of them of wich three deal close to no dmg?
this the one theater that took me time to clear because i dont have much geo, only noelle but she wants furina... had to raise sara, yunjin, and gouro just to hit the character quota... and as much as jstern mentions "it is easier to get characters" but i got really unlucky and dont get as much characters early stages, had to used up all my rewinds and honestly, i dont know if i can clear imaginarium theater if i didnt borrow a navia...
An easy fix that would help a lot of players: Designate a "Main Character", you get them from the start and they don't lose vigor/dont have it. This way you always have something to glue your team together and it also raises the baseline of player power by a lot so the mode can actually be difficult.
NGL, I don't think they ever intended the entry-level for the event to be cheap and easy to begin with. With how many rival gachas were coming out and interest kind of waning, I think they just cooked up something to engage the long standing players who were complaining about more endgame. It's a joke of an endgame because they need to care about mobile device players, but it's just a bone to throw to the people who have been around for a while and have nothing really to do with their characters.
For me, the first visionary round was a complete nightmare, in part because of the baptist being the baptist and in part because I didn't check what the boss stages would be ahead of time and plan for it from the start. The second visionary round went super easy (twice even, since I redid it to get an achievement for getting all the flowers/stars). The fact that planning which characters you must pull and then hold on to for the entire run from the start is such a huge deal seems to clash with the fact that your characters are randomized and getting them in any kind of targeted way can become prohibitively expensive. I just feel like it's a really weird setup. It would at least feel better if you could select from your entire roster at certain points, so you'd be guaranteed a couple characters for each boss. Aside from that, the buffs being tied to elemental reactions seems pretty inconsistent. What are they going to do about the elements that have no reactions? What about the special guests that can't get buffed because they're the wrong element? What about characters who are just shit at applying their element? Not even getting into characters who are strongly tied to a specific elemental setup (Nilou, Chevreuse, etc) or gear that expects specific element/reactions. I've actually never played a rogue-like except for Wuwa's Illusive Realm, but compared to that, I have to say that I also feel like Imaginarium buffs just... don't feel cool. They exist. They presumably do something. But it doesn't really feel like it's any different from every other combat event. It feels like Abyss but more convoluted.
I never really considered IT a rogue-like. It feels like Abyss with random restrictions. I was hoping it would feel like simulated universe from HSR (at minimum). Genshin is literally built around being an open world. How hard would it be to copy paste assets from story quest dungeons?! They could use the elemental restrictions correctly and place puzzles in the dungeon that need that specific element to proceed or something. The current version of IT just seems like the lowest effort thing they coulda created while still being able to say "hey we gave you more endgame like you wanted"
i wish they would have done somethin g similar to divergent universe in starrail where you can use any character on your account and if they arent leveled , geared , talents upgraded or anything the game will automatically upgrade them to a lvl they deem is enough to be used in the content
What made me enjoy it was finally building more chracters. I basicly always used the same ones. Now that I have a lot of characters built, I finally enjoy the theater a lot. I have more fun there than in abyss.
I think this is a monkey paw situation. We all asked for more endgame activities and they gave us the most dogshit endgame mode i've ever had the displeasure of playing lol like damn nothing at all would have been preferable
I would love to see something similar to an actual rogue like Where we would get all the characters at once, be able to play actual teams and plan around future rooms, while “rewards” for clearing a chamber would be the chards with reaction bonuses. Or some other form of “deck building”. Like jstern said, to eventually snowball everything.
I wish they include other combat modes inside the theater because right now all of them are just defend the monolith or dps checks which are already in the abyss.
Over 4 years Ive built 15 characters in Genshin as I have zero interest in 70% of the games cast. Feels like this mode was specifically made to spit in the faces of players like myself.
Imaginarium Theater f Nilou hard and forces me to swap out my Marachausse set from Noelle to build a Gladiator set, it forces me to dump tons of resources on characters I have little to no interest in playing and my reward is some of extremely scuffed combat experience with awful team comps.
i build ALL my characters, so personally that issue isn't a problem, but can definitely see why it would be. but they fixed it in HSR DU (divergent universe) already - they bring up unbuilt characters for you. this would relieve a lot of the absurd build requirements in IT.
IT is a dead end because of vertical investment. They'll never release an endgame mode with trial builds and no constellations to create a valuable sense of progression.
The main problem with IT is that 4* DPS characters are developed bad, seemingly on purpose, with scant few exceptions and "real" supports are printed so rarely. For every good support like Chevreuse or Xilonen, we get ten DPS characters between them. It doesn't matter if you have every character in the game, when every single DPS wants one of the same four supports, some of your teams are going to be awkward and suboptimal, and since every Attack-scaling fucker in the game wants Bennett, any rotation without Pyro just makes the likes of Wanderer, Navia, Wriothesley, Childe, etc worse. VV is arguably worse which may very well be what led to the creation of Xilonen; since the vast majority of PHEC teams use a VV support, they need to print res shred from other elements to ensure that players actually have an option when Anemo isn't featured to keep up the façade that this elemental restriction gimmick makes a lick of sense in a reaction-focused game. Oh and speaking of Chevreuse, wouldn't it be a damn shame if the vigor system forced you to add a Geo character to your Pyro/Electro team? And have fun playing your niche DPSes like Itto, Wanderer or Gaming if you don't also get offered their niche supports like Gorou, Faruzan or Xianyun!
I saw the theater character requirement and just went with “it is what it is”. If I have the characters, great. If not, it’s the way it goes. Anything more doesn’t seem worth it for the rewards or even for the pride of completing it.
As somebody with a very invested Genshin account that sucks at the combat, Imaginarium feels WAY more fun for me personally than Abyss. Abyss is literally just "use Neuvi, use Arlechinno, Win" while Imaginarium gives me a reason to play other characters that aren't as good
I played on a friend's account and it forced me to level up Amber, Lisa, Collei, and Sara to get to the bare minimum to participate in the last 2 theatre rotation. I barely have enough after that to max Kazuha to level 90.
imo, vigor sistem is okay, they just need to give 1 extra special vigor for boss chambers to every char. every character has 2 vigors for normal stages and 1 extra vigor for a boss stage. problem solved
Agree on the lack of sense of progression, but hard disagree on letting you just play your planned spiral abyss meta teams? Clearly the idea was to get you to not just play top of meta repeatedly each floor. You're essentially asking for spiral abyss 2 with more buff cards. Lower the requirement sure, but there absolutely needs to be some jeopardy to when you use your kazuha/bennett.
They need to take notes from elysian realm, a give unique buffs to the promoted/trial characters. Give us events that make odd teams viable rather than just buffing preexisting reactions. It feels like it offers nothing new. Gameplay wise you save your usual team, suffer with whatever you dont mind losing until the boss fights which dont offer any challenge or any need to think about your build. A meta team can take out the last visionary boss without any buffs to their primary reaction so what is the point of it all?
What baffles me the most is the game mode got approved but on release everybody hated it like it didn't go thru beta testing cuz it was so scuffed and unpolished from the get go the experience is just awful for the whole playerbase that it didn't leave a lasting memory for anybody, for a billion dollar company that's pretty shameful.
-If Hoyo would do a balance pass and actually buff "useless" characters, players would be more inclined to experiment with imaginarium comps. I personally already level every character I get but I have to admit, I wouldn't even bother slotting some of them in if not for this mode. -Maybe I'm not understanding the mechanics, but there's too much soft-lock probable randomness? Dunno how else to put it. I put off selecting a character, and that one that I want to save never shows up unless I spend all my points. -The buffs when raised to Level 4 are insane. OP. Don't get me wrong. I clear, I get gems. Yay. But It's basically a walkover, in which case I feel I didn't really accomplish my victory.
I think the biggest issue is still that you just have characters there to fill in a slot, and that feels awful. Even more because you know those characters are bad but you still had to invest resources on them.
Not single endgame mode has to accomodate "rush from beggining" players. I know it's for content, but that is not a valid point at all. Most players are not content creators and will follow natural game progression which is to pull for characters and use them as years go by.
The Imaginarium Theater is made for people like me who horizontal invest into getting as much characters as I can for free and leveling them up to at least 70 to get the free standard pulls from each of those characters to get even more free characters. I don't have godly artifacts but most of the characters have some usable artifacts and leveled weapons. I level them up as soon as I get them and I keep them in the overworld party doing the dailies and Serenitea Pot until they reached Friendship level 10. After which, I will replace them with the new characters I pulled. This way, the gameplay remain fresh and I don't get bored with the same team. Natlan was especially challenging in this regard since they gave two free characters and I also just pulled Mualani. I had to level three characters at the same time. I decided to get Dehya and prefarmed most of her materials so, that wasn't too bad. Mualani and Kachina, thought, I had to farm after they came out. My Natlan overworld party at the moment is Mualani, Kachina, Dehya, and Yaoyao.
I think its fun, i whoop it but I can understand why alot of others can't. Ive played the game since it launched essentially and i build alot of characters.
Another problem is that it's very hard to enter, especially the visionary mode, and when u do its too easy. Who is this mode for? New players can never enter, and old player just stomp it with 3-4 dps and the random supports they manage to get. There is no sense of "oh yeah i got this sick build" which differentiates one run from another like u get in games like hades and feel the satisfaction. Every rotation is just a pain to level up fodder characters that will stay level 70, 1/1/1, with no arts forever just to enter and then easily stomp it for the rewards. The other problem is that characters nowadays come with more and more limitations, Navia, xilonen, chasca etc needing 2 phec, neuv clorinde needing reactions for their passives, furina needing healers, poor nilou needing VERY specific teams making her almost unplayable here, kinich emilie with burning. This mode goes against the idea of making these creative characters in the first place, and on the top of that there is geo and cryo who are weak and dont get a lot of new chars and people dont have many of them to even qualify, and also dendro who doesnt have many characters in general. Its hard in all the wrong ways, and its not even fun or giving the sense of accomplishment cause of how easy it is when u do get it. Disappointing.
The problem with IT is that its a character bait gamemode and any suggestion that'd make you build less characters than their new quota is probably going to be ignored. The only reason it exists is so they can add new QOLs without changing the status quo by a lot. It's just a standard case of Genshin's combat system not being rigid enough to incentivize a more flexible gamemode.
I'll be putting into feedback and be vocal in a non stupid way about it like i did with the last theatre before it was updated to this and having a way to restore vigor is a solution. Another solution can be similar to a previous mode where you select two characters that have their vigor slightly protected each round. Remember where a certain slotted character carried over to the next team? But yeah vigor isn't fun i know why it is there but it needs to be better
Pretty much exactly how I feel. When I talked about this on Reddit, some of the responses I got were more or less "but's it's fine because it's easier than Abyss". I don't care about "easy", I care about HAVING FUN. If it's easy, but not fun, what's the point?
I have an og account with a lot of characters, but very few overlapping, been pulling a couple of 5* units a year since Inazuma. I do complete the trial one way or another, but I do struggle a lot exactly because I didn't focus on building a gazillion characters, but rather have coherent 2 comps working for the Abyss. All that this has done to me is incentivizing to care even less, because I cba to chase their stupid marketing plans. The day they will change requirements to let me earn less primos from their ''endgame modes'' will just go by like any other day. In short, all this has done is making me even more conservative, because trying to force me to play random garbage that I don't enjoy is not how you get my interest.
I'm here to give a different view for someone that quiet enjoy the Imaginarium Theater, tho it is indeed still has many flaws (the entry requirement VS avalaible/accesible characters, hydro only fkin have 3 4 star) I don't see Imaginarium Theater as a rogue mode and I believe I almost never make unsynergetic team, because the mode alwyas restrict you to certain elemental reactions, so I always planned ahead to make each element still available and what element needed for the bosses I honestly find it fun to use character in an unusual role and make it work, Like Ningguang Chiori FIschl Keqing, Ningguang Chiori Beidou Thoma, and It's weird that I beat the horse statue boss with Razor (def shred and electro applier), Kachina, Yunjin, Noelle, while Gorou never appeared, all the somewhat weird team are usually at early stages since I always save the synergistic one on the lastest boss (and they usually overkill) though I do see the problem, because the gameplay of Imaginarium Theater is all about planning and a little luck, maybe I spend longer thinking than the actual playing, and that's indeed a problem, and thinking also including changing character build to fit the current elemental reaction (I changed my Tighnari sands to attack sands in previous Imaginarium Theater), though I found it fun, but I can understand why others found it horrendous and I kinda hate it that this will make Hoyo have excuse to make character with the same kit but sidegrade because now we need a lot of characters anyway, having 2 Xingqiu is not a problem now, Xinyan can be useful if Thoma is unavailable now, still need Chiori but already used all her vigor because she's the starting character? good thing I have Albedo
if they wanted us to build lots of characters both 5 stars and 4 stars, then they should've at least made most of these characters' kits actually good and useable, especially for those 4 stars. and even then we wouldn't have enough resins to build them, making it really hard to justify spending very limited resources to build characters with a trash kit just for this garbage game mode.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
I think this game mode really highlights some problems with this game that never mattered that much.
Like how a surprising amount of characters don't have a good kit, have poor synergy with other characters and don't deal good enough damage to justify playing them.
Genshin wasn't made with that in mind, which makes it so that in the theater you're just gonna have a dead slot character in the team to save a good one, and it's frustrating.
Also, I think that the characters should go on a 2 wave cool down or something instead of just disappearing out of the run after they have been used up
This is so true
There's a reason so many characters teammates are Bennet and Xiangling. Way too many characters are just awful.
I mean, for a gacha game that keep producing characters every patch for years, you cant expect each and every characters to be good, especially 4 stars. And this problem is shared with hsr or zzz too when they become as old as genshin.
@@Amir-ry7pp the issue isn't whether characters are good or bad, it's that characters aren't designed with diverse team building in mind at all.
Take Bennett and Xiangling, for the evergreen example. The issue isn't that newer units don't measure up to them, the issue is that no new units are even copium alternatives to them - this game is 4 years old and the only two off field pyro alternatives to Xiangling are Thoma and Dehya.
Genshin releases disproportionately more on field DPSers than anything else, and it sucks on a gamemode like theater because all of these on field DPSers are fighting for the same 3-4 support units. This was not an issue in Abyss because you only had to build two teams, but when you have to build 4-5 teams for Theater it suddenly becomes very obvious how over reliant Genshin's team building is on these same old characters.
@@Amir-ry7pp Never mind them being good, how about just not shit.
@@Amir-ry7pp There are genuinely way less dud characters in HSR and ZZZ. Some are clearly better than others, but very few feel like they are so useless or undercooked like in Genshin. There are just so many characters in Genshin that seem to just get release to fill a quota and don't actually have any value to the game, even at release. And this has been a problem for Genshin since very early on. I'm still annoyed at what they did with Xinyan, and Zhongli would have gotten similar treatment if not for the CN backlash.
The Vigor system assumes everyone is equally as important, which is just false.
Yep. Theatre feels like the players are being punished for the devs developing a bad kit.
And you must have 4 characters in a team. At first youll have a great team. Nearing the end boss fight, you’ll have a team that is not built, doesnt have synergy, does little to none dmg. Not to mention how many characters you need to reach act 10. Not even all chosen characters will be used
It just solidifies the belief of the vigor caters more on the stonks side, coz how to get more char.? More pulls, More pulls? More stonks where it is a justified reason to not f up ur player base right? both veterans and casual, that is the stats that is intruiging to look into
No, the Vigor systems assumes everyone should pull all their shit 1yearmeta characters. They literally produce 1 dps for each element with a gimmick in each Nation; if you pull all of them and their supports you will have no problems. It's just a whale pleasing mode, which is also ridiculous because it is so stupidly easy once you have broken units all over the place that it shouldn't really please anyone. The Vigor system assumes whales are more important.
@@ping-x7m A great workaround to the shit system is to go the opposite route - bring absolutely dogshit teams that barely clear the star requirement (or even the basic one? I'm not sure if stars are required for the monthly rewards or clearing the stage is enough) and save the good 2-3 character cores for the bosses. You can retry and "upgrade" your team to a better lineup if you unexpectedly end up struggling with a round, but there's little to no way to recover stamina if you overcommitted your good units early.
It feels horrendous to do this voluntarily, but if Hu Tao/Kokomi/Baizhu/Gaming clears a mini-boss stage (particularly silly example from one of my stages with a mini-boss Bathysmal VIshap on September's reset), then I won't waste a cohesive team.
Crazy how they already had the formula right in the labyrinth event and now it's nowhere to be seen and they instead make a much worse version
clear evidence that they don't listen to the right advice. apparently labyrinth was unpopular in the CN servers (because of course it fucking was) so they didn't want to do that again.
@@plvto1 Yet they made Labyrinth Warriors a weekly thing and also a farming domain for planar ornaments in HSR. That Simulated Universe has got to be the most time consuming low-reward activity they have. Spending 10-15 minutes for 4 trash planar ornament. Good luck to you if you don't have Acheron to skip the mobs.
@@kibathefang6022 Farming relics is way easier now. Thanks to Divergent U, SimU's step bro. But yeah it did suck a lot.
@@plvto1Good. Labyrinth was pure rng shitfest.
Nah. Labyrinth Warriors sucked. It was quite literally just the Spiral Abyss with more walking around and even crappier buffs.
I HATE that the game forces you to run 4 characters each time
The amount of times i had to use supports in teams that just needed 2 characters to clear but lost vigor for this stupid reason sucks
Separate from that, I have no urge to play it. I have an urge to play abyss every once in a while but anytime theatre resets, it feels like a fucking chore
Genshin bots: Then don't clear it. No one is forcing you.
then they'd have to remove the total limit of character which is the whole point of this mode
this
@@Naruto_Uzumaki0123this game mode is just how many characters you own, on some levels you can even clear it with 1-2 characters and the rest are just fillers
2 built characters is enough for most stages for me, i just add unbuilt filler characters which i leveled just for imaginarium
The problem is thet Theater doesn'T really work with Genshin mechanics at all. The fact thet it is random BS go is antithetical of the whole idea to build teams based on elemental synergise and character's personal kits. Genshin's characters are just not flexible enough to make it work. Other problem is thet because you lose your characters you can'T even use the buffing cards conssitently, the whole idea of a rouge-like/lite is thet as you play you get more and more random/semi-random buffs where you activly try to get the most synergistic ones to achive macimum power, but as the cards work in Theatre you can get a full burning build without any dendro character left in your roster and then your buffing cards all wasted. The whole Imaginarium Theatre fail as a Genshin game mode and as a rouge-like as well.
I think its unlikely that you gonna face with the issue of not having the character with the same element as the buffs you pick, when the mode restricts you to 3 element. And if you invest so much in burning, why didnt you save a few units for it for the final boss? Could be a resource management issue.
Getting humongous buffs in a gamemode feels like shit in genshin anyway, because you spend years building your characters only for them to give you a massive buff and invalidate all of your progression.
One of the reasons i despise abyss blessings too, how can i enjoy building mualani when she gets free furina buff and 20% HP on top of that.
Rouge like gamemode type deal just doesn't mesh well with this game. They could have gone with the map building event as an endgame, and then community would build endgame by itself, but no, they just had to go with the gamemode who's only purpose is to bait people into pulling more characters.
@@Amir-ry7pp The otherside of the problem I don't talked about only implide it is the oppurtinity cost of the cards. It is possible to not use my dendro units until the last boss, yeah, but then I don't get any buff for any other teams I use in the Theatre. In rouge-like you are not only suppose use your builds ones or trwice, you suppose to play it in the whole game continuosly.
@@musicaddict9058
I agree with the suggestion to implement the Ingenuity as permament game mode.
I think one type of rouge-like game mode would work with Genshin. Radnomised Dungeon Crawling where as you go deeper and deeper you can build buffs for your, already builded, units. They can simply balance the game mode around the fact thet you need builded characters AND the buffs to clear the deepest parts of the game mode. Basicly they need to just make it harder then Abyss.
Though I agree, blessings are annoying. I really hate how with Theatre we get even more imbalance with the permanent stat buffs. But in a rouge-like this blessings are player controled ones, the whole thing is about make every run different and allow the player to get different buff combos in different runs.
@@reactiondavant-garde3391 I mean, you not getting any buffs for your other character doesn't really be the end of the world. Like, the the start to mid enemies are mostly fodder level anyway.
There is also another big problem. It is NOT a roguelike. Roguelikes rely on RANDOMIZATION and REPLAYABILITY. Imaginarium Theater has neither.
It's not a roguelike, but it's not a problem. It's more like a puzzle, but quite scuffed atm. And I think that with the last battle event which they've separated into two stages (on the first one damage didn't matter, reactions and character mechanics were more important), they're looking for solutions for the Theater. Basically, to let battle stages use proper teams, and then on "other" stages players could just play with random stuff because of certain effects (like running around with one-shotting circle from this recent event). This way they could also lower entry requirements, because not all teams should be able to do damage at all.
Yea... it could've been so much more. Considering the staggering amount of bosses in this game, it would've been simple for them to add an endless roguelike mode, and randomize the enemy lineups each run, with bosses at the end.
And if you remember, there was an event during the chasm patch,... the "Perilous Trail" event was a FANTASTIC way of making us utilize more characters. At the end of every 3 combat rounds, you had to remove 2 party members from your party. That would greatly incentivize people to build more characters, without it feeling "forced" like imaginarium theater.
cant speak of replayability when it differ from player to player but randomization is always there lmao. No way youre clearing the theatre with the same exact team from start to finish.
Wtf, it literally does lmao
It does have randomization but lacks any interesting randomization
I bet it would be 10x more fun if one of the buff cards you could get gives you good off field elemental application (e.g. "applies pyro to enemies around you when you do x or every x seconds")
But they're taking steps in tge right direction so hopefully it'll be fun in another 2 rotations
I still have no idea how mihoyo managed to make Elysian Realm and Sim Universe and then somehow fuck up theater
the funny thing is that people don't even like elysian and simu that much either 💀 and they somehow managed to make something worse than both
@@CaelVKMajority of people like them. ER a lot less than SimU cause of heavy favouritism towards new units, but people like it.
They’re sucks as well 😭
@@CaelVKI haven't played star rail in over a year but sim universe is where most of my best memories are
@@vukkicos5688 nah dude simuniverse expansions sucks with fucking menus onto menus man fucking hate them
IT wasn't designed to be roguelike or to be fun. It was designed to solve specific problems Mihoyo has - players not pulling characters and players not building characters (because what they alrdy have is good enuf). Essentially it was designed to make money, so there is no problem from Hoyo perspective. They never cared about making their games fun in the first place, all they care is money.
Which is good for me since I build almost all characters. I have 50+ of them with level 70+ at least, with their own weapon and artifacts.
I feel like I'm the exact target audience for a mode like this, I like pulling and building as many different characters as possible and I can easily hit the requirements to participate. Somehow its still not fun, not even for someone like me. Genshins combat system is so unique bc so much of it is in teambuilding, but you cant really do that in this mode. you just gotta use whatever random unsynergistic bullshit they give you. And even the buffs they give you would make so much more sense if you could freely choose what characters/ teams you want to use. Picking up a buff for a specific reaction or having to decide wether you want more hydro or pyro application for your vape team just feels bad if you cant actually decide to play teams that work with that specific buff throughout your run.
Same. I've got plenty of characters, artifacts and weapons and I still hate this RNG trashfest. Genshin is NOT the kind of game that lends itself to randomized teams. Even if it's still easy to clear random BS go is not fun at all for me.
the problem is the 2.2 childe event
it was way more fun than this
they didnt make this mainly for fun its just a mission to get rewards
Not being able to make teams with less than 4 characters pisses me off. It literally forces me to waste characters that I could use later.
Also it's a snoozefest. If you have all characters they tell you to have, you clear. That's it.
The meta for new players is honestly just to ignore this mode until you have two teams who can clear the spiral abyss consistently. Otherwise, if you build for this mode, you will only build literal garbage.
And when you're forced to waste characters, your immediate question when teambuilding becomes:"Which character is so trash i need to get rid of them ASAP?" Having an endgame horizontal mode make you think that is bad!
It seems like Hoyo is too proud to admit it's mistake with Theater and will still do everything to "fix" it. The entire concept is faulty and like others have said, they already developed events in the past that would be better endgames modes.
There is no mistake. It was designed to make money, and it works perfectly as intended.
I mean there's no "fix" here certain players want to reduce it down to another version of Abyss
So basically make it like HI3 Elysium Realm which is far worse and only rewards the type of player who loves Vertical Treadmills
@@demonking-zm3rs curious how elysian realm is far worse
@@demonking-zm3rs What do you mean there is no fix? This gamemode isn't for endgame players because the difficulty is abysmally low, and it isn't for new players either because it will take them years to obtain 22 characters needed to enter the hardest difficulty.
Who was it made for you ask? It was only made to milk new players by pushing them to pull for more units. No thought went into it besides that.
@@musicaddict9058 End Game doesn't need to be Difficult that's not a requirement and never has been (Let's remove the discussion on how Genshin Players use the term Endgame and Meta wrong)
The rhetoric that's it's supposed to be approachable to beginners is also nonsense. It's a mode that exist for horizontal progression
You see a lot of TC complain because they've already deemed most of the roster trash.
This is for people who want to play and explore there characters on a mechanical level and be creative
You see the complaint of Scuff because a TC for example can't look at a unit like Dori and try to use her ER and Healing along with her Lamp as a trigger and be creative
They'll complain and say why can't I just use Fischl
That's the scope of it. It's a way of using the limitation to utilize characters that Gamemodes like the Abyss doesn't cater towards
People are bitching because teams that are "Meta" are rigged
It's not "hardcore" and it's not " casual" and to those who say it's to resources draining...how much resin did you spend this week on Artifacts
You don't need high investment that's the point. There's no "fix" because players who truly believe it's bad are asking for it to be Abyss 2.0
It's a mode for most players and the ones complaining are to used to dragging the same 12 units and crushing content
Sorry you can't use X character try looking at your roster and leaning into the less relevant character
And if you can't well hey that's how a lot of players feel about Abyss its a vertical treadmill that support short burst high multiplier units
TLDR its a gamemode for horizontal progression for players who did invest in multiple units.
It's not really there to push spending because most players have a lot of units and for the kind of people who crave Power Creep or Meta not enough Meta Units come out or exist to encourage spending
This isn't HSR or Hi3 you get 3 or 4 Broken Units per Region so if the idea is to force the "Endgame Players" to spend then low investment doesn't make sense
It's for players who want to actually use there characters not spend 3 years getting cons and using the same 2 teams
There are a lot of issues with IT. But he barrier to entry its just stupid, even on my main account I had to level 5 characters to do the last difficulty this patch. Even if the mode was good most people probably wouldnt experience most of it.
They had HSR SU and ZZZ HZ to copy from and they cant even get that right.
Slight rant from a fellow Genshin creator:
As someone who "fixes" peoples Genshin accounts I see many different types of players accounts, and most of the submissions I get do not care about Theater at all. Nobody really cares about it for anything other than it being a primo source.
So I agree with the general take Jstern has with Theater being made for nobody. I basically blanket tell people not to bother building characters just for Theater because it isnt worth it generally speaking (unless you have spare resources and actually want to use those characters elsewhere).
I will add that I find "random BS go" in Theater to be fun. But my main account just has enough units leveled to challenge Theater w/o leveling more units for it. And I basicallt never want to go through the same Theater again. IT is a very limited form of fun, and it's fundamental design is opposed to what makes Genshin's combat engaging and what has kept me engaged with the game long term (team building and the nuance of layers of interaction between all the games characters). I genuinely wouldve preferred they just changed the enemy cycle in abyss every 2 weeks to keep it more fresh-more new abyss cycles more often would be more fun than what I get from Theater.
I get all kinds of ideas on how to use characters in fun ways all the time-and theater never inspires any of them. And if players like me with ability and desire to be creative with how they use characters still dont find much fun in IT, then imo its a enormous design failure.
All in all, IT being the only new permanent combat mode theyve added in five years is extremely disheartening to me. Somehow Theater has honestly made me more pessimistic about them adding future content to the game, when it should make me more optimistic since adding more content at all should be good. It's really hard for me to consider their priority was anything other than "what can we design to make players spend money?" when they designed Theater, quite frankly.
Oh, and I do think a gamemode incentivizing players to use more characters rather than doing something stupid like spending 40000 resin farming for Raiden is a good thing, but then I think one of IT's biggest failures is in how it forces building characters to attempt it at all, it doesnt actually necessitate using them. Ive been able to clear IT on my polearm only account by leveling non polearm units, selecting them for teams in IT, but then for the challenge I just never switch to those units (I only use the polearm chars). And none of the Theaters have been hard to clear with only polearm units, because the easiest way to succeed is just by having a really strong dps unit available for some of the Theater chambers. Basically, somehow the easiest way to clear Theater actually seems to be to just use hyperinvested DPS units, not using the different characters they force you to level to attempt the thing. Imo Abyss does a far better job at actually being a form of content incentivizing USING different characters.
And then this is all made worse by how great they've done with ZZZ's combat modes thus far (as of version 1.2). It feels like these games are made by different companies almost with how different the philosophy to combat content is between them. Genshin has an excellent combat system framework with so much potential for very fun combat, but the fundamental philosophy for how they approach content in the game is completely different from their other games. I really dont get it. I can only imagine there are many players, including many who have spent money, that have stopped playing because of how stupid theyve been with combat content in Genshin. So if Hoyo designed theater to make more money because they starting making less money on the game due to losing paying players, maybe they should consider actually designing fun content that make me want to PLAY more, rather than cringe mechanisms that seem to just exist to get me to grind more.
So here is my message to Mihoyo: I want to play genshin more, but YOU are making me want to play it less! Id love to start telling people that I dont feel bad spending money in Genshin because its a great game that I can have a ton of fun in. But instead the only justification I have for spending money in the game is that I make money by spending money because I am a creator. Is that what you want your creators to say? That it only makes sense to spend money because it makes money for a privileged few? Or would you rather I say I spend money because it is more fun? Would that kind of sentiment not end up making you more money? So make your game better. Its a travesty how much effort I see being put into aspects of Genshins combat when most players just dont meaningfully engage with it due to lack of compelling content.
(I love lots of things about Genshin to be clear, I just really want them to improve the game, but imo theyve done very little to meaningfully change things that affect what we can DO in the game...)
It was made for players like me. I built zero characters for IT and full starred IT every iteration. I don’t bother to farm for artifacts, my Akasha rankings suck, but I have a huge cast of characters who are reasonably developed. This and the last round of IT have been fun. I don’t mind if they amp up the difficulty a bit more tho, it’s still too easy.
They could probably solve this problem by having the player use 2 teams to climb some separate floor system, and then in-between each main floor they have you run IT chambers with the random concept in order to earn buffs for the 2 main teams. The IT section should just have your entire 3 specific element characters available from the start.
A well invested vertical account (cons and weapons) could just slam past the main floors without help from the IT side, but it would help people with less vertical investment deal with the harder main floors, utilizing snow-ball buff situations if they get lucky enough with the same buff-types that their main teams use, and thereby being rogue-like.
While I only 7 starred on my f2p alt, current IT was pretty much made for my accounts, but even then I don't run them more than once on my main.
@@icekyuusame with me, I have around 50 characters already built but not chasing the ranking in Akasha so IT has been fun. But I do agree with Soluna that the mechanic limitation is cringe to others. I hope the mode can be improved so it can be an even more enjoyable experience.
Im not all that
It might just be me, but I despise the idea behind this game mode. In roguelike games, you actually get stronger characters through buffs and items, but in this mode, you end up building the same teams you could play in the Abyss (if you're lucky enough to get the characters in the right order), and that’s just not fun in my opinion. There's no sense of growing stronger with tougher challenges, and I hate that. In my opinion, WuWa does a much better job with the Illusive Realm in keeping players entertained and wanting to replay. I never wanted to replay the Imaginarium Theater even once, to be honest. Get the primos and get out
At the end of Illusive Realm, your character feels like a god. There really is zero progression in IT.
Careful there, you mentioned genshin community's cryptonite
True, i just go in there every 1st day of the month, get my ppgems and forget it exists until the next reset
I love how illusive realm has character specific buffs that removes any form of drawbacks from them
i super agree with how the lack of teams just fee bad
the game just wasn't made for you to be able to put any 4 random characters together and have a cohesive team
also it sucks that my good supports cant ever be paired with the dps i intend them to because there's no point in stacking power on a single team. I'd never pair chevvy with arlecchino on theater because arle can clear by herself and chevvy is needed to help the stupid keqing overload floor
maybe if the system was build to GIVE energy on mob floors and consume energy on boss floors it would be better, so it incentivizes you to fish for and actively play your good characters. And then on boss floor the team enters cooldown for 2 arcs
there's no need for a cohesive team in the first place. The mobs is not as tanky as the one in abyss and the buffs are way stronger than abyss to help you out.
Sure there's no need
But is that fun? I'd argue no
@@jstern25 i'd argue yes, this mode makes you do things you would never do outside of it, I personally have a whole lot of fun with it because of this reason I'm tired to do the same dps race content for years. There's a strategic element to it when you have to ration your characters out, the forced 4 member composition is exactly for this, people keep complaining about this but removing this restriction would make the mode 10 times more boring because the strategic team management is gone.
@@kskr8610 What "strategic team management"? You mean having 3 trash units you don't even swap to and one actual DPS? Yeah great strategy. Or is playing something like Noelle/Lisa/Gaming/Sara really that entertaining to you?
You know you can play random nonsense teams of characters you like against weak enemies in the overworld whenever you want right?
@@azl218xc the way Genshin makes its characters and the elereact system literally makes having a team with zero synergy almost impossible, in the very example you brought up you can use Sara to buff Gaming and Lisa burst for off field damage, even if Sara's burst doesnt last that long it's still something valuable, with Noelle shielding ensuring Gaming doesnt die while hes doing his burst. Synergy doesnt need to be perfect it just needs to be there, in a team you can get value out of anyone if you want. If you think the game is unplayable without perfect synergy then you do you. Yes, it is entertaining to me because its completely novel, you are probably never playing this specific team ever again outside of that one stage, it is a one-time experience that really shines when you have been playing the same dps races for years. It wouldn't have been fun otherwise if you are stuck with the team for more than one fight. I don't get why people want to fix this mode by replacing it with Lab Warriors where you use one single team to do 20 battles it's way more boring and uninspired.
Can confirm. I got my 10 stars on visionary with half my characters at lv. 70 equipped with random or no artifacts at all. Most chambers, only 1 or 2 characters in the team were actually doing anything... until chamber 10, where I saved a "meta team" (Raiden national with Kuki moral support instead of XQ) to deal with ASIMON. I was also able to borrow a friend's C2R1 Arlecchino, and she pretty much soloed 2 of the middle chambers. The only "strategy" on my part was save the Raiden national-ish team for the end, and pick as many companion cards as possible in order to use up the bad/unbuilt characters early.
First 5 stages: trying to use a combination of shit trial characters + shit expendable units to get through mediocre combat sages
Last 5 stages: combining 1-3 of your good units with trash units each stage, and hoping that you don't have to rewind because you got element-blocked.
its not just needing 22 characters, its also needing 22 weapons leveled up (how many times i realized i dont have a weapon mid run and its even more stupid that you cant fix that after you enter the game mode) you cant change artifacts or weapons, and cause the game mode has so much randomization many characters need more ER than usual and you cant even fix mid run!
i yet to use the IT buff cause i was trying to get the only good characters but still i could not get them in time, still i dont think the buff will be massive cause this IT is overload and only chevy make overload viable and you can only use her twice and it you want to use her then you need a full team of pyro/electro, good luck if the rng of the run allowed that
its so scummy how they realized that the amount of characters they originally went for to full clear was not enough to make people have to invest in new characters they just leveled a couple chars to 70 every rotation and cleared so they just made it higher
Its perfectly in line with the rest of the game. Rng wishing. Rng artifacts. Insane pricing. Limited time events and weapons. Powercreeping characters and weapons to sell the new ones. Daily logins to try and form a habit. The whole thing is a money grab.
I feel they really aren't sure what to do with IT when it comes to making characters, you'd think they'd make more characters like Chevruse or nilou but instead they're just making characters who are hoping for a currently hypothetical pyro character they all can't share at once, really just feels like n excuse to get people to try and pull new characters just to complete it, likeIi dont ever see anyone recommend a character based on how well they could do in IT
IT Performance is really just
Solo damage
They should up the amount of friend characters to at least 3. The problem with adding more trial characters is they are bad and if you own the trial characters you aren't gaining any amount of extra characters. Also increase the vigor to 3 or refresh vigor like you said.
genshin is doing this to dilute players resources. its virtually evil
As you said, implementing a "vigor station" or "limited vigor reserves" can help the IT gameplay experience a lot, especially when the entry barrier is more obnoxious than the last iteration simply cus characters are not designed equal, like there is still no alternatives to Xiangling and Bennett. Another thing I wanna add is that the boons are so good now but the enemies are still squishy in the last three chambers. Of course, the enemies need to be normal in the earlier chambers but still make the last chambers have more HP than what they got rn. Another thing is we should get 2 out of 4 units rather than 1 out of 2 units after winning a battle. That way, we get more units while still being able to focus on buying the boons
is it just me being stupid or does the vigor refresh thing from the mystery cache is just not working sometimes? i got my Bennett's vigor refreshed only to not be able to use him in the next battle, it's really weird. granted i ain't read a damn thing lol
this game mode is just so bad i couldn't bother.
I agree about everything and also, it feels weird for a roguelike to HAVE TO switch teams completely all the time because even if you end up playing a good team, most if not all your buffs are probably useless because they don't align with the new team, like this theater, I got a bunch of overload buffs but played Lyney Xiangling Bennett Sucrose on the last 2 fights, ignoring all the buffs (and still killed Asimon in 34 seconds before it went invisible)
In star rail, in simulated universe, you can play a single team and get a path and blessings that make sense and everything works out perfectly so you can beat worlds while being underleveled or make teams that hyper focus on a path, and even if your team has big weaknesses (like no sustain) your team works so well with itself that you might clear anyways
And in Hades, you don't randomly have to switch weapon before a boss, that would break the whole roguelike thing but that's literally what happens in genshin theater
I'm fairly confident that the character requirement is half the reason the mode even exists, they wanted to "incentivize people to build more characters". It's definitely a problem with the new visionary difficulty though. 22 is too many unless you get lucky with starters you don't have and bonus units you do have. 18 was already a lot.
I personally don't particularly like roguelikes so the underdevelopment of those aspects doesn't bother me. I get extremely tilted when I get unlucky late into a run in more heavily randomized stuff like Simulated Universe and waste most of it or lose some rare opportunity and I am happy to not have to deal with that in another game.
At least don't force us to use 4 characters at once to artificially use up vigor. I hate that part so much. Or maybe just let us choose between doing IT or 2x abyss. At least abyss still is very, very replayable which is supposed to be a requirement for endgame content. I've never found myself replaying IT because there's no point, but I do go in the abyss from time to time to test out stuff.
At first I was gonna build some of my characters for IT, but then my resources still aren't enough at this point. Playing since 3.8 at AR 59, daily, and I'm still running out of mora, books, and ores, so I'd rather save those for characters I like rather than IT fodder.
Do you think a way to fix theater could be for the principle cast to not use vigor so you can always build teams with 1-2 of your own characters and fill them up with the principle cast? That would lower the character requirement and make building teams easier, this rotation chevreuse would always be available for example
9:43 One must imagine jstern25 happy
One way to fix this game mode would be to instead of selecting up to 22 characters and obtain them randomly, you select 4 o 5 teams that fit the restrictions and you get those teams randomly.
Game mode basically designed to force you to build characters you didn’t want to play in the first place.
I think they should add an endless mode and allow us to use fantasia flowers to regenerate vigor. The reward can be artifact exp and mora , which is extremely important now that they want us to craft sanctifying elixirs.
Vigor needs to either be unlimited/refreshable or the character acquisition needs to be removed entirely and you get access to your whole roster from chamber 1 but can only use everyone 2x.
This mode has too many restrictions and they all are fine individually but mesh together horribly.
Why do we need to level the characters to 70 when they could just raise them to 70 or 80 like Divergent Universe?
Why all this random nonsense just to obfuscate that we are just playing spiral abyss 2 instead of actually making a roguelike?
Honestly, Imaginary Theater is not really a rougue-like. It's basically just a random team-draft for fighting almost random enemies. It is really a horizontal investment check. Where it comes to skill, it's testing whether you have basic competency, and whether you can compete the final two boss mechanics, or have a team strong enough to brute force such mechanics. Honestly, if they ever did an actual rougue-like, that'd be awesome.
However, I don't hate it. The thing about genshin is that there was no proper endgame. If you built 3 strong teams covering different elements, you basically only had to login every 15 days to beat Abyss and Collect the primos. It was not uncommon for me to be done with "the endgame" in half an hour.
Now there is an endgame activity, which is building characters for Imaginarium theater, but of course, tons of players are going to hate the increased "homework".
As for people with a secondary accounts... unless you already have tons of built characters in your secondary account, it's not worth the time investment to do Visionary Mode. Just focus on hard mode. It is important players realize that Visionary mode is aimed at old, primary accounts. Think well, before deciding if Visionary is worth the hassle, because in a lot of cases, I just don't think it is.
not even the primos could bring me back to this game mode tbh, it's that bad for me.
It has various problems and at many levels.
1. The first problem is at what I'd say level 0, where you can't even enter the theatre if you don't have a specific number of built characters.
2. Element check.. Why???? They put asimon in this theatre but the characters allowed are electro, dendro, geo. Like wtf bruh??? Did they forget their own in game mechanics??
3. Vigour- Characters can be used at max twice. What if I want to use my choice of character without a restriction? Atleast give us an option to "redeem" or "revive" the used characters via those flowers(the in mode currency).
4. Team building- It is essentially random bullshit go. I am forced to play weird combinations of characters which have little to no compatibility.
5. Buffs- do they even do anything?
Agreed! I’m a player with a nicely built roster and easily fills the entry requirements for every season so far and 10-10 with no problem whatsoever but I find no enjoyment in this game mode. One of the most annoying thing about this game mode is the nothing-burger buffs. They’re good don’t get me wrong but what’s the point of picking buffs for specific elemental reactions when most of the time I cannot use the buffs anyways with how quickly my characters run out of vigor and I have to swap out for others which oftentimes don’t produce that specific reaction. Additionally, the mobs usually are swishy enough for me that the buffs don’t even MATTER because my C0 Arlecchino evaporates them in a swipe! Usually I never bother going with the buffs and just try to get as many characters as I can with the fantasia flowers to have as many fillers as possible so I can save the best characters for later stages. Not to mention, some stages are just purely annoying if I haven’t don’t have on hand a specific character, e.g. CC stages without Kazuha/Venti/Sucrose actually forced me to rewind to roll for them. Abyss is annoying, sure, but at least it’s a battle where I can pick what equipments to bring, IT is just a battle where I have to make do with what the game throws at me, which is fine in and of itself but the vigor, the forced 4 characters team, the buffs that are there but are rarely useful make this an incredibly unfun experience.
Its like this mode forces you to build characters youd never use in actual gameplay like abyss etc.💀
I don’t have that big of a problem with getting a bunch of filler characters to 70. You don’t need to farm for their talents and artifacts, and you only have to do it once, so it’s very easy to secure a permanent Imaginarium entrance. The real problem that is pretty much guaranteed to happen at some point is the inevitable HP pool inflation.
wanting 22 characters of 3 specific elements to just participate in the highest diffculty is crazy lol cause its not just about levels its also about artifacts and talents for those units, not just this but you cant even focus on upgrading your favourite units to a higher level due to this
@@TamytaummtaI’m an endgame player, but for such a high requirement the gameplay isn’t even rewarding
So yes, the game mode is meh, near 0 replayability
@@Tamytaummta genshin players and defending their game on everything still go hand in hand huh. I literally clear ITs visionary mode, it's still a horribly designed mode, also endgame doesn't equal "pull meta or you can't beat it" Even a waifu puller should be able to beat it assuming they are making cohesive teams. In IT you can't even make any team for the most part and also it wants you to have 22 units of 3 different elements each patch and none of those units even get utilized, they are just for bench lol. The problem isn't having an endgame, it's having it be horribly designed.
Imaginarium dogshit
@@hachiman205 you guys seem to like talking up a storm lol
the community account being 1y/o was a surprise gut punch
They had the perfect skeleton for it with the 2.2 Labyrinth event mode.. all they had to do was copy and paste , up the difficulty or make different options for different difficulty and everyone would have been happy..
But no!!! The game's brilliant devs took "how to create FOMO and how to disappoint our players again" route and made Imaginarium theatre... Ok i get it , this is a gacha game , they want to create FOMO so they make players spend their money on their game but like c'mon...
I wish they would give Lv80 trial builds for all characters you own but don’t have leveled up. I don’t mind the 22 character requirement, it’ll come eventually when players pull enough. I do mind having to waste resin leveling characters to Lv70, who I 100% won’t build or use properly anyway and who would be lucky to be switched in once to trigger Scroll
That + removing the 4 character requirement for rooms would be the biggest instant improvements to this mode. I like the concept of Theater but this feels like playing an early beta with non fully fleshed out mechanics
I have a 4 year old account that I spent way to much money on it so clearing this game mode is not an issue. But it feels terrible every single time. I have enough build characters to easily make 20 teams that are fun to play yet imaginarium theatre regularly leaves me with a character selection that has zero synergy at all. I can’t even imagine how shit this must feel for new and/or low investment players.
why is genshin so afraid of just letting us experience combat for a long period of time? i want 5 straight minutes of varied enemies to really test energy requirements and i want enemies that dont die in one raiden charged attack. i want ruin guards that have 2 million hp. i want enemies that are ventiable but can live through a full venti team rotation. speedrunning abyss is fun and all but the current one is so piss easy, bosses dying in 15 seconds is boring.
shout outs to your trial dehya hitting 5990 crits with her burst
One point I want to make about the lack of "snowballing": The enemies need to be equally gimped to accommodate the expected level of slop you'll be forced to use against them. Becomes very apparent in early boss chambers, where you most often save a few synergestic characters. Throwing a good team against the boss literally melts them like paper, cause of course theyre designed to handle slop.
Its a very disheartening affair as a whole, the game breaks your legs and pits you against enemies with broken legs and expects you to have a good time.
Giving more access to vigor is going to raise this bar, but the sad reality is even in such a case the absolute best you can still get is your baseline normal team that you'd get in abyss. The ceiling of the "snowball" you can get is literally your normal good team comp cause the stacking buff cards they give are very one dimensional without much impact (not to mention you can't get them half the time cause you need to be spending currency to get more chars anyways.)
another reason genshin made theater bad is because if you have too much fun, u wont pull characters
LOL people are under the assumption Imaginarium Theater is meant to be a good game mode, its NOT. The mode is designed by the sales team purely for sales, nothing else. You are force to level bunch of characters because the sales team want to make you roll and strain your resources so you pay $$$ for refreshes.
Again the mode is purely create a problem, offer a solution with $$$. Trust me, after next region its going to go up to 30 even 40 characters. So pay up or shut up, that's how the sales team work.
-this mode only exist for players who don't do abyss and don't pull "teams" they just pull "characters" (which is admittedly the biggest part of genshin player base just go to hoyolab and see) that's why every time someone brings up the randomness of team building you just get told "but it's part of the strategy!" or "it gives you a chance to play different teams" which is why a lot of people - rightfully so from their own perspective - feel like they finally have a mode to play which isn't a bad thing itself. the problem is, you just separated "endgame" into 2 parts and which you cannot tackle the one without severely jeopardizing the other especially for newer accounts (and by "newer" I mean account that are at least 1 year old minimum and even then it's still a problem). but then they make abyss reset less? so even if you are a "hardcore" player and you 36 star abyss consistently you are locked out of halite rewards you can normally get unless you participate in the arbitrary character building requirement they put.
also my tinfoil hat tells me this is them trying to bring star rail into genshin because they cannot powercreep as fast to make people impulse pull as much units as they possibly can just to keep up with endgame modes flavor of the month requirements (which you can argue is already happening) so they said "fuck it, just make a mode where an account need as much characters as possible".
essaying
Its nothing changed to abyss. Because before you didnt get monsters reset but just rewards so nothing changed in terms of NEW ABYSS RESET with NEW gameplay in it.
@@feyandhisstuff9888the comment is indeed talking about the rewards. Besides, the blessing is different so you have to tackle it in different ways.
@@Kicksrockskids nah, there is no real difference in teams if first buff was 30% normal attack dmg and it changed to 30% elemental skill dmg
5:30 ...What a terrible way to start off... Girl, do Dehya, Keqing and Ning and whatever bad character you've gotten from select random character card.
12:00 ... Maybe because the point of a game mode is to make random teams and figure out synergies you can use to clear content in one go. Unlike Abyss that people play on repeat on hardest mode only to test their favorite teams. It's not the same thing.
mika how do you keep having these bad takes..
@@nevergonnagiveyouupnevergo2795 What bad take? This isn't a take, this is a fact 😭
people think unless a synergy is absolutely perfect it's not fun lmao
@@kawaiimika7974 jus SHUSH
@@kskr8610 Literally, like it's still a fun functional team. Just because it isn't a standard one doesn't mean it's "boring"
I think IT shines a light into genshin's biggest character design issue: creating too many on-fielders compared to off-fielders. it is kind of a 50/50 share, but it makes little to no sense playstyle-wise since there's only one slot for on-fielders and 3 for off-fielders. It'd be much easier and unoticiable to build diferent random teams if you weren't locked into half of a cast of on-field dps who can't really play with each other;
like how the hell am I supposed to feel good playing a mode that implies the need of off-field pyro characters when we have now only four of them of wich three deal close to no dmg?
this the one theater that took me time to clear because i dont have much geo, only noelle but she wants furina... had to raise sara, yunjin, and gouro just to hit the character quota... and as much as jstern mentions "it is easier to get characters" but i got really unlucky and dont get as much characters early stages, had to used up all my rewinds and honestly, i dont know if i can clear imaginarium theater if i didnt borrow a navia...
An easy fix that would help a lot of players:
Designate a "Main Character", you get them from the start and they don't lose vigor/dont have it.
This way you always have something to glue your team together and it also raises the baseline of player power by a lot so the mode can actually be difficult.
The problem is it’s too basic for veterans that have lots of characters and too restrictive for new players that don’t have a lot of characters
NGL, I don't think they ever intended the entry-level for the event to be cheap and easy to begin with. With how many rival gachas were coming out and interest kind of waning, I think they just cooked up something to engage the long standing players who were complaining about more endgame. It's a joke of an endgame because they need to care about mobile device players, but it's just a bone to throw to the people who have been around for a while and have nothing really to do with their characters.
For me, the first visionary round was a complete nightmare, in part because of the baptist being the baptist and in part because I didn't check what the boss stages would be ahead of time and plan for it from the start. The second visionary round went super easy (twice even, since I redid it to get an achievement for getting all the flowers/stars).
The fact that planning which characters you must pull and then hold on to for the entire run from the start is such a huge deal seems to clash with the fact that your characters are randomized and getting them in any kind of targeted way can become prohibitively expensive. I just feel like it's a really weird setup. It would at least feel better if you could select from your entire roster at certain points, so you'd be guaranteed a couple characters for each boss.
Aside from that, the buffs being tied to elemental reactions seems pretty inconsistent. What are they going to do about the elements that have no reactions? What about the special guests that can't get buffed because they're the wrong element? What about characters who are just shit at applying their element? Not even getting into characters who are strongly tied to a specific elemental setup (Nilou, Chevreuse, etc) or gear that expects specific element/reactions.
I've actually never played a rogue-like except for Wuwa's Illusive Realm, but compared to that, I have to say that I also feel like Imaginarium buffs just... don't feel cool. They exist. They presumably do something. But it doesn't really feel like it's any different from every other combat event. It feels like Abyss but more convoluted.
I never really considered IT a rogue-like. It feels like Abyss with random restrictions. I was hoping it would feel like simulated universe from HSR (at minimum). Genshin is literally built around being an open world. How hard would it be to copy paste assets from story quest dungeons?! They could use the elemental restrictions correctly and place puzzles in the dungeon that need that specific element to proceed or something. The current version of IT just seems like the lowest effort thing they coulda created while still being able to say "hey we gave you more endgame like you wanted"
i wish they would have done somethin g similar to divergent universe in starrail where you can use any character on your account and if they arent leveled , geared , talents upgraded or anything the game will automatically upgrade them to a lvl they deem is enough to be used in the content
What made me enjoy it was finally building more chracters. I basicly always used the same ones. Now that I have a lot of characters built, I finally enjoy the theater a lot. I have more fun there than in abyss.
It's so fun using nonsense together ❤️
Ive never considered theatre a roguelike.
I actually like imaginarium theater now with visionary mode. I love that it's given me a reason to use characters I never bothered to build before
Aintnoway we got the theatre hit-piece before the cryo hit piece
I think this is a monkey paw situation. We all asked for more endgame activities and they gave us the most dogshit endgame mode i've ever had the displeasure of playing lol like damn nothing at all would have been preferable
@@bulat9331 erm
Actually
They took away abyss content to make room for theater
@@jstern25 no you don't understand, they HAD to do that! Giving us five more pulls per month would have been far too generous!
/s just in case
@@jstern25 Oh man that's true, I forgot that they did that and I feel even worse about it now
current IT seems like it could work years down the line when theres enough niche units or general supports to support the amounts of teams needed
I would love to see something similar to an actual rogue like
Where we would get all the characters at once, be able to play actual teams and plan around future rooms, while “rewards” for clearing a chamber would be the chards with reaction bonuses. Or some other form of “deck building”. Like jstern said, to eventually snowball everything.
I wish they include other combat modes inside the theater because right now all of them are just defend the monolith or dps checks which are already in the abyss.
Overload themed and Chevreuse is there: Awesome.
Stupid vigor system means Chevreuse is gone after two uses: *Well this sucks*
Over 4 years Ive built 15 characters in Genshin as I have zero interest in 70% of the games cast. Feels like this mode was specifically made to spit in the faces of players like myself.
Imaginarium Theater f Nilou hard and forces me to swap out my Marachausse set from Noelle to build a Gladiator set, it forces me to dump tons of resources on characters I have little to no interest in playing and my reward is some of extremely scuffed combat experience with awful team comps.
i build ALL my characters, so personally that issue isn't a problem, but can definitely see why it would be.
but they fixed it in HSR DU (divergent universe) already - they bring up unbuilt characters for you.
this would relieve a lot of the absurd build requirements in IT.
IT is a dead end because of vertical investment. They'll never release an endgame mode with trial builds and no constellations to create a valuable sense of progression.
The main problem with IT is that 4* DPS characters are developed bad, seemingly on purpose, with scant few exceptions and "real" supports are printed so rarely. For every good support like Chevreuse or Xilonen, we get ten DPS characters between them. It doesn't matter if you have every character in the game, when every single DPS wants one of the same four supports, some of your teams are going to be awkward and suboptimal, and since every Attack-scaling fucker in the game wants Bennett, any rotation without Pyro just makes the likes of Wanderer, Navia, Wriothesley, Childe, etc worse. VV is arguably worse which may very well be what led to the creation of Xilonen; since the vast majority of PHEC teams use a VV support, they need to print res shred from other elements to ensure that players actually have an option when Anemo isn't featured to keep up the façade that this elemental restriction gimmick makes a lick of sense in a reaction-focused game.
Oh and speaking of Chevreuse, wouldn't it be a damn shame if the vigor system forced you to add a Geo character to your Pyro/Electro team? And have fun playing your niche DPSes like Itto, Wanderer or Gaming if you don't also get offered their niche supports like Gorou, Faruzan or Xianyun!
I saw the theater character requirement and just went with “it is what it is”. If I have the characters, great. If not, it’s the way it goes.
Anything more doesn’t seem worth it for the rewards or even for the pride of completing it.
As somebody with a very invested Genshin account that sucks at the combat, Imaginarium feels WAY more fun for me personally than Abyss. Abyss is literally just "use Neuvi, use Arlechinno, Win" while Imaginarium gives me a reason to play other characters that aren't as good
I played on a friend's account and it forced me to level up Amber, Lisa, Collei, and Sara to get to the bare minimum to participate in the last 2 theatre rotation. I barely have enough after that to max Kazuha to level 90.
Imaginarium Theatre is a game mode based on strategic (random BS go) use on your built (haphazardly scrounged up) characters.
imo, vigor sistem is okay, they just need to give 1 extra special vigor for boss chambers to every char.
every character has 2 vigors for normal stages and 1 extra vigor for a boss stage. problem solved
For anyone wondering how it is for those who horizontally invest in their characters as well, here's the 22 units I brought for Visionary. My take away is that my Beidou is typically collecting dust in the bench but was really helpful here as subDPS.
Pyro (all are level 90 with their own weapon and artifacts.)
1. C0R1 Hu Tao - Triple Crowned
2. C6 Bennett - Triple Crowned
3. C5 Diluc - Triple Crowned
4. C6 Gaming - Triple Crowned
5. C6 Xiangling - 6/9/10
6. C0 Dehya 9/9/9
7. C3 Chevreuse
Electro
1. C2R1 Keqing 90 10/9/10
2. C0R1 Raiden 90 6/9/10
3. C6 Sara Mouun's Moon 90 1/1/10
4. C6 Fischl R5 Stringless 90 6/10/9
5. C6 Beidou R5 Luxurious Sealord 90 6/9/10
6. C0 Yae Miko R5 Widsith 90 6/10/9
Geo
1. C2R1 Itto 10/9/10
2. C0R1 Albedo 6/10/9
3. C6 Gorou R5 Fav Warbow 1/10/6
4. C0 Zhongli 1/10/9
5. C0 Chiori (Trial)
6. C6 Ningguang TTDS 9/9/9
Guest
1. C2R1 Kinich 6/10/10
2. C0 Yelan R5 Fav Warbow 6/9/9
3. C0 Venti R5 Sac Bow
I was hype for a new endgame mode, now i miss the second abyss each month. It's so bad i wished they didn't bother.
Agree on the lack of sense of progression, but hard disagree on letting you just play your planned spiral abyss meta teams? Clearly the idea was to get you to not just play top of meta repeatedly each floor. You're essentially asking for spiral abyss 2 with more buff cards. Lower the requirement sure, but there absolutely needs to be some jeopardy to when you use your kazuha/bennett.
They need to take notes from elysian realm, a give unique buffs to the promoted/trial characters. Give us events that make odd teams viable rather than just buffing preexisting reactions.
It feels like it offers nothing new. Gameplay wise you save your usual team, suffer with whatever you dont mind losing until the boss fights which dont offer any challenge or any need to think about your build. A meta team can take out the last visionary boss without any buffs to their primary reaction so what is the point of it all?
What baffles me the most is the game mode got approved but on release everybody hated it like it didn't go thru beta testing cuz it was so scuffed and unpolished from the get go the experience is just awful for the whole playerbase that it didn't leave a lasting memory for anybody, for a billion dollar company that's pretty shameful.
-If Hoyo would do a balance pass and actually buff "useless" characters, players would be more inclined to experiment with imaginarium comps. I personally already level every character I get but I have to admit, I wouldn't even bother slotting some of them in if not for this mode.
-Maybe I'm not understanding the mechanics, but there's too much soft-lock probable randomness? Dunno how else to put it. I put off selecting a character, and that one that I want to save never shows up unless I spend all my points.
-The buffs when raised to Level 4 are insane. OP. Don't get me wrong. I clear, I get gems. Yay. But It's basically a walkover, in which case I feel I didn't really accomplish my victory.
Even if there were no useless characters its still bad because genshin is built around synergy, 4 on field dps characters will never work in a team.
I think the biggest issue is still that you just have characters there to fill in a slot, and that feels awful. Even more because you know those characters are bad but you still had to invest resources on them.
Even wuthering waves illusory realm was more true to the roguelike formula than genshin did with threater
Not single endgame mode has to accomodate "rush from beggining" players. I know it's for content, but that is not a valid point at all. Most players are not content creators and will follow natural game progression which is to pull for characters and use them as years go by.
The Imaginarium Theater is made for people like me who horizontal invest into getting as much characters as I can for free and leveling them up to at least 70 to get the free standard pulls from each of those characters to get even more free characters. I don't have godly artifacts but most of the characters have some usable artifacts and leveled weapons. I level them up as soon as I get them and I keep them in the overworld party doing the dailies and Serenitea Pot until they reached Friendship level 10. After which, I will replace them with the new characters I pulled. This way, the gameplay remain fresh and I don't get bored with the same team.
Natlan was especially challenging in this regard since they gave two free characters and I also just pulled Mualani. I had to level three characters at the same time. I decided to get Dehya and prefarmed most of her materials so, that wasn't too bad. Mualani and Kachina, thought, I had to farm after they came out. My Natlan overworld party at the moment is Mualani, Kachina, Dehya, and Yaoyao.
I think its fun, i whoop it but I can understand why alot of others can't. Ive played the game since it launched essentially and i build alot of characters.
i did tons of abyss over and over again to try a proper fun teams, but IT nah just once a month is enough
Another problem is that it's very hard to enter, especially the visionary mode, and when u do its too easy. Who is this mode for? New players can never enter, and old player just stomp it with 3-4 dps and the random supports they manage to get. There is no sense of "oh yeah i got this sick build" which differentiates one run from another like u get in games like hades and feel the satisfaction. Every rotation is just a pain to level up fodder characters that will stay level 70, 1/1/1, with no arts forever just to enter and then easily stomp it for the rewards.
The other problem is that characters nowadays come with more and more limitations, Navia, xilonen, chasca etc needing 2 phec, neuv clorinde needing reactions for their passives, furina needing healers, poor nilou needing VERY specific teams making her almost unplayable here, kinich emilie with burning. This mode goes against the idea of making these creative characters in the first place, and on the top of that there is geo and cryo who are weak and dont get a lot of new chars and people dont have many of them to even qualify, and also dendro who doesnt have many characters in general. Its hard in all the wrong ways, and its not even fun or giving the sense of accomplishment cause of how easy it is when u do get it. Disappointing.
My main problem is how they restricted the elements we can bring
The problem with IT is that its a character bait gamemode and any suggestion that'd make you build less characters than their new quota is probably going to be ignored. The only reason it exists is so they can add new QOLs without changing the status quo by a lot. It's just a standard case of Genshin's combat system not being rigid enough to incentivize a more flexible gamemode.
SHIT ROGUELIKE, WHOEVER MADE THIS INSTEAD OF LABYRINTH WARRIORS INAZUMA EVENT NEEDED TO BE PUT ON ELECTRIC CHAIR FOR 24/7, THATS HOW DUMB IT ISSSSS
Nice Vid Man…still waiting on that Cryo vid…
day 1 player and i was shocked that i cant even get in this thing i was missing like two characters
I'll be putting into feedback and be vocal in a non stupid way about it like i did with the last theatre before it was updated to this and having a way to restore vigor is a solution. Another solution can be similar to a previous mode where you select two characters that have their vigor slightly protected each round. Remember where a certain slotted character carried over to the next team? But yeah vigor isn't fun i know why it is there but it needs to be better
Pretty much exactly how I feel. When I talked about this on Reddit, some of the responses I got were more or less "but's it's fine because it's easier than Abyss".
I don't care about "easy", I care about HAVING FUN. If it's easy, but not fun, what's the point?
I have an og account with a lot of characters, but very few overlapping, been pulling a couple of 5* units a year since Inazuma. I do complete the trial one way or another, but I do struggle a lot exactly because I didn't focus on building a gazillion characters, but rather have coherent 2 comps working for the Abyss. All that this has done to me is incentivizing to care even less, because I cba to chase their stupid marketing plans. The day they will change requirements to let me earn less primos from their ''endgame modes'' will just go by like any other day. In short, all this has done is making me even more conservative, because trying to force me to play random garbage that I don't enjoy is not how you get my interest.
I'm here to give a different view for someone that quiet enjoy the Imaginarium Theater, tho it is indeed still has many flaws (the entry requirement VS avalaible/accesible characters, hydro only fkin have 3 4 star)
I don't see Imaginarium Theater as a rogue mode and I believe I almost never make unsynergetic team, because the mode alwyas restrict you to certain elemental reactions, so I always planned ahead to make each element still available and what element needed for the bosses
I honestly find it fun to use character in an unusual role and make it work, Like Ningguang Chiori FIschl Keqing, Ningguang Chiori Beidou Thoma, and It's weird that I beat the horse statue boss with Razor (def shred and electro applier), Kachina, Yunjin, Noelle, while Gorou never appeared, all the somewhat weird team are usually at early stages since I always save the synergistic one on the lastest boss (and they usually overkill)
though I do see the problem, because the gameplay of Imaginarium Theater is all about planning and a little luck, maybe I spend longer thinking than the actual playing, and that's indeed a problem, and thinking also including changing character build to fit the current elemental reaction (I changed my Tighnari sands to attack sands in previous Imaginarium Theater), though I found it fun, but I can understand why others found it horrendous
and I kinda hate it that this will make Hoyo have excuse to make character with the same kit but sidegrade because now we need a lot of characters anyway, having 2 Xingqiu is not a problem now, Xinyan can be useful if Thoma is unavailable now, still need Chiori but already used all her vigor because she's the starting character? good thing I have Albedo
if they wanted us to build lots of characters both 5 stars and 4 stars, then they should've at least made most of these characters' kits actually good and useable, especially for those 4 stars. and even then we wouldn't have enough resins to build them, making it really hard to justify spending very limited resources to build characters with a trash kit just for this garbage game mode.