Genshin’s Leveling System is Weird, Right?

Most modern gacha games have stopped giving unit xp for killing enemies or completing missions. You only ever level up your characters using materials. Genshin was clearly balanced the same way with books being the only way to level up, and at some point they decided to tack on “Natural Xp” to trick non gacha players into thinking the game was reasonably balanced but scaled it so you couldn’t farm levels at a reasonable pace this way. There is zero doubt in my mind that the level system is exactly as weird as Mihoyo wants it to be or at least mostly intentionally screwy.

"You ever level up in Genshin?" Man, I dunno, I've been AR60 for long enough to forget how it's like to level up.

An interesting thing that comes out of the book/material based level up system is that a lot of player will pre-farm the materials for a character weeks before the character actually is obtained, spending hours level grinding for a character that doesn't exist yet with other characters on the account. Literally the opposite of most games where you grind with the character themselves after you obtain them.

At first I didn't like it but as an endgame player it is nice to just plop books into a new character to go from level 1 to 90

When I pulled Childe in October of 2021, I decided he was not allowed to have any exp books until he earned them himself, wading through the waters of combat until he finally reached level 20. It wasn't as if I needed him for my main team at that point, because I was solidly a Yoimiya main; as long as I had Zhongli, Xingqiu, Yoimiya, and a flex slot for puzzles (which eventually just turned into Albedo's seat when I pulled him next patch), my overworld team had whatever it needed. So Childe was my toy, and toy with him I did. While I used him quite a bit, he was not in my party most of the time. It took me about four months to get him to level 20! Four months of grueling training. And then finally, when he hit level 20, he was rewarded with an ascension to 80 right away. It was a lot of fun. I'm never doing it again.

You know why Genshin did this? Because at the start of the game until the 1.2 Dragonspine expansion, they tried to lean into the traditional aspects of RPG games. Leveling, crafting, cooking, quests, finding cool items in the open world, reputation system. But after that it seems they ditched trying to make an open world action RPG and instead focused on characters, story and laidback casual events and interactions. Likely because that’s when they realized the type of players playing the game were mostly casual previously non-gamers.

just wanted to say that 14 weeks is not more than a year :) 8:46

7:11 Since the first 3 Weekly bosses you fight have their Resin cost reduced by half, it ends up costing you 90, and not 120 Resin. In addition, Genshin's Weekly bosses do not work in the same way as Star Rail's. In Genshin, you can fight the rest of the Weekly bosses that you didn't fight at half the Resin cost, and each one will cost you 60 Resin. In the end, you can spend 90 (30x3) + 360 (60x6) = 450 Resin on Weekly bosses in a single week. This will leave you with enough Resin for 20 more bosses in the week. In conclusion, this makes the final amount of Exp you can get from using Resin per week equal to 5,244 - 7,600.

If you kill every fungi with electro/pyro on the map, you can get 20k exp, which is the same as the purple books. The only reason I know this is because I did it while leveling up Zhongli. I resorted to books pretty quickly, though.

Most RPGs have characters passively gaining levels through battles. However, this runs into the problem that new characters are under-leveled - and forcing you to use half built characters in battle can be frustrating. This is a minor problem in games where there are only a few characters, but Genshin has a lot of them. As such, Genshin starts with letting characters passively gain levels so that new players feel familiar with the system before slowly introducing them the actual way to level up with EXP books, which lets the player actively control which character gets to level up. In my opinion, this solution is a lot more elegant than Pokemon's EXP share.

Yet another banger from KazooCat. I leveled up my Zhongli to level 80 when i first got him in April of 2021. After that I wanted to see how long it would take me to get him to level 90 naturally from level 80. He has been on most of my teams when I play and he is only level 82. He is 184073 EXP out of 243025 so im hoping to get him to level 83 by the end of the year. So getting him to level 90 might take a decade at this rate.

Well for me it's an upgrade from having to kill tens of thousands of mobs for months in the old MMORPGs of the late 2000s/early 2010s.

I left my Xinqiu lv88 for like to years and some random day he ascended to lv89 lol, pretty surprised cus I used to play him quite a lot in my weird Ayaka team. One of the most epic moments I've ever had with Genshin i swear

it's not a huge difference in the general idea, but activated and scorched fungus do give 60 exp which makes them efficient to farm if you're insane and want to level your characters naturally

This wasn't a surprise seeing as I played other gacha games before. The level up material farm is a relatively normal mechanic in those games.

Yes, being relegated to books for levels does make the grind for them a daily thing, whether it be completing events, farming the leylines, or chest scavenging. Initial level-ups are very much a dopamine thing + convenient cheesey method to fully restore HP. (I don't know if this is still a thing, but leveling up did this as long as the character was still alive and was in your party). I guess there is also the facet that when using purely books, you will have some EXP overflow that can't be refunded.

i always ignore the leyline exp unless there is double drop rate event (3 runs a day) i got 2600 purple books, i got all of those from events, quest, exploration, and teapot (20 books a week) there is no point doing leyline for book, better for artifact or talent/ascension.

Remove levels and instead being tied to a skill tree could also work. You would still end up needing to unlock the branches of the tree so you'd need boss materials and region items. Star Rail already has this system, basically having this weird double upgrades needed to level a character, normal levels and a skill tree.

This video is a sole reason i learned about holding a + button lets you add 10 xp books. Ar 60, playing for almost 3 years.

The main level up system exists a bit as a time gate with resin in order to make sure you dont get too powerful too fast. In the early game with mondstat and even some liyue you can get by without getting books via events/flowers to help new players not have to juggle as much as quickly.