Genshin Impact Beginner Tips and Tricks

by hotbooster9858

After playing the Chinese OBT for around 3 days extensively I’d like to offer some tips and tricks and some feedback for the game in preparation for launch. It’s a really nice game and I will definitely play it on launch.

I’m currently AR 24 and I have played through the story up to being send to Liyue.

The Gacha

After doing the 20 rolls in the Novice Banner (the one with the Noelle background) I got the following:

• Noelle (4* Geo)
• Beidou (4* Electro)
• Barbara (4* Hydro)
• Bennet (4* Pyro)

After doing 39 pulls in the Standard Banner I got the following:

• Bennet (4* Pyro)
• Xingqiu (4* Hydro)
• Favonius Sword (4* Sword)
• The Flute (4* Sword)

The rest of the loot were 3* weapons.

So as you can see, really please for the love of god don’t roll on the Standard Banner. If you plan on rerolling, maybe, I don’t know if the rates are better but if you don’t plan on rerolling just clear out the Novice Banner (16 Acquainted Fates) and stockpile for an event banner. (which might also be on release but even then I’d suggest no rolling until you got around or close to 100 rolls available)

Also single pulls are identical to 10 pulls so ALWAYS single pull, if you get a 4* before the 10 pull guarantee the counter will reset and you will get another in the next 10 pulls.

The Novice Banner doesn’t actually allow you to single pull so don’t freak out on that.

Priorities Early Game

Adventurer Rank

I’d say that in the first day your priority should be to reach AR 20 and consume all of your stamina on Ley Lines. It’s not worth it to do any Domains unless you want to do the 3 Domain Adventurer’s Handbook mission.

It’s really not hard to do, without even rushing the main questline (I’ve really explored a lot and ignored it for the most part) I have gotten to AR 17 in the first day. If you just play the main questline and don’t get too distracted running to the other edge of the map or trying to climb the tallest mountain in the game, you can definitely do it. Although it will take some commitment.

But why AR 20?

• At AR 14 12 you get your commissions so you if you feel like you don’t have time you can stop here and just do your commissions and logout.
• At AR 20 you get your BP and you will be able to contribute to BP on your first day if you manage to rush it well enough. You will also unlock Spiral Abyss and Xiangling if you clear Floor 3.

Quests

You should just follow the main questline until you clear the Prologue. The main reason is that ignoring it will block you from accessing some parts of the map or even some characters. You will also get more XP from doing this as well, you don’t have to ignore all puzzles and treasures but don’t go too far off.

Party Setup

Most of the time I used this setup:

• Traveler (Anemo), Amber, Barbara, Lisa

The way I approach combat depends on what I’m fighting but most of the time I do the following:

1. Pull with Amber’s Charged Shot to apply pyro. Throw the taunt as close as possible to the mobs.
2. Use Traveller Wind Burst to spread pyro.
3. Switch to Barbara for the water buff and hit some enemies to apply Vaporize and Hydro.
4. Switch to Lisa to spread Electro-Charge and kite whatever is left alive

Rinse and repeat. You can switch out Barbara for Xingqiu and it will work similarly.

Sometimes you’re forced to use Noelle because enemies with Geo Shields are extremely annoying if you don’t have a Geo character. In this case just switch to Noelle when the shield is up and just do the first 2 steps and a lot more auto-attacking with the Traveler.

Should you get the Geo element for the Traveler early on?

I’d say no unless you didn’t get Noelle from the Novice Banner. Simply put Anemo deals more damage and works better in most setups unless you have another good main DPS in which case Geo might be better, but it all depends on setup and for most F2P Players I’d say Anemo is better.

Materials

Collect. Everything.

Well not really everything, you don’t have to literally clear all bushes in the game for mushrooms.

• Flowers: The elemental flowers (the ones which you have to vaporize or melt to get them) are good for Alchemy and most of the flowers are Ascension Materials needed for the characters (Windwheel Aster, Calla Lily, Silk Flower etc.)
• Ores: All of them are important, especially the blue ones. If you see one stop everything that you’re doing and go get it, 99% of the time they’re more important.
• Vegetables & Fruits: Same as the flowers, the Apples and Sunsettia are useful for healing if you don’t have a healer like Barbara and a lot of them Ascension Materials (Philanemo Mushroom, Valberry etc)

Puzzles

I don’t want to spoil you the fun of going 10 hours into the game ignoring some stones because you thought they don’t do anything only to learn that they’re a puzzle but keep in mind that there are A LOT of puzzles. Everywhere and anywhere so keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that some puzzles will really make you go far away from your current distance, don’t just assume they end in your vicinity.

Character Investments

1) Traveller (Anemo)

Get him/her to a higher level as soon as you can. You don’t actually need to make him level 20 since you will get a lot of XP from grinding and quests. I’d suggest to get him to level 18 and leave it there until you get the Ascension Material from the questline.

As for the weapon you don’t have many choices:

• Cool Steel (3*)
• Prototype Rancour (4* you get it for free at AR 10)
• Fillet Blade (3* although you won’t see it much in the early game since it’s from Liyue)

Prototype Rancour might seem to be a good option at first but it’s actually worse than both other options for 2 reasons:

1. The main modifier is % Physical Damage Bonus while for the others is % Attack. There are some stat guides to make you understand this a bit better (checkout the official discord for the list of guides) but long story short, % Physical is almost always worse than % Attack and even then, the only characters which actually deal a decent amount of Physical Damage don’t use a Sword.
2. Being a 4* weapon you won’t be able to reach Refinement 5 (R5 in short) in probably the next few months. You can get to R2 in 2 days or even 1 if you get lucky with the blue crystals since you get 1 sword prototype from the Souvenir Shop but after that you will be relying on high level Domain RNG to get a sword prototype (and maybe you get it from some other quests too)

So I’d say unless you will be able to get a good 5* weapon, you should just stick with Cool Steel for a while. Fillet Blade is also good but it’s much harder to find while you will get a lot of Cool Steel copies from the gacha as well.

For the artifacts I suggest a combination of Gladiator’s Finale (the one from the Road event) and either the Berserker (12% Crit) or the Resolution of Sojourner (18% Attack) sets.

2) Amber

You can avoid investing in her at all since you won’t use it as a DPS. You will only switch to apply pyro, ult, taunt or do puzzles. You won’t be in combat long enough for almost anything to matter.

Unfortunately all the bows are kinda bad for her in this situation. For extra damage you can the Raven Bow but don’t invest too much in it.

For artifacts it’s a similar situation, you can just use the very early game Adventurer Set(1000 HP and 30% Heal on opening chests)

3) Kaeya

Similar story to Amber except Kaeya is really not that needed at all. You almost always want Amber in your party in exploration because you need an Archer but for Kaeya you don’t really need him anywhere. There’s also a very small amount of Cryo based puzzles to solve as well compared to Pyro ones which are almost everywhere.

4) Lisa

Lisa is pretty great against Water enemies and for kiting annoying mobs. If you have a Hydro Character as well you can really melt some mobs with the Electro-Charged debuff. You can invest into her unless you maybe have Fischl or another setup which doesn’t need her.

For weapons almost all of them are decent, the only ones which I would avoid are the Otherworldly Story which gives you 1% HP when picking up elemental orbs and Thrilling Tales of Dragon Slayers which gives you % Attack on the next character switching in.

For artifacts the Instructor set is fine but you can also use the same setup as for the Traveler if you want.

5) Noelle

She isn’t exactly free but most people will get her from the Novice Banner. I’d say get her to level 40 at least since she gets a pretty nice passive (shield on any member when they get bellow 30% HP) and she is really useful when fighting Geo shields.

For the weapons, use the Debate Club until you can get an R5 Skyrider’s Greatsword. You can also opt into using the Prototype Animus from the Road event if you get it since you also get 2 free claymore prototypes for crafting.

For artifacts you can just stick with the Lucky Dog set from the start. It’s the only one which actually gives you DEF and unlike most characters Noelle scales with DEF for the most part. The Traveler setup might be useful for extra damage as well if you have parts to spare.

6) Xiangling

She is pretty strong but I didn’t use her much since in exploration there are a lot of spots taken by other characters for puzzles. In Abyss and Domains however she is pretty nice.

For the weapon I suggest using R5 Black Tassel since it’s really strong against slimes which are pretty common in Abyss. White Tassel sounds deceptively good but actually since it boost only Normal Attack Damage it won’t do nearly as much as the other options.

For artifacts similar setup to the one for Traveler.

Feedback

• I know it’s a trade-off but I’d prefer the usual approach to talking to NPCs. What I mean is usually in RPGs if you start a dialogue you have to explicitly press the “Goodbye” option to leave dialogue. In Genshin it’s the other way around, after choosing one option you get out of dialogue by default at the end of it which will be nice later on but it’s also annoying early on because some NPCs have like 5 dialogue options and it’s annoying to continuously re-open dialogue to click on them. Also some NPCs have some kinda useless first line which you have to click away to get to the actual dialogue options. Maybe merge the first line with the second one which shows the dialogue?
• On the OBT you still cannot change key binds, you have a menu for it but you can’t click to change them for some reason.
• It would be nice to have a tooltip which tells you where an item is used similar to Honkai so it’s easier to track what is useful and what isn’t since they have the same quality and a simple Matsutake will seem as important as a Valberry unless you dig into it.

Tips and Tricks

Bosses

You can actually abuse terrain a lot against big bosses since they don’t know how to get around stuff. Of course this doesn’t work against some of the flying ones but against the Golems it will really help you trivialize the fight.

Be resourceful

Don’t waste resources on cooking or alchemy early on. You really don’t need it. I actually never used a potion for the entirety of the game, I crafted some but I forgot about them all the time because if you have a healer (Barbara in my case) I don’t even need to use food for healing 90% of the time so I don’t end up opening my backpack.

As for characters and weapons you should only invest in the ones you use simply because wrong investments will cost you long hours or even days to fix. For example getting 1 weapon to max ascension will probably take 2 weeks or more like it takes in Honkai. It’s not the end of the world but It can be really annoying.

Always switch to Claymore users while mining special ores

Yes even for 1 blue ore.

Be careful with long expeditions

I’d say it’s not worth it to do expeditions unless you do the blue ore one at the max duration of 20 hours. Be careful that you won’t be able to use that character. Most of the time I used Bennet for it since I couldn’t find much use of him in my party setup and he has a special passive which reduces duration time to around 14 hours which makes it really nice to send on while going to sleep. But again be careful, DON’T send Noelle to expeditions unless you really know what you’re doing.

Don’t level 3* or 4* artifacts past level 4

You can actually do a bit more on Feathers (maybe 10 but not 20, I don’t think that’s worth it) but generally speaking don’t. Why level 4? Because you will need 12+ level 4 artifacts for the Adventurer’s Handbook tasks.

Only heavily invest into 5* artifacts because only those will actually matter in the long run. For weapons it’s a lot more nuanced but for artifacts this is how it is.

Don’t fall into water if you don’t have stamina

You will die twice until the game will just teleport you out so you don’t kill of all of your characters. And in general just be really careful about going into water.

Use the new land mechanic

It deals significant damage, instantly destroys ores, it’s really fast and it negates all fall damage. You can literally land from any distance. You can literally avoid any fall death with it since it works without using any stamina.

Enjoy the game

You can do whatever you want. I just laid out some suggestions or things I wished I knew while playing the OBT.

I suggest you don’t ignore the Be resourceful and Gacha suggestions to avoid salt later on.