In Genshin Impact, you can obtain many of the strongest characters through a gacha system. Individual characters are highlighted for specific banners, ensuring they are guaranteed to appear. However, this can become quite expensive.
How can you get the best characters? In Genshin Impact, there are currently over 20 characters, with those having the highest star rating usually tied to the gacha system.
This means you have to spend premium currency to buy “wishes”. The primogems can be farmed in-game, but the easiest way is to buy them with real money. With the wishes you obtain, you might get a character—with a lot of luck:
- The chance of getting a 4-star character is 5.1 %
- The chance of getting a 5-star character is 0.6 %
However, there are guarantees given by the developers. For every 90 openings of the same banner, you are guaranteed to receive a 5-star character. Additionally, there is a 100 % guarantee for the newest character Klee. But even that can get really expensive.
Up to 440 euros for guaranteed characters
How does the guarantee work exactly? The banner “Flaming Steps,” from which you are supposed to get Klee, has a special effect:
- If you pull a 5-star character, the chance of getting Klee is 50 %
- If Klee is not there on the first pull, the chance is 100 % if you pull another 5-star character.
Statistically, you receive a 5-star character every 167 openings. However, the guarantee that there will be a 5-star character in every 90 pulls means you will get one more often.
Let’s assume that you do not have extra luck and the first guaranteed character is not Klee; you will need precisely 180 wishes for Klee.
How much do the wishes cost?
- One wish costs 160 primogems
- Therefore, for all 180 wishes, we need 28,800 primogems
- 1 primogem corresponds to one creation crystal, which can be purchased for real money.
Even in the best value package, you get 6,480 creation crystals for 109.99 euros. Additionally, you receive 1,600 bonus crystals—so it’s 1.3 cents per primogem.
Calculating with the required 28,800 primogems, this totals to 374.40 euros. However, there is no such package available. Therefore, you would need to spend 109.99 euros four times, and you would still have 19 bonus wishes left. Even in combination with the cheaper package, a better value is not achievable due to missing primogems.
What does this mean now? Of course, you can farm primogems, you might get lucky and need fewer wishes, and yes, there are a few extra wishes depending on how many 4- and 5-star characters and weapons you get while opening.
But the value of 374.40 euros is the guarantee that the developer gives you for Klee if everything else goes wrong. Even for the 50 % chance, you would still need to invest around 180 euros.
Other characters, however, do not have this guarantee. Most of the best characters in Genshin Impact come from the wishes and have no guarantee. Here, it can happen that you might have to spend thousands of euros to obtain them.
And exactly that is, besides the original resin in the endgame, a major point of criticism for Genshin Impact. This has also been recognized by more and more content creators around the game.
YouTuber Tectone, for instance, mentions that he was once addicted to the gacha. Now he only buys the wishes in-game to save you from foolishness:
YouTuber spends a lot of money on Genshin Impact to show you how foolish it is
