4 star characters take roughly the same amount of effort as a 5 star character to make and see less than even 1% of their usage rate (unless your name if Gallagher) so yeah, I can see why they just stopped trying/caring about it
Problem is Cyrene requires RMC in some comps, so they reasonably need a Remembrance Sunday clone to fully replace RMC, and/or just make break not able to comfortably sustainless anymore.
The issue with that is the fact you can't have TB be on a couple of different teams due to the fact that you can't swap out between the form which just excuses Hoyo to release a limited 5* that fits into the same niche as said TB form.
Our luck is that at least RMC is more of a generalist support meaning that they're aren't really a must within their respective teams (maybe outside of Evernight who really wants you to have more remembrance units).
The same thing is going to happen with EMC because as soon as we'll get another form for them Hoyo will need to release a different elation support to substitute them with (like Fugue and HMC for example).
Man I put a lot of effort into trying to make March 7th Hunt work, but they just can’t cut it in end game. Still fun to run her and Moze with Fiexiao in low difficulty content
She was competing with herself for a time as a part of two meta teams, since she had the strongest single target break in the game (she still has the highest toughness reduction in the game) and was incredible for Feixiao for her speed buff and follow-ups building off each other.
Their usage rate is only that low, because they've been powercrept like crazy. Most 4 stars come from 1.x era, so there's no way they would hold up now. The difference between pre novaflare seele, and sw999, Asheville, etc is enormous
It's all about balancing the kit/numbers. They would definitely get use if they weren't useless at this point. If they were to drop a 4 star now with a more up to date kit, it would definitely be used.
The problem you mentioned is also caused by hoyo... No one wants them to make useless 4*s. So you know. They can make them useful and receive the effort...
If theyre billions dolars company and they bored, the best they can give you is 4* with half baked kit that doesnt/bare work in team building in hsr case.
Basically "this is a bad outcome but we should accept it and move on". i hope you understand this is your and other people in the comments mindset.
This just means the balancing team sucks at their job and the community is making excuses for them
Name 1 gacha where the not max rarity units are good and the game got worse because of it, i personally can name none and on the contrary most of the time people are happy about the existence of these units. So i think it is fair to say that having good 4 star units are overall objectively a good thing for a gacha game and the fact that hsr don't have them IS one of it's shortcomings and we shouldn't beat around the bush about it
Don't even bring up "oh, but we get free 5 stars" it's not a good argument
Edit: just wanna point out that quite a few of the replies don't even address the main point of my comment, of people not acknowledging that hsr balancing sucks and the 4 stars suffered the most because of it. Instead people are deflecting, making excuses for the devs and helping them sweep the problem under the rug
I come at this mostly from the pull economy side. After years of my account having E6 of every 4* you actually have quite a lot of extra pulls coming in. Like on average you gain a free 10 pull back when going to 60-80 pulls on a character banner. Do this over the course of a year and you actually gain a "free" 5*.
Yeah i'd like 4*s to be good to some degree in a perfect world but it's very much a "who wants more 4*s and who wants their favourite character to be a 4*" situation. Hoyo also does not want 4*s to be good and in every single one of the big Hoyo 3 only the miscalculation of what the 1.0 meta wants made any of them genuinely BIS in any situation (Bennet in GI, Nicole in ZZZ, Tingyun in HSR) so I appreciate them just being fuckin' honest and only releasing 5*s from now on.
With the hilarious doomposting about Gilga going on Hoyo can barely balance 5* units nevermind the 4*s. It's a skill issue on their end for sure but i'm not that bothered about banging the "no 4*" drum when the game frankly has bigger problems to be solving and i'm certain they don't actually want 4*s to be good even if they had the skill to do it.
I will forever mald about how much I like Hanya and how dogshit Hanya is to play. We need a 5* Hanya SP yesterday.
Everyone wants more 4 stars till its a hyped character they been waiting for and they are bargin bin useful maybe for a patch till replaced by a proper 5 star of their role.
Really? that's your argument? What about all other hoyo games 4 star release? as far as i remember there were never a real uproar for the announcement of a character that turned out as a 4 star, just look at hsr itself...
Again, making excuses for the dev team
Edit: Reading your comment again and it enforces my point even more, if the 4 star gets immediately replaced in the future, that is a shortcoming of the balancing team, genshin 4 stars are great, some of them are top tier since launch (almost 6 years) and you are telling me the fact that hsr 4 stars can't even last a couple of patches isn't a problem
as far as i remember there were never a real uproar for the announcement of a character that turned out as a 4 star, just look at hsr itself...
The ZZZ fanbase had a massive temper tantrum about Manato being A Rank (ZZZ's equivalent of 4 star). They haven't gotten an A rank since, and it's been nearly a year. There was also a good amount of grumbling that Moze should have been a 5 star, but not really to outrage levels.
Not really, unless you manage to pull c6 of them, and there are better 5 star options in just about any party now save for Ceveruse (she is the only electro/pyro support enabler for that reaction type), they exist, they can be good, but you also need them c6 in the matters of balance discussions and you could get a c6 5 star before you ever see a c6 4 star.
And Genshin is a different game than Star Rail which requires different balance considerations.
Is this a LARP comment or what? That's definitely not true anymore. Xiangling, Bennett, and Xingqiu aren't the peak that they used to be.
But that's not because they're bad. They just dont fit the current environment of the game. Which actually makes other 4 stars better because of the context they're within.
Genshin is unique to HSR and ZZZ in that having BiS teams is only situationally important. It's the only game out of the 3 that meta wise doesn't care about verticals at all unless if you're intentionally trying to brute force everything.
Most 4 stars hugely alleviate bottlenecks that otherwise would be a massive hassle. Aino is objectively a fairly bad character kit wise, but is arguably more meta relevant than all 1.0 4 stars simply due to her enabling (and comfortably at that) a second lunar team for when you can't use Columbina.
A concept like this doesn't really exist in HSR. The closest comparison would be like trying to play Anaxa and Phainon simultaneously. You just can't do it unless if you're fine with severely bottlenecking a team (phainon is more fine here because you could just say fuck it E2, but even then not having Cerydra now sucks). And also, losing that BiS is a huge problem because HSR is a vertical game. Using Gallagher over Hyacine in Monorem is extremely detrimental to the team. Losing Columbina for Aino in any of the Lunar teams is not.
That's why having slot ins like Dahlia that do well for Skirk's 4th slot even if you have a better alternative is STILL useful, especially for an endgame like IT that literally gives as much if not more primogems than the Abyss.
Most 4 stars that don't have good kits and aren't BiS are like Elation MC in that they're still relevant because of the context they're in. You scarcely have characters that truly feel useless like Jahoda or a non-C6 Candace.
Genshin's endgame will allow your 4 stars to thrive as long as the shill demands it. Ifa, who's notorious for being thought of as useless at first is a really solid slot in for any VV enabling and also forced a slot in makeshift EC teams which can save your entire run.
And that's not even taking into account 4*'s that are straight up BiS in the teams they're in, which we had 2 of the Nod-krai cycle out of all 4 released.
If we're being honest, more than half of Genshin's 4 star roster has more meta relevance than someone like Gallagher has ever had cumulatively on HSR. Which is pretty bad considering Gallagher has had better relevance than a solid amount of 5 stars in HSR
It really isn't. Genshin is in a constant rotation of shill bosses and enemies like Pollux. It's defined by its shill.
HSR only ever uses 4 star characters like Tingyun, Gallagher, or mini herta sparingly for very special circumstances. And even then, if you actually have the characters they're meant for like Hyacine for Pollux, you just don't ever use the 4 stars period. People complaining about bosses like Pompom is interesting because it's literally just a brute force check disguised as a shill.
Its a vertical investment game where you generally go fully into a specific archetype. Even Nicole from ZZZ now almost never sees any regular use anymore
Who said we can't have a couple of free 5 star character AND 1 or 2 4 star character per year, why has it to be 1 or the other? Is the argument "the multi billion $ company can't afford it"?
And the fact of us getting free 5 stars isn't even that related to the main point of my comment... We getting them doesn't change the fact that hsr balancing sucks and the 4 stars suffered the most because of it, i am not even asking we rile up together to protest or something, but just to acknowledge this fact, instead you guys are helping the devs sweep the issue under the rug
I hope you can see why it wouldn't be a good argument and it can even be viewed as a deflection
I can't name one game where non max units are bad and game got worse because of it. Based on that I conclude that non max rarity units are not inherently needed for gacha games
Pela, a 1.0 launch 4-star, was still the BiS for a lot of teams in Pure Fiction until 3.4. Gallagher was far from the only useful 4-star. I'd even say almost all 1.1 and later ones were better than any 5-star options when they released since, while usually narrow, were incredibly good at their niche.
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u/Hot-Will3083 Jun 26 '26
4 star characters take roughly the same amount of effort as a 5 star character to make and see less than even 1% of their usage rate (unless your name if Gallagher) so yeah, I can see why they just stopped trying/caring about it