Genshin Impact recently received its Inazuma update, which brought a brand new region for players to explore. As always, a new region brings new characters and the latest update is no different, with Ayaka and Yoimiya being the most recent banner characters. However, Yoimiya has drawn a lot of criticism from Genshin Impact players due to her kit and overall design being underwhelming.
While Genshin Impact has previously fixed characters like Zhongli, Yoimiya's problems are different in that they're inherent in her kit. The way her elemental skill and burst are set up doesn't seem to reflect the intended design of her character and the issues with bow characters become more apparent with Yoimiya. Although it's unclear if miHoYo will ever address these issues, players are worried about the design of future characters like Kokomi as well, now that more information has leaked.
The Problems With Yoimiya
There's a lot of problems with Yoimiya's design in Genshin Impact, and much of it results from seemingly conflicting ideas implemented together. Yoimiya has one of the weakest base HP and DEF stats in Genshin Impact, but unlike other characters, she has no method of mitigation. This is because her auto-attack multipliers scale greatly, meaning she needs to stay in place while shooting or else she misses out on a lot of damage. However, her range is quite poor for a bow user, and without a shield user like Zhongli, she dies extremely quickly.
Furthermore, Yoimyia is supposed to have auto-targeting on her shots and burst, but they miss frequently since they only target enemies on cast. Even if one enemy moves away, her elemental burst is prone to whiffing completely and there will be times where she locks onto two completely different enemies. Unlike other Pyro Genshin Impact characters, Yoimiya also cannot proc reactions effectively due to her internal cooldowns which means she's quite limited in Vaporize or Melt teams. For a character that's supposedly designed around single-target damage, Yoimiya doesn't even manage to do that effectively.
What This Means For Future Genshin Impact Characters
The problem with Yoimiya extends beyond just her character design in Genshin Impact. It seems that recent leaks of characters like Kokomi also share similar problems in design. Kokomi's leaks indicate that she has split scaling on her abilities and her passive talent makes it so that she cannot crit. It appears to be miHoYo's way of nerfing the reliance on crit stats in the same way that Yoimiya is intended to shift away from the traditional charged shot gameplay of bow users. Similarly, Kokomi also has a huge internal cooldown nerf in the same vein as Yoimiya meaning reactions are harder to generate.
Yoimiya has set the tone for a lot of future Genshin Impact characters in Inazuma and so far, a lot of them look quite a bit weaker than their previous counterparts. Understandably, not every character is supposed to be designed to be meta-defining like Ganyu or Venti. However, the way miHoYo seems to address overpowered reactions or encourage new playstyles seems to be a step in the wrong direction.
Missing auto-attacks has always been a big problem for bow users in Genshin Impact but since Yoimiya is the first to be specifically focused around them, it hasn't been necessary to fix the auto-targeting system. Whether miHoYo intends to fix these mechanics remains to be seen but hopefully, the criticism from the community will spur them to make changes in the same way they did for Zhongli.
Genshin Impact is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, and PS5.