MiHoYo statement on Raiden Shogun's Burst causes mass outcry, and why the community may have a point

Another Archon release, another player base revolt. When an official statement was made clarifying how Baal’s Burst worked, specifically the Mussou Isshin portion, not even an hour after the character was released, the Genshin Impact community was furious. In short, the Raiden Shogun’s Burst cannot activate Beidou’s Burst or similar effects such as the Electro Traveller’s Burst or Skyward Spine’s Vacuum Blades.

The full description is lengthy, but the key point is that “attacks by Raiden Shogun in the Musou Isshin state [are] a special kind of attack. It is considered a Normal Attack in terms of its movement type, but the DMG dealt is considered Elemental Burst DMG.” The devil, as they say, is in the details. Beidou’s Elemental Burst (and other effects like it) apply on Normal Attack damage - not Normal Attack animations. Mussou Isshin attacks have Normal Attack animations, but their damage is Burst DMG. Hence, they don’t activate Thunderbeast’s Target.

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Ostensibly, that seems a reasonable clarification on the surface of it. And it would be, if not for a number of other factors that severely muddy the waters. First and foremost, Beidou’s Burst description says it activates “on-hit” not with “damage,” so by description it should work with the Raiden Shogun. Even worse, the interaction did work in the beta test - and so has actively been removed at the last minute.

• Read more: Genshin Impact v2.1 tier list: All characters ranked from best to worst 

The rabbit hole goes deeper still, with Baal’s C6 description being dubbed an “issue” and has already been reworded because it was phrased in nearly identical fashion to Beidou’s Elemental Burst. It now reads differently, but assumptions were reasonably made (and backed up by beta gameplay) that if it worked for Raiden’s own constellation, then surely other characters with similar on-hit effects would function as well.

To make matters worse, MiHoYo revealed all this information after Raiden’s banner had already launched. Of course, that means many players had already pulled with the assumption that the interactions worked as they did in the beta, and seemed to on paper. 

The end result of all this confusion and disappointment is a large swathe of angry players. Public outcry has led to mass threads on official forums and Reddit, with some Chinese fans going so far as threatening to sue the company for false advertisement and sending in evidence of their lawyer’s licenses.

MiHoYo’s lacklustre response

Adding fuel to the fire, MiHoyYo’s response has been less than delicate. Supposedly they deleted the first Raiden/Beidou thread (which contained the lawyer’s licenses) to appear on Chinese social media, have thus far ignored backlash, and instead just changed descriptions like with Raiden Shogun’s C6… which still appears to be awkwardly worded. Take this conundrum that arises with the new wording: “Does hitting shields count as dealing damage for Raiden C6?” user rather_random_rex called out “because it does for Beidou.”

Other allegations are swirling of MiHoYo removing negative comments speaking out against MiHoYo and pointing out international frustration from the official Subreddit. Certainly, a number of nominally innocuous (if clearly frustrated) comments have been removed by moderators for no obvious reason.

Issues with Electro

From a wider perspective, a lot of the community outcry stems from a very simple root cause: Electro is not very good. Beidou bucks that trend by having a very powerful Elemental Burst that supersedes her elemental limitations, and that was why a lot of potential Baal players were excited to pair her up with the Crux’s Captain - Beidou needs an Electro Battery, Baal loves things that power up her Elemental Burst attacks. It seemed like a win-win, especially because Beidou has been relatively easy to acquire as a free-to-play player.

Now that those characters don’t synergise, it's left players scrambling to put together good teams to use Baal in… particularly if you don’t have easy access to high-tier or limited characters.

• Read More: How to unlock Thunder Manifestation boss in Genshin Impact 2.1 

As for why Electro sucks it’s due two main reasons: Electro Resonance is mediocre, and there’s only one strong Elemental Reaction in Superconduct. Overload and Electro-Charged both scale poorly with damage at higher World Levels compared to the likes of Melt or Vaporise, and their crowd-control effects are often low impact or actively detrimental to the player (Overload routinely knocks enemies out of range of combos and Electro-Charged can hurt the user). As for Electro Resonance, it’s dwarfed by Pyro, Cryo and Geo Resonances exceptional increases to DPS, and even Anemo offers highly coveted skill CDR, move speed and reduced stamina consumption.

Superconduct is the one notable exception to the Electro problems because of its ability to shred Physical RES, which is exceptionally valuable. The only problem is there are very few characters who are truly excellent Physical DMG carries. Top of that list are Eula - who is excellent with Baal - and Keqing, who’s already Electro and doesn’t need Baal to set up the reaction for her. Outside of that, you’re looking at a lot of off-meta builds for characters Like Jean, Rosaria or Xinyan, with only Rosaria really holding her head up here.

And herein lies the issue: where does the Raiden Shogun fit in? Her only top-tier team composition as it stands is when paired up with Eula, who is a limited 5-star and so something of a rarity. Frustration from players about removing positive combos between Baal and the likes of Beidou is heavily influenced by the fact the options are narrow to begin with.

To the community, it seems as though MiHoYo has limited an already limited character by narrowing her teammate combinations needlessly. Potential hot-fixes to Baal might stave off community outrage (look at what happened with Zhongli), but this level of outrage may never have occurred if MiHoYo had taken a serious look at the mediocrity of Electro as an Element.

That’s all from us for now, but to get even more of your Genshin fix head on over to our dedicated Genshin Impact section.