Genshin Impact fans anguished over missing Venti, a top-tier character

Genshin Impact debuts a banner later today with an entirely new character to collect, which means that the old promotion featuring Venti, one of the best options in the game, has concluded. While the Venti campaign had been going on since launch, plenty of people never got the green lyre musician despite spending money specifically for that purpose. It’s a reality that is causing plenty of anguish and regret.

Pulling Venti was always meant to be a rare occurrence; not only is that the entire gacha experience predicated on a scarcity model, the game outright tells you how slim the odds are. When you made a “wish” on the Venti banner, there was only a 0.6% chance you’d get a five-star character. But Venti wasn’t the only high-ranking character to obtain, so getting him was never guaranteed unless you make an obscene number of wishes — or drop lots of actual money in the otherwise free-to-play game.

There are asterisks to this, but generally speaking, it’s understood that if you managed to get Venti, you are lucky indeed. More than one Venti? Damn, son.

And so, over the last few days on social media, many Genshin Impact fans have been sharing stories of how much cash they dropped while hoping for Venti, or lamenting their crummy luck. Some folks have been playing for weeks now without any kind of high tier pull at all, Venti or otherwise.

Venti will probably come back at some point, and in the long term, he might not maintain his current high tier rank. Plus, there aren’t really bad Genshin Impact characters per se, so you’re never inconvenienced by lacking a Venti. With some planning, you can always build a team around so-called “weak” options. But for some folks, Genshin Impact is their very first gacha game — so dealing with these limited-time promotions for rare characters and the ambient pressure that comes with it is new.

Even if you don’t initially want Venti, watching people boast about landing him combined with knowing he’ll go away for a while made him more appealing by proxy. Plus, once you get enough of the basic characters, you start wanting to complete the entire collection — Venti included. The main storyline also spends plenty of time with Venti, a fact that may endear some players to him over time. Genshin Impact also rewards players with free currency for doing a limited trial run with Venti, making him temporarily playable during a challenge. Attempting that trial could make some players discover that Venti is a lot of fun.

All of these forces combined so that, while I was perfectly happy with the characters I got during the first banner, there was always a small part of me that hoped I’d get blessed with a certain mischievous magician during new pulls. Alas, I never did.

With Klee added in the mix, Genshin Impact now offers players another excuse to cross their fingers. Some of us will get lucky and manage to pull the fiery bomb user without spending any money. Others will learn to appreciate whatever we get. But for at least some Genshin Impact fans, Klee and her incredibly small odds are just emotional or monetary pain waiting to happen.