Constructive Criticism on Imaginarium Theater

Now my issues with it…

Why require 18 built characters when you really only need 16? I get that having these extra characters contributes to the randomization aspect of who you’ll end up with for each battle, but 16 is a lot of characters to begin with. The minimum requirement being 18 feels unnecessary, especially when almost everyone playing will certainly bring a friend’s character along with them. You should be able to bring 17-18 if you want, but 16 or even 15 should be enough if we’re considering the support from a friend. As an example, I was short one character and had to bring Anemo MC just to meet the 18 character requirements, and I ultimately ended up not using him even once. I like that this mode encourages you to build and try out new characters, but in a game where resources are as limited as they are, this feels a bit excessive to me.

I can appreciate that there’s a good amount of trial characters provided for everyone to use, but it feels a bit like a punishment to those who already chose to pull and build those characters. Obviously the first few battles incentivize using any of the trial characters, but IMO they’re particularly pushing you to use wanderer as he’s there with faruzan along with a defensive unit like thoma. As someone with a very well built Wanderer/Faruzan duo I really had to go out of my way to not use them in the early battles. If I’d used them in the beginning like the game wanted me to, I would’ve been left with some very awkward borderline unusable teams during the harder rounds. Yes, the point of the game mode is to challenge your team building capabilities and make weird combos work, but that should be within reason. The same could be said about someone who’s pulled and built up characters like arlecchino and clorinde. Again, I like the idea of trial characters, but maybe don’t force us to start out with ONLY the trial characters. Allow players to mix and match with some of the supporting cast from the very beginning.

While the amount of primos that you can get between Imaginarium Theater and abyss has technically increased from before, I feel like a lot of people are losing out overall. Because of the difference between vertical and horizontal investment, people that can 36 star the abyss every cycle may easily still struggle with the theater, and taking away the ability to get half of those primos each reset is kind of silly to me. I don’t think this will change because Hoyo is so stingy when it comes to genshin, but I think it’s fair to point out. If someone struggles to beat the theater because they haven’t built 18 characters of the specified elements, I don’t think they should be losing out on valuable “freemogems” when they previously got them all from two abyss resets per month. Plus, if the abyss still reset twice a month, players who have put in the time/effort/money to vertically and horizontally invest and can beat both would be rewarded a little extra for doing so.

I want to say this is more of a silly critique than anything, but seriously, how are you about to make this first season solely pyro/electro/anemo when chevreuse has only ever been on one banner?

At the end of the day all of these critiques can be ignored if you have enough characters of the specified elements built, but I do feel that is highly unreasonable for a lot of players, even some late game. These are just my thoughts, and even with all of these nitpicks I managed to clear the entire thing and collect all the rewards, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of people struggle solely because of what characters they chose to build or not.