My Experience Rolling 40 Free to Play Accounts in Genshin Impact

 

Howdy friends, I've been playing a lot of Genshin lately as you might imagine; though not an ungodly amount or anything. Still had time to play 50 odd hours of CK2 and a full clear of Iorveth's side of the Witcher 2 while I was doing this. I've made close to 40 accounts but I'm not sure of the exact number, each run takes around 45 minutes to get to Adventure Rank 7 and then you get 40 free rolls; if I was on PC it would be like 37 minutes or so and then if you could skip the cutscenes that would be another 3-4 minutes; but I'm on PS4 so PS4 load times shall rear their ugly head. This is the run, my fastest time is about 1.5 minutes faster than this one:

Minor improvements: Fast Travel works inside of buildings, menuing is pretty responsive so you can skip some levelling animations, the optimal first fight is three headshots and then one wind blast which somehow magically hits the archer with a fire aoe, the optimal last fight (i.e. in Lisa's temple) is down attack, charged R2, super, switch to MC, whirlwind the hypotenuse and then it is possible to hit the first cycle of the moving platforms which saves ~10 seconds by itself; I've done it twice.

Here's what happened on the first two rolls of the 40th run:

So it's basically just a relatively fun speed run with a fair amount of AFK potential and also some reasonable skill tests plus enemy RNG. Genshin is very fun, seemingly no matter what you're doing; but it is much more fun on the way to rank 20 and also when you have specific characters that are immensely more interesting than others. Some of those characters are insanely overpowered, like 300% stronger than their contemporaries, and some of them are just mildly overpowered, but in general the powerful characters are also more interesting to play fundamentally.

On my first account ever I got Keqing, who is extremely fun and has the wonderful utility of being able to teleport; however I never got a second wind character which meant I was gimping myself on movement speed no matter what I happened to do in the game. This eventually got under my skin enough for me to start rolling new accounts, then it turned out the speedrun was fun and relaxing. Since I'm doing it on PS4 I have to get a new email address for every account (not as easy as it was 10+ years ago), the sites I'm using currently are protonmail and yandex, both of which let you make multiple accounts without using a phone in the process.

Twenty five runs later I got the $7000 man himself Diluc, I actually wanted Jean but Diluc is preposterous so this has become my main account effectively, but I'll still do dailies on all three accounts since dailies are extremely fast and generally pretty fun/easy ways to get experience. I bothered to get all the locuses on this account to go with the double wind for silly amounts of stamina and am presently just fighting world bosses on a daily cycle, eventually I'll do all the Liyue quests; Diluc/Fischl/Barbara/Xiangling (or Razor) seems like a solid party with sustain and comical amounts of damage;

Though the new party of Klee/2 Star Sucrose/Fischl/Whoever is a lot more active since I've got 6 R2's to cycle through; plus a billion unique animations for Klee. This is the next best roll I've had, haven't decided whether I'll bother playing it or not but it will eventually get 12 characters if I do:

I'd say on average about 30% of the accounts I made wound up with 9 characters, though typically they would have a Xiangling or Barbara so no later freebie for them. The Venti banner was much better for characters since it would always give you one for 10, but it didn't have Sucrose for the movement speed. Think I rolled that banner around 750 times, just one five star in Keqing on the very first roll; but since everyone else already has Venti if you ever play multiplayer he is sort of superfluous to have yourself (if you conveniently have Diluc).

Random notes: The Main Character's name is "G" except on the first account since that's the fastest thing you can input. I picked the male character once, it took a lot of concentrated willpower to do so but thankfully the rolls were garbage. Longest cutscene (not counting the full intro since it has an input) is Venti and Dvalin; second longest is the prelude to the railshooter; railshooter is very random so you could save around 5-10 seconds there just based on what Stormterror decides to do. Xiangling is by far the most common character aside from the guaranteed Noelle pull.