Like many other games, Genshin Impact operates with gacha game mechanics, meaning players can spend money to increase their chances of getting what they desire. The harsh and somewhat unbalanced mechanics of Genshin’s gacha system are evened out with the pity system in Genshin.
This system can be confusing to understand initially, especially for new players, but it becomes much more comprehensible when broken down.
What is Pity in Genshin Impact?
Pity, as the name somewhat implies, is essentially the gacha system taking pity on players to help them attain what they are seeking. After a player’s long streak of bad luck, the pity system ensures that they get rewarded with what they have been after all along. The system has a series of exact rules which are as follows.
- Every 10 wishes that players make on any banner will grant them at least one four-star character or weapon.
- Every 90 wishes on a Character Event Banner will grant players one five-star character.
- Every 80 wishes on a Weapon Event Banner will grant players one five-star weapon.
- The 50/50 ensures that if players do not receive the item they are seeking the first time they receive a five-star, they are guaranteed to get the featured five-star next time.
Something worth keeping in mind is that your pity will carry over to banners of the same type. If you had 89 wishes, for example, used on a single Character Event Banner, you could use your 90th wish that would guarantee a five-star character on an entirely new Character Event Banner. You wouldn’t be able to have this work if you decided to switch to a Weapon or Standard Banner, however.
What is Soft Pity?
Soft pity raises the chances that players will receive a five-star as the number of times they wish increases. For character banners, soft pity begins on the 75th wish, and on weapon banners, the soft pity begins at the 65th wish. This means that as players go beyond the soft pity starting point, the chances of receiving a five-star steadily increase until it reaches 100 percent at 90 wishes.
While these are the basic guaranteed rules of the system, luck can entirely shift how these events unfold. For example, players quite regularly get two or more four-stars in one group of 10 wishes. Other players have also gotten extremely lucky and received two five-stars very close together. Ultimately, everything in the gacha system comes down to unpredictable luck.
Pity is also entirely reset every time an item is received from pity. This means that if a player has only wished 20 times and is lucky enough to receive a five-star on the 20th time, the pity does not stay at 20, but will reset back to zero. It would be 90 wishes until this player would definitively be guaranteed a five-star once more.
What is the 50/50?
The other big and complex rule of the pity system is the 50/50. This feature ensures that players will, at the very least, get a featured five-star every other time they receive one.
Players who are due for a five-star have a 50/50 chance of getting the featured banner character or weapon when they are granted a five-star by the gacha system. Without pity, this would mean that players could continuously lose the 50/50 indefinitely.
Luckily, pity makes it so that if players lose a 50/50, meaning they get any other five-star character who is not the featured one on the special banner or a five-star weapon that is not currently featured, their next five-star is guaranteed to be the featured one.
If the banner ends before players get another five-star, the pity and 50/50 guarantee transfers to the next banner, and the banner after that, and so on until players get their next five-star. At that point it will then reset. However, it will always be carried over, which allows players to save their pity and 50/50 guarantee until the banner features a character or weapon that they hope to attain.
Unfortunately, Fate Points on the Weapon Event Wish banner do not carry over. Fate Points clear between each Epitome Invocation. Use your Fate Points before the Weapon Event Wish banner switches to a new set of weapons.
Where to calculate Pity in Genshin Impact
Pity can be checked on each individual wish banner, as it is calculated separately for each one. Players can calculate their pity by first opening the wishes page in Genshin and then selecting the history button on the banner they wish to check their pity on.
After opening the history page, players will then see all the items that they have received from wishing on that specific banner. There are six items on each page, with four-star items featured in purple text and “(4-Star)” next to them, while five-star items will be in gold text with “(5-star)” next to them.
How to calculate Pity in Genshin Impact
To check pity, players must find either the four-star or five-star item that they most recently received and calculate it from there. Most players probably don’t really need to calculate four-star pity because a four-star is guaranteed every 10 wishes. Five-star pity is a bit more complex.
The best way to calculate five-star pity is to do the following:
- Go back a number of pages until you find the most recent five-star that you received.
- Multiply the number of pages by six, since that’s how many items are on each page.
- Add the number of wishes on the page where the five-star is that have happened after it.
This number will tell you how many wishes you are at, and you can then compare that number to the guaranteed 80 or 90 wishes of the pity system.
Players still struggling to calculate their pity can view the example above to better understand how to know what their pity is at. The number of wishes since the five-star character Qiqi was received in this image is only 17, as there are six wishes on the first two pages and five on this one, which means that another five-star likely won’t be received for quite some time.
Because this example is on the character wish banner, a five-star is not guaranteed until 90 wishes. Thus, the pity in this example indicates that it will be 73 more wishes before another five-star is guaranteed.
