Say goodbye to Genshin Impact's short lived self-immolation bug

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When Genshin Impact's big 1.11 update landed this week a revamped environmental damage system meant that world effects like burning grass, or electrified puddles, were doing significantly more damage than before. And when I say "significantly more damage" I mean "players with fire damage characters were routinely burning themselves alive." With the new scaling, previously-innocuous flaming patches of grass were dealing out hundreds to thousands of damage per second. Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo has decided that though they wanted to increase the damage of effects, this was not actually the desired outcome.

It was pretty bad news for those who liked the game's rare fire characters, like suave redhead Diluc, and made even some banal activities like mining for materials pretty dangerous. It was an exceptional problem if you were a fan of tiny bomb-hurling pyromaniac Klee, and you might find yourself having taken no hits from enemies but ended the fight with a fraction of your health left. To a less extent, this bug also hurt Electro characters, who had a propensity for stepping into puddles mid-fight and—well, you know what happens with water and electric currents in video games.

Some players pointed out that this made the characters stronger for those willing to change up their style of play, but they were very much drowned out by negative comments on both social media and the official forums.

Developer MiHoYo has decided that this effect was unwanted, and in a hotfix rolled back the change: "This version update fix has, in practice, thus resulted in more harm than good to the player experience," they said. Don't expect the change to stay rolled back forever, though, as it's clear that MiHoYo still wants to affect how the environmental damage tango is danced.

"With regard to this design choice, our initial intention was to increase the effect that the environment has on combat and to encourage Travelers to use different strategies in response to these different combat scenarios," they said, but continued, that their "developers are currently in discussion regarding this adjustment and devising further adjustments with this feedback in mind."

If you're thinking you'd like to consider which party members you're using in light of the surely-coming changes, might I suggest our list ranking every Genshin Impact character?

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.