Genshin’s Leveling System is Weird, Right? 

Most modern gacha games have stopped giving unit xp for killing enemies or completing missions. You only ever level up your characters using materials. Genshin was clearly balanced the same way with books being the only way to level up, and at some point they decided to tack on “Natural Xp” to trick non gacha players into thinking the game was reasonably balanced but scaled it so you couldn’t farm levels at a reasonable pace this way. There is zero doubt in my mind that the level system is exactly as weird as Mihoyo wants it to be or at least mostly intentionally screwy.

An interesting thing that comes out of the book/material based level up system is that a lot of player will pre-farm the materials for a character weeks before the character actually is obtained, spending hours level grinding for a character that doesn't exist yet with other characters on the account. Literally the opposite of most games where you grind with the character themselves after you obtain them.

You know why Genshin did this? Because at the start of the game until the 1.2 Dragonspine expansion, they tried to lean into the traditional aspects of RPG games. Leveling, crafting, cooking, quests, finding cool items in the open world, reputation system. But after that it seems they ditched trying to make an open world action RPG and instead focused on characters, story and laidback casual events and interactions. Likely because that’s when they realized the type of players playing the game were mostly casual previously non-gamers.

At first I didn't like it but as an endgame player it is nice to just plop books into a new character to go from level 1 to 90

"You ever level up in Genshin?" Man, I dunno, I've been AR60 for long enough to forget how it's like to level up.

When I pulled Childe in October of 2021, I decided he was not allowed to have any exp books until he earned them himself, wading through the waters of combat until he finally reached level 20. It wasn't as if I needed him for my main team at that point, because I was solidly a Yoimiya main; as long as I had Zhongli, Xingqiu, Yoimiya, and a flex slot for puzzles (which eventually just turned into Albedo's seat when I pulled him next patch), my overworld team had whatever it needed. So Childe was my toy, and toy with him I did. While I used him quite a bit, he was not in my party most of the time. It took me about four months to get him to level 20! Four months of grueling training. And then finally, when he hit level 20, he was rewarded with an ascension to 80 right away. It was a lot of fun. I'm never doing it again.

just wanted to say that 14 weeks is not more than a year :) 8:46

7:11 Since the first 3 Weekly bosses you fight have their Resin cost reduced by half, it ends up costing you 90, and not 120 Resin. In addition, Genshin's Weekly bosses do not work in the same way as Star Rail's. In Genshin, you can fight the rest of the Weekly bosses that you didn't fight at half the Resin cost, and each one will cost you 60 Resin. In the end, you can spend 90 (30x3) + 360 (60x6) = 450 Resin on Weekly bosses in a single week. This will leave you with enough Resin for 20 more bosses in the week. In conclusion, this makes the final amount of Exp you can get from using Resin per week equal to 5,244 - 7,600.

If you kill every fungi with electro/pyro on the map, you can get 20k exp, which is the same as the purple books. The only reason I know this is because I did it while leveling up Zhongli. I resorted to books pretty quickly, though.

Yet another banger from KazooCat. I leveled up my Zhongli to level 80 when i first got him in April of 2021. After that I wanted to see how long it would take me to get him to level 90 naturally from level 80. He has been on most of my teams when I play and he is only level 82. He is 184073 EXP out of 243025 so im hoping to get him to level 83 by the end of the year. So getting him to level 90 might take a decade at this rate.

Most RPGs have characters passively gaining levels through battles. However, this runs into the problem that new characters are under-leveled - and forcing you to use half built characters in battle can be frustrating. This is a minor problem in games where there are only a few characters, but Genshin has a lot of them. As such, Genshin starts with letting characters passively gain levels so that new players feel familiar with the system before slowly introducing them the actual way to level up with EXP books, which lets the player actively control which character gets to level up. In my opinion, this solution is a lot more elegant than Pokemon's EXP share.

Well for me it's an upgrade from having to kill tens of thousands of mobs for months in the old MMORPGs of the late 2000s/early 2010s.

it's not a huge difference in the general idea, but activated and scorched fungus do give 60 exp which makes them efficient to farm if you're insane and want to level your characters naturally

i always ignore the leyline exp unless there is double drop rate event (3 runs a day) i got 2600 purple books, i got all of those from events, quest, exploration, and teapot (20 books a week) there is no point doing leyline for book, better for artifact or talent/ascension.

Remove levels and instead being tied to a skill tree could also work. You would still end up needing to unlock the branches of the tree so you'd need boss materials and region items. Star Rail already has this system, basically having this weird double upgrades needed to level a character, normal levels and a skill tree.

This wasn't a surprise seeing as I played other gacha games before. The level up material farm is a relatively normal mechanic in those games.

Yes, being relegated to books for levels does make the grind for them a daily thing, whether it be completing events, farming the leylines, or chest scavenging. Initial level-ups are very much a dopamine thing + convenient cheesey method to fully restore HP. (I don't know if this is still a thing, but leveling up did this as long as the character was still alive and was in your party). I guess there is also the facet that when using purely books, you will have some EXP overflow that can't be refunded.

The main level up system exists a bit as a time gate with resin in order to make sure you dont get too powerful too fast. In the early game with mondstat and even some liyue you can get by without getting books via events/flowers to help new players not have to juggle as much as quickly.

I left my Xinqiu lv88 for like to years and some random day he ascended to lv89 lol, pretty surprised cus I used to play him quite a lot in my weird Ayaka team. One of the most epic moments I've ever had with Genshin i swear

The minimal exp drops from enemies is weird but I do like that it's there. Let's you save a little bit here and there by idk, levelling a character to a bit under 80 and just letting them get there passively. Getting rid of the level system might be nice, it just makes me wonder how much would go into reworking game mechanics. The way transformative reactions work for example.

This video is a sole reason i learned about holding a + button lets you add 10 xp books. Ar 60, playing for almost 3 years.

Mob XPs are for when you're on the 9th level, out of Green Books, and a Blue would be mostly wasted

I actually tracked my progress of leveling my Wanderer from 89 to 90 by killing Elites somewhat near teleporters. There are actually quite a lot of them if you know their locations. It took about 51 days. I did not clear every elite. Just mostly the huge guys or if there were many in close proximity to each other. I also found that exp distribution inconsistent in distribution for some reason even though it is supposed to be evenly split. My Wanderer seemed to gain exp faster even though I used the same team mate the entire time. My Bennett was forever glued to Wanderer and they both started out 89.

Very informative video about something I never really thought much of lol

i did an experiment in game, my Raiden was level 80 (not ascended) so, when the chasm was released, i made her ascend to the last tier but i didn't use books on her. i wanted to see how long it would take to level up naturally. Now, for reference, i've been using roughly the same team since inazuma released :Ayaka, Zhongly, Raiden, Venti. then i swapped Ayaka for Nahida when she was released. I've used Raiden non stop in every event, in every quest, every daily, EVERYTHING for TWO YEARS, want to know what level my Raiden is? Level 81 and a half. i am NOT joking

I don't mind the books necessarily, but I agree with the enemy exp being way too negligible. Also, most day 1 players probably have way too many books, but I'm someone who's trying to lv all my characters to lv 90 so I'm always low 😅 I do appreciate that new characters, when pulled, can immediately be brought to lv 90 (if I managed to preform them fully) I like to immediately throw them into a team and go ham. So in that regard not having to level them organically is great :) I just wish that bringing them from lv 81 to 90 didn't take 600k mora...

Love It when you upload Kazoo

I'll never forget getting my world level higher and spending a week getting recked in every single zone while desperately farming relic domains trying to get my characters a little bit stronger and then realizing you can actually lower it back down if needed...

Part of it is the lore as well. One of the things you need to know about the setting is that memories and experience are tangible things, and the traveler extracting them from the Ley Lines is a way to quite literally transfer that experience to new characters.

Books are here to use exp where you want to apply to a character that you choose and the amount of exp.

I do still use exp from fighting enemies, even at high levels. I don't like to cap out on xp with books, because if feels like a waste, and the higher levels are so costly that I don't spend books on them beyond level 79. So for all my characters I've always brought them close to the assension levels with books, and then just farm mobs to get them levelled up. And everything above level 79 I let progress naturally through exploring and fighting enemies. It doesn't matter much anyway. I'm still a fairly new player though, and part of the reason I do this is because I never have enough levelling books for all my characters, so I avoid spending the large amount of books that are needed at the higher levels. Once I have most characters at a good level, I might change my strategy.

Tbh I think it makes a lot of sense for enemies and quests to give exp, like those paper things you use to level up are canonically the notes of various adventurers or smth like that. Which is also why you get them from leylines since those store and transfer information and memories. It only makes sense that doing the things those adventurers would be doing i.e. killing enemies or doing quests would also give exp. Although factually I agree with something I saw someone else comment, which is that it is that way to make new players think leveling through playing the game is a viable thing to do.

first video I've watched of yours and i wont lie, i quite like it :D One use i know people make out of the terrible natural exp is grinding the last bit of exp needed to level up characters so they dont waste papers. other than that i dont see another use. i feel like, how you said at one point in the video, the exp should scale with your level and the enemy's level. i think it'd promote exploration more, in the same way papers do but make it feel more natural? maybe the papers could stay as well for those who dont want to/dont have time to explore.

their love for making people have to lose days to build a character has made them gain much less then they could

I got too lazy farming books for venti at a certain point (oh the irony as I sit at 60 characters max leveled), and so had him naturally collect xp from level 88 to 89. It took around a year of using him just in a normal genshin playthrough -rarely removing him off the team. I've not played every day, but a month or so difference is alright. Now, he's 3/5ths to level 90, and same deal. The natural xp system is best enjoyed with characters you use often in the overworld ig lol since 89 to 90 isn't a big dps increase ig lol

there actually is a exp limit from natrually killing enemys in the overworld. not really documented, infact to the point i got issue finding the exact numbers again, but i think its linked to how things like elite enemys have drop limits on items is 400 kills. i leave most of my chars at lvl 89/90(i got only 2 lvl 90, noelle and albedo since def scaling), as to why, mostly just to not really need to waste so many books to get less then a 1% dmg increase with the obserdly long potentiol of actually lvling them up from other methods. i have yet to get a char that i left at 89 to hit that 90, zhongli is probably the closest example i have and hes last i checked 70% of the way there. anyways even if they were to take out lvls, they would have to decouple so many back end systems that i know even sumwhat knowledgeable people dont even know. enemy def is calced by lvl, attacker in dmg calc is based on lvl to decreases def effectiveness to the point def is a glorified lvl scaling because of this, transformitive and aditive EM stuff also gets changed, but that one isnt hard.

I've always thought Genshin is the type of game that would benefit from Ascension Quests, where you have to complete a certain quest specific to that character to unlock more of their abilities or let them level up further. Obviously that's a lot of work to design the quests but given most characters have story quests or hangouts I don't think its unreasonable. You could say every character has 2 quests, one for each ascension passive: their first quest is just a bit of character dialogue that leads you to fight the bosses which currently provide ascension materials, while the second quest is a more involved way of getting to know the character akin to one branch of a hangout, which maybe also ends in a boss just to add a bit of challenge so you can't just skip through all the dialogue and get the 2nd ascension passive for free.

You can farm 400 Elites a day which give about 58-60 XP at highest World Level. So, if you farmed those every day. Taking into account that XP applieas to all characters in party, you can take 4 characters from Lv 80 to 90 in 21 weeks.

I recall trying to level up someone, Itto iirc, through battle cause I didn’t have many exp books. Fighting level 70 enemies with a level 15 character not only felt hard as hell, but after 3 days of casual gaming, I didn’t level up once. Now I know why. Then there’s players like MistahFeet doing level 1 runs and dreading when mandatory quests diminishes his list of characters he can still use, lol

Well, my cocogoat just recently made it from level 75 to 80 all by herself. And she did that twice before: at 45->50 and 65->70. Yes, it takes enormous amount of time. But it still is a thing even on high world levels.

Because I hate the fact that progression halts at lvl 90, I made it so I leveled up naturally from 89 to 90. Since I feel like anything other than that is too much work... it's been a long journey I'll say that much. But at least, it doesn't feel entirely worthless to kill enemies

Me and my friends did “no books” for a year at least, and it is unimaginably gruesomely slow. That said, it’s been nearly a year since I played Genshin now…

Genshin leveling is superior because you can farm with any character and then use said XP to level any character. It’s infinitely more flexible than traditional methods

I think either level-up system works in its context. Natural level-up is good for a small group progressing through a story. Consumables for level-up works best building up a character at any point in the game.

It always made sense to me so I never really questioned it ig..? I guess they knew that players would get bored of leveling up characters when there was too many characters to use

Ascension talents are also very weird. They (mostly) provide a general buff to stats and skills (which can be implemented into the skill itself), but in other games you can change which talents your character has, which is, in my understanding, the core thing of a "talent" mechanic. I wish we could do the same in Genshin, where you can swap these talents between characters you own. I would love to put Diluc's useless talent on Keqing since she uses charged attacks way more often.

This has been on my mind a lot the last year, as a majority of my resin has gone to leveling up every single unit I own (only missing nine five stars 😭), and even with about a year of grinding for books, mora, boss drops, and more, all of my units JUST now hit 81. Lots of resin refreshing as well, so it’s not even close to how long it would take for an F2P to attempt something like that. The leveling system definitely needs some changes of some kind.

I use my Beidou in a team to level up all new characters to Level 20 passively, after that only books. Also, a very weird thing, that that neat little passive talent of Beidou is nowhere mentioned at all? But then she never got a character video trailer or miscellaneous clip from Mihoyo either.

really, I've forgotten about the natural leveling system, I remember leaving my xiao and raiden at 89 so they could level naturally from that point but at some point I forgot about the system itself, I stopped playing with characters that aren't built

I laughed so hard at all the hilichurls together 😭😂

Great video

I leveled a couple of characters from 82-3 or something to lvl90 but it took a year, I just had a main group with Kazuha and I basically swirled groups of enemies a lot when I came across them while in the overworld, Hilichurls and Slimes.

I played a few mobile games in my time and some of the earlier ones (~2010 - 2014) usually didn't have "Character EXP Materials" on release. These items were mostly introduced later in the lifetime of these games as character catch up mechanics: If you have a game where day 1 players have a roster of units already maxed out, you need to give them some way to bring up new characters you release up to the powerlevel of the stuff you already own. You usually give the players "EXP Grind" Dungeons for their daily energy sink to level up new characters but after some time all devs realise that doing this for the 2000th time whenever you obtain a single new unit this gets very dull very quickly. So they introduce these "EXP Materials" to allow players to bring new characters up to snuff. The issue is that most new Gacha games ... kind of forgot that there was this grace period from release of the game to the state these games are now in where this mechanic didn't exist. So by now they just go ahead with "Well all Gacha games we play day in day out have EXP materials so our game needs to have them too!" - it has simply become part of the genre. I was very perplexed when I started Genshin that I got these books everywhere and I think I played the first one or two weeks without using them because I thought "well maybe these are supposed to be catch-up items for characters later" ... but no ... once I clicked the "use" button on these books I realised that their value far far far outscales any grind one is able to perform manually. It is a sad time we live in.

From Ganyu's release to when I quit around slightly after Sumeru release, she leveled up from Lv88 to Lv89 and a tiny bit

This is why I started a second account lmao. On the first I started in 4.0 and got Bennett through the event along with Xingqiu in standard, not knowing how great it was, able to essentially run traveller national team while disappointed I didn't get a 5 star (not knowing I already had the secret 6 star and true pyro archon). When I started the second account without Bennett for the early start and Fischl instead, playstyle was completely different as I paired her with Amber and focused on long range. I really do feel like aside from completionists, you really only spend money rather than start a new account for the convenience of not doing a new account all over again (achievements and all)

one thing I have always hated is the abundance of weapon leveling materials and complete lack of the good xp books for characters in most chests. The best source is events and even the average event probably only gives up to 30 books which is not a lot if you want to level a character past 40. But one thing I prefer is the open world and being able to dodge and stuff so there is a little of a player skill aspect. Like yeah I killed the geovishap with a level 40 yanfei and it took 15 minutes but I didn't die once because you can move. However with say honkai star rail you can not get away with not leveling every aspect of your characters or you will die because there isn't really a skill aspect.

Sometime early in my genshin journey, back before version 2 I had a crazy thought of lvling a character completely through grinding. I chose Beidou and after what I remember being like a month got her to lvl 20 from lvl 1 and immediately gave up on my goal. It was a crazy grind at the time and even now at AR60 I don't ever see myself trying that again. Now I have worse tasks I've given myself in game

Nah. I think Genshin was originally developed as a normal game, but was ruined by adding gacha mechanics in later stages. There is another example to support this claim - how gacha ruins weapon progression, and common/uncommon weapons become obsolete after first 10 pull. They didn't scrap enemy EXP system, because a) it took them efforts to implement it; b) because it would take efforts to remove it. Instead, they simply changed enemy EXP numbers to very low ones, and switched to default gacha EXP mechanics (it is easier to balance too). They also needed another motivation to incentify players to "explore", thus they placed EXP as one of the main rewards in chests (didn't help much, genshin is still a trashcollector simulator).

Has anybody seen those videos where a person “organically” leveled up their Alhaithem through fighting bosses

Great vid! IMO it doesn't make sense when compared to other games, but in its own way it does. It's a goofy system but you do have the choice to not level a character and keep the game challenging, and being able to level weapons up instead is pretty neat. I'm at world lvl 5 and none of my characters are above lvl 40. I can still experiment with new characters without things being super lopsided, and quests are still pretty easy.

You could say my Arlecchino is already lvl90:)

soo, reading is better than traveling at the end of the day.

And meanwhile in dnd it’s exact opposite. How do you become a great wizard? Do you study and read a lot? No, you kill goblins with fireballs

theoretically, you'd get a better resin-to-exp ratio by doing every weekly boss rather than just the three half-cost ones, as normal bosses cost 2/3 the resin of full-cost weekly bosses while only giving 1/2 the potential exp as of the release of fontaine's second weekly boss in 4.6, this also allows the entire resin allowance per week to be spent, as opposed to leaving behind an unusably small remainder of course, this is useless in practice unless you're insane

I just use the purple books you can buy from the teapot weekly, along with ones from the battlepass. Never really struggled with levelling up characters in the end-game. Its prob a pain in the ass early-game to mid-game though

theory ... maybe they keep giving exp through ennemies so that we are encouraged to go kill some of them instead of "wasting" a few exp when very close to the asention level. This is a trick that is very similar to the fear of missing out they play with to keep us on the game.

Remembered early game i struggled since i was out of the books..now i got multiple built chars and if i dont wanna do artifacts, id do leylines..i still have like 800 when arle was released

When I first played genshin I didn't realize xp books were a thing so I just spent all of my time (and when I say all, I mean all. I would even forget to eat) around half a year leveling up my party the good old traditional way up to lvl 40, the only reason I didn't get a higher level was because of how long it took me to discover the ascension system. If there was one good thing about all this tortuos grinding time is that to this day I still got plenty of slime, masks and so, so, soooooo much whopperflower nectar from back then that I almost never need to bother with those parts of the ascension.

I hate to say but I don't like Grinding for Level in Most MMORPG (That's why I refer Genshin for this task)

The level-up system exist to keep a balance on what do you have to grind for. If you remove levels, players will have more resources, and you'll have to make the grind for weapons/artifacts/talents longer, and players would find it even more boring. These game needs to have tons of different "level-systems" because players prefer to think their doing different things in a game, even if the reality is that its all "grind". The traditional enemy EXP tho, its probably not necessary, so much not necessary it's really inconsistent to what even gives it. The reason its in the game in the first place, i think you nailed it. It gives a nice sense of familiarity, for any experienced players, killing an enemy and it NOT giving any EXP would feel offputting. That being said, this EXP cannot be generous so it doesn't become an actual strategy to farm it, it is purposly abysmal to force players to spend resin on EXP books

The reason probably for why the natural Xp system even exist in mondstat area is probably due to the fact you cant really get more characters (besides the freebies *not barbara*) until Ar 10 when the wish feature unlocks. Also theres only a finite amount of chests in each area. Yeah some sdont give anything and aome are for quests but they don't count to the total 100% of each area they are in (surprisingly enough) but they probably went to book route for Xp because its easier and most of the time especially if you dont try to immediately level everyone up like crazy on the first day it ends up building up on the books and makes it easier down the road. Is it bad? Not really but it could be somewhat better. Like if you never seen the rate for the world level changes theres not really a reason to go beyond world level 5 either because despite it says rewards increase and enemies get tougher, your only looking at a 0.1 to about 2% drop increase, the chests also dont actually change at all despite ot says that increases as well, and enemies become glorified sponges.

As someone who actually did manual level Albedo from 80/90 to 85/90 *organically* it took me like 3 years to do before i fucked up my whole system with Cyno and leveled him up to 89/90. Then i capped Shenhe, Qiqi, Kazuha, Cyno, Wanderer, and Albedo all naturally. I compulsively refuse to let *any* open world EXP go to waste. Except my Triple crowned C6's, everyone else gets stuck at 80/90 and gets to slowly accumulate EXP organically.

I don't even remember leveling up from monster exp at low levels but what I did was, when I was executing my plan of leveling up every character to 90, I would stop each of them right after 89 and then I would use these characters to farm Mora by killing all 500-mora dropping elites I could find in the map, plus their companions. And that way, despite the monster exp being quite low, I managed to get about 10 characters all the way from 89 to 90 purely on monster exp. I stopped doing that when I ran out of characters to level up, then I leveled up the rest to 90 using books. But I do remember that leveling up using monster exp, albeit slow, is very possible.

As a wrio main I'm entertained by this video

Honestly genshin should give more exp per enemy, not like thousands more but a 10x multiplier at level 90 would be highly appreciated (100 exp per hilichurl would be very good) , it would encourage to play more over world Or they could add a resin based item that multiplies exp gained by overworld enemies x50 for a limited amount of time , that way you could level up by playing but genshin wouldn’t lose resin usage

glad someone finally said it.

the xp system is messed cuz they want it that way they could make the boss kills more significant by giving you a good amount of xp depending on your WL but they dont want it, they want you to spend time to search the books but they want it more fkd up, they limit the ways to get the books 💀

Man idk i think the leveling system is kinda nice in this game.. dont have to spend half my life leveling up.. i think there could be even a lvl Raise to 100 and adventure rank to 70/80/90/100 but at same time maybe also more resin so you dont have to wait forever.. but the adventure rank would take way to long to lvl so meh not a great idea

This could be a challenge or sm, only leveling up through fighting bosses and quests

Am I high, or did this guy just say 14 weeks is “more than a year”

"You used to level up, naturally" I mean, maybe from level 1 to level 2. After that, not really. At least not without an absurd and pointless amount of effort.

AR60 since last year and i still hv some of my characters lvl up naturally from doing domains and comms. By some i mean the same characters ive been using every day for 2 years that i had raised to lvl 80. My bennett was one of those chasacters and hes currently at 84.

Levels will never be removed because there is a bundle that you can buy for genesis crystals in the shop, so 1) they will lose a very small amount of money if they do it, but still a loss, and 2) the same reason why they dont nerf characters, people already paid for it, if you buy a bundle of books and they are removed the next day you will be mad and want a refund, so i dont know if they can remove it at all, they would have to remove it from the shop for a while Overall i agree, keep ascension, remove book grind, or make the natural exp gain 10-30x more, or double it on every world level

i always level up naturally for a little with a character i plan on raising. then theres ganyu who has only been leveled from killing stuff while exploring (still only one ascension). i leave my characters at a non maxed level for their bracket so i can see how much ive used them

100% agree with you, this game being a Gacha server game, it runs on those time gated domain grinding system, and it's pretty bad if you want to have a normal RPG experience. You can play this game all day killing enemies and barely progress.

You know what, i got Zhongli in his last day debut banner (22/12/2020) and maybe take 2 weeks to upgrade to 80/90 and never upgrade exp again. And since Zhongli is the most used before sumeru(not always) when exploring. Now he's at level 83 with 37k/273k exp and recently using him with Navia

Utlimately, levels don't really help you in the long run. Why, you ask? World Level exists. It is literally impossible to overlevel beyond, at most, maybe 10 levels. This is only a problem if and when you need to bring a character to the NEW requirement due to the new World Level. In the end, levels really just hurt you if you're newer and progress faster than someone who started the game when it first began and slowly built up the lvl up material. You could get rid of it entirely due to the fact that this is a combat team game where team comps could be more interesting and allow the player to experiment, as well as weapons and artifacts.

What are those keybinds? Are you using some kind of ergo keyboard or something?

Didn't know about those paer and leveling up artifacts and weapons. Thought genshin was hard as fuck leveling up normally

It all comes back to the chokepoint that resin provides because you can use primogems to buy more resin. It's not a matter of playing more, but paying more. I'm honestly surprised they even have a cap on the amount of resin you can buy in a day.

I'd love to see the idea of abandoning levels and using the gacha character growth system but also excluding that daily limit thing on a typical RPG game, it might be a better way to do progression and eliminate grinding if done right

I stopped giving my characters books after ascending them past 80 so I was able to get my Ganyu to level 81 naturally. It took over a year

Like the only time it’s ever “useful” to kill overworld mobs is if you’re like, 75 exp away from leveling up a single character and don’t want to waste a single talent material for just 75 exp. But even then you might as well do it bc the time it takes to kill enough mobs to gain 75 exp is probably longer than it takes to get a single exp book

18 weeks is just over 4 months, not a year. No worries though, everyone has moments like that haha. Btw, the discounted weekly bosses cost 30, not 40, and the non-discounted ones are still more efficient than world bosses, since they grant 100% more exp than world bosses for only 50% more resin cost, so you should do all 9 to maximize exp gain rather than just the 3 discounted ones. You can also get 1370 resin a week, since you get 1 transient resin a week, and 5 fragile resin per patch from the free version of the battle pass (very doable to get to level 45 in 6 weeks, especially since you're already going to accomplish the missions for spending resin, doing world bosses, and doing trounce domains). Using that number as the weekly amount and subtracting 30 resin each for the first 3 weekly bosses and 60 each for the last 6, you have exactly enough to do 23 world bosses. The exp from 23 world bosses and 9 weekly bosses is 8200. That ends up coming out to almost exactly 8 years to get from level 80 to level 90 (less than 2 days over). Note that even though there's usually 52.1429 weeks in a year, since it takes several years, I used 365.25 as the length of a year, meaning a week approx. 52.1786 weeks instead, though let's be honest, that didn't change anything lmao. If you don't want to count the transient resin and fragile resin (which is totally fair, I chose to but I can see the argument against it) and just count the base 1260, but still do the more efficient exp allocation, it comes out to 8 years and 210 days, or 8 years and 30 weeks (plus a few hours lol) So if you don't grind on regular enemies, 80 to 90 takes either 8 years if you use the weekly transient resin and the per-patch 5 fragile resin, or a few weeks over 8 and a half years if you don't.

Whenever I level up my characters, the system notifies me if I am going to "waste EXP". Me being a person that hates wasting anything... will go OH NO, I'll save that book for after ascension. I'll just do enemies and boss runs to naturally gain EXP. So the books will level my characters up and the "natural EXP" will just top them off until I have them ascended.

Truthfully, and I hate to say this, I think the Natural EXP is there to trick players at the beginning. As someone who's been playing Gachas since their baby years in 2015, it wasn't uncommon back then for "Max Level" to be something you had more than one or two characters at that you used constantly, since things were just so much slower paced back then. It's also a familiar mechanic to RPG Players who might be interested in the game, so they use it to lie to the player that it's going to be a method of progression, when it just isn't. It would be incredibly easy to get rid of Levels, just make units have the same stats at each ascension level they would have at the highest level of that ascension level, boom Ascension can go entirely unchanged but EXP doesn't need to exist. The real reason EXP still exists is because players who don't do every little thing and play constantly every day will need to use their Resin to get EXP books, which means they can't use that resin to get other things, which means they have to play more. I love Genshin and Star Rail, but this is one of the worst examples of predatory gameplay functions they have.

You want to know why leveling in Genshin revolve around XP books? It is because Genshin Impact is a Chinese Xianxia/Wuxia story. In a Xianxia novel, the best way to grow stronger is to use cultivation manuals. Another aspect of Xianxia stories are bottlenecks and breakthroughs which translates into level soft caps and ascensions.

i think the level up system is actually pretty good, you get a lot of books from quests/exploration, its not enough if you want to level up many characters, but you can farm the experience needed from lvl 1 to 90 in less then 1 week of resign, so it isnt that big of a deal, and it feels good to see the numbers go up, that wouldnt be possible without the lvl up books, also many people want to prefarm the materials for the character, and having a lvl 1 character that you have to manually lvl up over time after you get them till you can actually try them out also wouldnt feel near as good as having a maxed character right after you pull them and use them to the full potential, they could get rid of the natural leveling, but that would be pointless and wouldnt have any benefit for the gameplay or how it feels to play the game

I think the weird thing about leveling system is the "why" they even considered character exp from monster drops. Gold/Mora ang EXP are standard mob drops in rpg but at the same time, Genshin is a multi-character game like other gacha games. Other gacha games also implement rpg elements but not this leveling system because there's no point in only four active characters only gaining exp when you play." There's nothing like that at all in most gacha games. Instead, what they have is a bond/favoritism point system (which is friendship points in genshin) when you repeatedly play a specific character. Imo, it's probably an oversight from an early developmental stage of trying to imitate RPG elements but as they developed the gacha aspects, they probably forgot to fix or even remove it from the game. It's also weird how there's account level EXP and character EXP. IMHO, they should've just remove character exp drop and turned it into account level exp drop instead. It's the same for the co-op elements of the game. The very first event in Genshin opted for four players to play together to clear waves but as the game was not balanced enough, and since the players (at the time) were mostly low level people that don't try hard on gacha games, the event wasn't well received. After that, they really didn't have enough reason to make co-op rogue-like events. Going back, a lot of the players during that time hated that event (well for many other reasons), but I think what Mihoyo took from that feedback was that people didn't really like being forced into repeated combat within this game. That's why in the following patches, they added more puzzles, exploration, and other miscellaneous activities because they wanted cater to players who hated the combat aspect of events. While they do retain combat events, it's not as build dependent as they originally intended it to be. They added gimmick buffs that strengthens a character. They added trial characters so low level players can use a strong enough set of characters. While retaining the option of using your own built characters to do the event. Basically, the game was a huge experiment capitalizing on current trends at the time of development until release. Genshin found its footing as a genre of its own around mid-Inazuma. Around that time, the developers already found the formula for the game. It's been consistent ever since then. But current in-game mechanics like leveling through mob clears, it's all just simply a relic of a bygone era.

I think it's smart that they do this; in genshin, you're naturally going to play with characters that are already good, and if you try and play with a new character at endgame, it'd be.. REALLY hard. Being able to selectively apply XP makes much more sense in this situation. Other RPG games aren't gacha games, so you're expected to level up your characters throughout the game, and it's done easily just through gameplay. Having to play genshin in lategame with a level 20 character to try and level them up would REALLY suck