#3.6 leaks

[wobster109]

Alhaitham: Once I said something that caused a huge, dramatic fallout! Now I’ll just casually insult Kaveh all the time—

Kaveh: Once I walked out on my best friend (and I was his only friend) for years! Now I casually threaten to move out every week—

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST it’s like they’re re-enacting their breakup over and over again agsgdhfh they are such messy fools and I love them and I can’t deal with them! 😭😭😭💀💀💀💖💖💖

[cake-wlk]

i'd smash

[scara-blogs]

Love that all the harbingers, so far, are in agreement that Pantalone is incredibly annoying and borderline crazy

[aha-chuu]

Alhaitham and Kaveh's dynamic is interesting, because I've seen a lot of people say either "oh my god Kaveh is so mean" or "oh my god Alhaitham treats Kaveh terribly". But, quite importantly imo, in this quest Paimon remarks that she "doesn't know which one of them is more problematic".

I think when considering their relationship you need to look at intention. Do Hoyo want to villainise one of their popular husnandoes as a toxic asshole? No. Even the "villain" playable characters like Childe and Wanderer are nice/funny on occasion. Kaveh and Alhaitham's interactions are intended to be humorous, to make you gasp and say "oh wow I can't believe he just said that!".

Like, during the most recent story quest, for example. Kaveh accusing Alhaitham of having no empathy when he's clearly pretty emotionally stunted and decently moral is mean. But saying "At least I'd be a fungus with empathy!" Undercuts that - it's clear neither Alhaitham nor the player are suppose to take those words seriously.

Alhaitham dismissing Kaveh's field of work with "you work yourself to death just for a smile" is so belittling, but it's a retort to Kaveh saying his scribe job is at "rock bottom" in the Akademiya. Alhaitham isn't lashing out or trying to demean Kaveh in front of others (this interaction happens after the player has "left"); he's just continuing their verbal sparring match. I think people take this jab so seriously because it can be seen as a jab at a lot of people working out of passion, but in the context of the dialogue we're not supposed to regard it so deeply.

It's also fairly clear that nobody in game takes them seriously either. Tighnari says Kaveh is "as pent up as an anemo slime" in his Alhaitham voiceline - another funny quip - and Collei details how hard it was to suppress her laughter when Kaveh was talking about Alhaitham. Nobody thinks they're genuinely bad for one another, or that getting them separated is all that crucial.

Even the interactions in this story quest are just so silly and domestic: Kaveh can't get the painting straight, Alhaitham buys ugly furniture, they're arguing about rent and drink tabs, Kaveh is doing an unfair amount of housework and Alhaitham fucks off without entertaining his own guests. it's funny, or at least it is clearly intended to be.

I've heard that in the other dubs the VAs tones are different and it makes the lightheartedness clearer. Personally I've thought since their first interaction in the AQ that Alhaitham is having fun during their quarrels, and Kaveh is just melodramatic enough to act traumatised even if he isn't truly offended.

Then when it comes to whether their dynamic is supposed to be read platonically or romantically... Well Hoyo won't do anything canon, but it's hard to argue that there is no intentionality in how their relationship is portrayed. What other character(s) has an idle animation directly referencing their relationship with another character? How many other voicelines explicitly reference two characters as a pair? Nahida's Kaveh voiceline, Collei's, Tighnari's - I'm sure there are more. "Roommates" "senior & junior" "academic rivals" -> certainly there's a case to be made that they're just very close, but Kaveh and Alhaitham getting fifteen minutes of epilogue interaction in two different quests (where none of the content is related to either quest) says something. Fanservice, quite possibly.

Also Kaveh's line "We used to be friends, but not anymore"; I've seen plenty of people interpret this as "oh we're not friends, we're dating*". I think this is fun in fanon, but on a canon level it's basically a promise by Hoyo to fix (or explain) their current dynamic. Hoyo, for all their many faults, are detail orientated enough to follow up on such a line. Perhaps it will just be in Kaveh's voicelines/character stories, but I anticipate a future event or Kaveh hangout in relation to their bond. Nothing explicit, but more exploration. It's fairly clear Alhaitham and Kaveh are popular enough characters to warrant it.

All this to say: I have lots of thoughts. I have seen people call them toxic and (while idm the drama of that in fanon shipping) that isn't really the intended case in canon. Or, at the very least, the intention is not to to take their squabbling so seriously.

[lycorisketch]

Just listened to Baizhus voice lines. He hisses his 's' when he speaks. I can't tell if its because hes listened to Changsheng so much or not but he sounds like hes mimicking a snake. I love him sm

[trulytofu]

First they twinkified him in the drip marketing, and now Hoyo’s bottomized Kaveh by outing him as a Cancer.

heh.

[enden-k]

spoiler warning for genshin leaks

kaveh hangout before 4.0!!

kaveh screentime in the 3.6 sumeru event too!!!! guys we WIN

i read al haitham is gonna pop up too, i cant wait for it hhbfhfb

[rapifessor]

Initial Analysis of Baizhu

Well, here we go. Decided I’d take a quick look at Baizhu since we have some details about him from the Version 3.6 beta. So far he looks like a very solid support that can do pretty much anything and might be the premier option for a Dendro character with role compression when he becomes playable.

Elemental Skill

Does a pretty good amount of damage for hitting a total of three times, and also heals your entire party by a pretty significant amount. On top of that this Talent has a pretty low cooldown of only 10s, it’s overall just a really good attack. Hopefully it generates a good amount of particles as well.

Elemental Burst

This one’s pretty unique. It creates shields and heals your active character in addition to dealing damage when the shields break or are refreshed. The shields themselves are interesting as well because they’re pretty weak but since they’re always being regenerated while Baizhu’s burst is active it’s effectively the same as having a really tanky shield. You should get about five or six of them while the burst lasts, and looks like it costs 80 Energy for Baizhu.

Passive Talents

First Ascension passive gives Baizhu 20% more healing for characters below 50% HP and if your active character is above 50% HP, he gets 25% Dendro DMG instead. Pretty nice talent overall, more damage is always better.

Second Ascension passive is where the fun is at. Every 1k HP Baizhu has up to 50k will give the active character 2% more Hyperbloom, Bloom, and Burgeon DMG and 0.8% more Aggravate and Spread DMG when they’re healed by his Elemental Burst. Considering how absurdly broken Hyperbloom is and that you can in theory get a 100% DMG Bonus to it with this Talent, I would not be surprised if this gets nerfed in the beta test because damn that is way too OP.

Lastly, Baizhu has a unique exploration Talent that heals your active character by 2.5% of his HP when they harvest plants in the overworld. I like that this is something new and it’s a nice quality of life feature to keep your team healthy while exploring.

Constellations

As is normally the case with 5-Star characters, Baizhu’s C2 is pretty strong and a good stopping point for players who want to invest in him without going full whale. C1 gives his skill an additional charge, making for a comfier playstyle and enabling more damage and energy for Baizhu. The C2 performs joint attacks with your active party member every 5s, dealing a hefty 300% Dendro DMG and also healing 1/5 the normal amount of Baizhu’s skill.

C4 is a strong supportive Talent, being essentially Collei’s C4 but better as it just gives your team more Elemental Mastery.

Lastly, C6 enables DPS Baizhu and just makes his burst deal a fuckload of damage in general, with added 10% HP scaling and generating more shields which means more damage.

Overall Thoughts

Looking at that second Ascension passive, I get the impression that Baizhu is like Candace but if Candace was done right. If her similar Talent that grants bonus damage based on her HP was more universal than Normal Attack DMG Bonus with her burst, she would have been a much better and much less niche unit.

But yeah, as you can see, he’s pretty fucking stacked. Also I’m sorry, but I just have to add that it really makes you wonder again what the fuck happened with Dehya’s kit when Baizhu is apparently a god. The disparity in power level between the two of them is sobering.

Anyway, I’ll probably be doing a similar post about Kaveh pretty soon. I specifically wanted to look at Baizhu first so I can get an idea of how much I give a shit about him. I’m thinking of pulling for C1 Dehya but I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t burn too many Primogems if Baizhu was a character I wanted, especially since I’ve officially gone free-to-play and have no intention of buying the Gnostic Chorus or Blessing of the Welkin Moon.

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

all these Fontaine leaks and still no Baizhu WHERE IS HE ;-;;;;

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

i need you guys to watch this with the sound on

[draconisvesperi]

///genshin leaks

im sorry

but

kaveh's splash art 😭😭😭

especially when its posted right next to this masterpiece

[aha-chuu]

Kaveh's Odd Desert Connections

Kaveh... Is weird. I hadn't thought that much about it until I very recently caught up with the Dirge of Bilqis quest (the new desert one with Jeht) and watched Ashikai's latest theory video. This post is just meant to gather my thoughts and share what I've learned.

So first what sent me down this rabbit hole was finding this during the desert quest:

In case you missed it in that wall of text, this record is addressed to "Mehrak". We know due to leaks that Kaveh's very cute briefcase is called Mehrak also.

Unfortunately,,, desert lore is like that and is pretty hard to untangle. These records recount the fall of Gurabad and the story of Liloupar - basically, they tell a story of a ruined civilisation from thousands of years in the past. Knowing the actual contents of them isn't really necessary to follow this post, because Mehrak (and by extension Kaveh) is only namedropped this one time out of all the records.

But we can theorise a lot just from this single mention. To me, there are two possible explanations for why "Mehrak" comes up in these records whilst also being Kaveh's present day briefcase. The first is mildly boring but kind of funny: there is no true connection between Kaveh's Mehrak and the Mehrak mentioned, Kaveh simply named his cute techno briefcase after a historical figure because he thought it would be cool. Kaveh is smart and does work on projects in the desert, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that he might learn of Mehrak and use the name. It makes him look a whole lot more nerdy, which I find amusing.

The second possible explanation (and pls do provide your thoughts if you have any other ideas) was provided to me by a redditer (PinkPrimrose05). Their theory is that Mehrak is in a similar situation to Ferigees, who I will remind you is the Jinni near the end of the Dirge of Bilqis questline. They were a person at a certain point in history, but has since been trapped in a mechanical construct. They cannot die until we release them.

(I apologise for the poor quality, Ferigees is inside that yellow mechanism.)

This has many more implications, since (if this is the case) Mehrak's current form does not really match the other ancient desert technology. Well, perhaps it has some similar patterning, but it definitely looks significantly more modern than other technology from that time -

(I could not for the life of me find a good model image for this, so sorry Kaveh's arm is in the way.)

Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier - we know from leaks that Mehrak has some level of sentience, in that it has expressions (little pixelated anime eye reactions) and responds to Kaveh's instructions without necessitating verbal or physical inputs. This makes the Jinni idea seem more likely, since they also have sentience.

Okay, so maybe the briefcase has a rich history from the time of King Deshret. So what? Kaveh probably found it in the desert and repurposed it for his own needs - perhaps due to errosion Mehrak has no memory of its past life. Since the technology does not quite match, or at least not totally, perhaps Kaveh created the briefcase around Mehrak (as well as an architect he is also a student from the technology darshan, after all). Or maybe he just made additions. What does it even matter aside from being an interesting tidbit?

Well, then I watched Ashikai's latest video: https://youtu.be/h5rNMYwWjfA. It's not necessary watching to understand what I'm about to say, so I'll summarise some of her thoughts very broadly: she brings up the idea that rather than Alhaitham being the Deshret parallel as we all thought, it's instead Kaveh. If you would like to hear all her thoughts as to why that could be, I recommend watching the video.

This does not mean that Kaveh IS Deshret, or even that it's a reincarnation situation. Just that he could be a parallel, or have more connections/knowledge than we might realise. Kaveh is an interesting case from a meta perspective also, since he has had a strange amount of unnecessary story presence for an unreleased four star. He is in the archon quest and Alhaitham's story quest and in neither is his presence at all justified by narrative - Alhaitham's quest could easily end fifteen minutes earlier, and Kaveh adds literally nothing to the archon quest aside from some nice levity. Some lore relevant significance might explain this presence past just "oh, well Hoyo wanted fanservice".

Through the lens that their is some sort of Deshret -> Kaveh connection happening (and I say this so so loosely), his connection with Mehrak might have a more sinister implication. Deshret allowed, through his own ignorance, the Jinni he intended to protect on behalf of the Goddess of Flowers to be enslaved. He also lied about the Goddess' death to the Jinni, and it is largely due to their contract with him that their entire civilisation fell apart. An important note about Ferigees and Liloupar is that both crave an existence outside of their prisons - Ferigees purposefully trapped themself inside the mechanism but found the experience torturous, and Liloupar returns to Gurabad. If Mehrak is another trapped Jinni, Kaveh might be accidentally mistreating it.

However, I like the idea that Mehrak and Kaveh are friends much better. Its expressions are often positive ones, so even if it's forced to listen to Kaveh because he has its name, it doesn't seem too upset about it. Also, another part of Ashikai's video posits that Liloupar so quickly accepts the traveller because they have resemblance to Deshret (a whole other rabbit hole, watch the video if you want to know). In this same thread, Ashikai brings up that Kaveh looks very similar to the traveller, so I think that perhaps Mehrak (either knowingly or not) connects Kaveh to its previous master, which could explain why it listens to him so well.

Overall, I find this connection very intriguing and I'm excited to learn more. There is definitely something there, but whether or not it will be imprtant I do not know.

[voidscreamns]

./

[satoumafuyuss]

[fishareglorious]

Me before 3.3 livestream: Man, if i have to pull on a rerun, I want it to be either Raiden Shogun’s or Ayato’s. My next 5-star is guaranteed, after all.

3.3 livesteam:

Me: ....son of a bitch.

[jackross-v]

Having a normal one today lads