Genshin Impact makes "adjustments" to Yae Miko's broken targeting but frustrates the character's biggest fans

Genshin Impact character Yae Miko got a fix for her targeting mechanics in version 2.6, but the sudden change has aggravated some of the character's biggest fans.

Yae Miko is the overseer of Inazuma's Grand Narukami Shrine, the owner of Yae Publishing House, and Genshin Impact's newest electro character. Her release last month caused quite a clamor, but that quickly died down as players discovered some issues with her abilities. Developer HoYoVerse released a blog post on HoYoLab addressing Yae Miko's targeting mechanics and the adjustments made to the system after listening to player feedback.

Yae Miko's elemental skill, Sesshou Sakura, places totems which target enemies with electro attacks. Previously, these totems would randomly target anything in their effective range, but after this change, they will only hit the enemy closest to them. HoYoverse says Yae Miko's totem attacks were never meant to be random, and attributes the issue to "a combination of issues with both enemy and character targeting logic" that also "affected other enemies and characters besides Yae Miko."

The latest update made it less likely for Yae Miko and other characters with similar abilities, like Fischl and her Oz turret, to unintentionally target non-enemy entities such as miscellaneous collectibles, but many players have reported encountering the same issue after the update. And while Yae Miko's targeting behavior has been tweaked, some of the character's biggest fans feel that the end result is essentially a nerf – one which was abruptly announced weeks after the character's release.

Much of the frustration seems to be tied to Yae Miko's second constellation, which you can access by pulling two duplicate copies of the character. This constellation increases the damage of her totems and greatly expands their targeting range. With the original targeting system, a C2 Yae Miko could effectively clean up far-off enemies while you were busy fighting something else. Now that the totems automatically target the closest enemy, some players feel that this constellation is less valuable, but they can't reclaim the Primogems they already invested into Yae's constellations.

Yae Miko is still a perfectly usable character and her second constellation provides a considerable damage buff, but this targeting change has created some edge cases where her usefulness drops off dramatically. If one electro-immune enemy gets close, for example, all of her attacks will basically be wasted on it. And while her range boost is still relevant in some fights, it's less impactful since she can't rain down a wide-reaching storm of thunder anymore.

HoYoverse says it "will continue to gather everyone's feedback after the implementation of these fixes and monitor Yae Miko's combat data from the live server," and judging from the state of Yae Miko's dedicated subreddit, the studio is in for some feedback.

"If we conclude, based on player feedback and combat data, that further adjustments are needed, we will inform Travelers once again via another official notice," HoYoverse says.