Top 5 Leveling Tips for Genshin Impact Progression

If you’re new to Genshin Impact, knowing the best ways to level your characters and account will make progression easier and more efficient. Proper leveling also keeps you from being overwhelmed by difficulty spikes, ensures you have solid teams for harder content, and are generally in a better place by the time you reach the endgame.

The Best Ways to Level Your Character and Account in Genshin Impact

Leveling in Genshin Impact takes a few primary forms: your character and their abilities, their equipped weapon, and the World Level, which determines enemy difficulty. While everyone will have a slightly different experience leveling any of these progression paths, there are some tips you should keep in mind so you don’t find yourself running thin of resources or overwhelmed by OP enemies.

1. Weapon and Talent Levels are Much More Important than Character Level

While leveling your characters is important, as it opens up more of their Talents and other upgrade paths, your damage, buff, and healing output is directly related to their Talents and their equipped weapon. Talents are the blanket name for abilities, and include your Normal Attack, Elemental Skill and Burst, and the three Passives each character can use.

Early on, you should focus on gathering as many Talent and Weapon upgrade materials as you can whenever you use your Original Resin You’ll find these in the various Domains scattered throughout the world, specifically:

Weapon Upgrade Material Domains

• Cecilia Garden in Mondstadt.
• Hidden Palace of Lianshan Formula in Liyue.
• Court of Flowing Sand in Inazuma.
• Tower of Abject Pride in Sumeru.
• Echoes of the Deep Tides in Fontaine.

Talent Upgrade Material Domains

• Forsaken Rift in Mondstadt.
• Taishan Mansion in Liyue.
• Violet Court in Inazuma.
• Steeple of Ignorance in Sumeru.
• Pale Forgotten Glory in Fontaine.

Note that the entire world of Genshin Impact is open to you from the start. Should you choose to explore a distant region before reaching its Archon Quest, many of the quests and activities there will be unavailable. However, discovering treasures, gathering world upgrade materials, and unlocking Domains are all free to do almost as soon as you start playing. You will, of course, want to unlock the ability to Wish and the other basic menu options by finishing the first few missions in Mondstadt, but once those are complete, the world is your oyster.

Each upgrade material Domain starts at a level 15 difficulty, and while you only get a few low-rarity items per completion, if you spend your first few dozen hours progressing passively collecting mats, you’ll be in a much better spot when you have a character you really want to invest into.

2. Focus on a Few Characters at a Time

Every Genshin Impact new player guide I’ve ever watched or read from any veteran creator has said the same thing regarding character upgrading. In short, invest heavily in only one or a few characters at a time. That means focusing on collecting materials and other progression paths for only those characters you want to use in the long term.

Investing only in a few characters at a time might seem contrary to a gacha game where there’s a spicy new set of characters every few weeks, but if you spread your resources too thin, any team you make will consist of partially built characters. And while a team of characters who are only average will still let you get through most of the story content, there are several massive difficulty spikes in the story and side quests, and if you aren’t careful about increasing your World Level, those middle-of-the-road characters will quickly feel their mediocrity. Speaking of which…

3. Be Careful When You Upgrade Your World Level

Your Genshin Impact World Level determines the level and difficulty of enemies in the world. There are eight World Level ranks to reach, each of them determined by your Adventure Rank. That’s the progression path tied to your Genshin Impact account. You gain Adventure XP primarily by doing quests and other activities out in the world. At specific AR thresholds, you’ll be tasked with completing an Ascension Quest, which, when completed will permanently increase your World Level.

There are three thresholds where you’ll want to put your Ascension Quest on the backburner: AR 35, 45, and 50. The AR 35 quest separates World Levels 3 and 4, and thus, enemies reach a maximum level of around 50 to a whopping 73. Passing AR 45 takes enemies up to level 84, and AR 50 increases enemy levels a maximum of 98, several levels above the maximumn character level of 90. Stopping lets you focus on continuing to upgrade your characters without fear of being overwhelmed by trash mobs.

4. Only Pull the Characters You Like

Here’s another classic: unless you plan to spend a lot of money on Genshin (and you don’t need to), you’ll likely be saving Primogems from events, Daily Commissions, and other sources for specific limited event characters. And while the temptation to only pull the “meta” characters is definitely there, you should only really pull for characters that resonate with you.

If you know that both of the current banner characters are really good, like Kokomi and Wanderer (my first banner), but you don’t like how either of them play, don’t pull for them. You can save your Primogems for another day when someone you both like as a character and enjoy in gameplay comes around.

5. Don’t Rush the Story or Artifact Farming

Well, you can’t really rush the Genshin Impact story, its Archon Quest chain, as a lot of it gets timegated behind Adventure Rank progression, but you shouldn’t try to rush it, regardless. Exploration and discovery in Genshin is one fo the best parts of the game before you reach the grindfest that is its endgame.

The story itself is a bit inconsistent, quality-wise, but the environments are always fantastic, learning the bosses and fighting enemies is always fun, and if you take your time, you’ll build up a bank of materials and currency to carry you for a long while.

Don’t worry too much about going for the perfect Artifact set as you progress, either. You’ll unlock Artifact domains as you explore, but until you’ve reached World Level 6, you can’t farm the highest-tier 5-star Artifacts that you’ll want for your endgame builds. You’ll collect a fair few 4-star and lower Artifacts as you go through the story and explore, and many of those will serve you fine for most content up through at least Inazuma (the third region).

There are dozens of other, smaller considerations to keep in mind as you level in Genshin Impact, but these five are some of the most important. If you’re looking for more Genshin Content, check out our Genshin Impact guides hub, where we’ve covered the best Electro characters, Support characters, and more.