Wanted to discuss Yae and how she's one of the worst 5* characters released so far. Playing her for few days and I found so many problems in the design of her kit.
1) Yae's totems mechanic is increadibly clunky and poorly thought out.
a) Totems have a very short duration. It's 14 seconds but since you need to place all three of them the actual time is closer to 12s, since time is ticking when you place second and third totem. This is only two seconds longer than Fischl's Oz. For an off-field DPS Yae wants to stay on field for so much time, which results in DPS loss from your main DPS. Compare this to Albedo's Isomata which is active for 30 seconds. Zhongli's shield is also active way longer than any 4* shield. Why Yae gets 4* duration despite being a limited 5* character?
b) You're forced to constantly reapply totems. Yae's Elemental Burst requires all three totems to be on field, otherwise you'll lose damage. This means that when your Burst is up you're forced to first place your totems again to prevent them disappearing during the Burst animation. After Burst you need to place them again. This all results in a total 6 activation of Elemental Skill, more than any other character. This obviously wastes a lot of time without any benefits.
c) Totems formation is meaningless. To get the most of your totems you need to put them close to each other, preferably in a triangle shape. Question is, what's the point of this meachanic? It's not like you can get different effects with different formations. You're just forced to place them in this one exact way. This mechanic only exist to annoy you and provide no creativity or variety to the gameplay.
d) Elemental Skill has no i-frames. Since you need to use her Skill so many times and since it looks like a dodge animation, you'd expect it to have some i-frames to help setting totem formation up as quickly as possible. Having a staminaless dodge would also be nice since it'd add some so needed additional utility to Yae. But nope, you can easily get hit out of your Elemental Skill. This makes placing your totems even more annoying, since you need to dodge and place them simultaniously AND you need to place them in proper formation. This all just wastes time and make the totems even more annoying of a mechanic.
2) Yae's Elemental Burst is extremely expensive and clunky to use.
a) Burst can easily miss. It seems like additional lightning strikes from totems hit in the place of initial Burst hit. Not only it's hard to aim to begin with, but all of the additional hits can easily miss against a moving target. Lavachurl did an attack animation and moved forward? Kairagi did a charge attack? Congrats, 80% of your Burst damage is wasted. Again, Oz have no problems shooting moving targets.
b) Yae has a severe energy issue. She has the most expensive Burst in the game and she doesn't generate that much energy. She NEEDS electro battery on the team, preferably Raiden. Considering problems with her Burst aim you can easily just waste 90 energy. Just to laugh at f2p players and low spenders her C1 refunds 24 energy simply by using her Skill three times. My question, why Jean has a similar effect on one of her passive talents but Yae needs a constellation for it? This looks like an artificially created problem just to force you to pay for C1. Or suffer, trying to solve Yae's energy problems.
c) You have to wait after using Burst before placing totems. I didn't test it too much, but it seems that if you start placing your totems right after the Burst animation then you'll only get TWO additional lightning strikes instead of three. Which means you'll need to wait a bit before starting to place your totems again. This is another awkward pause you need to make, like you don't waste enough time on field placing your totems. Feels absolutely awful too, since you're forced to do nothing.
3) Kagura's Verity is extremely niche weapon. They made signature weapon just for Yae, it's rather useless on other catalyst users. Not only that, but it amplifies the most annoying aspect of Yae's kit - the constant Skill spam. Which means some obvious fixes to Yae's mechnic - like making Burst to refresh totems' duration instead of destroying them - won't happen since it'll break Kagura's mechanic.
4) Yae's damage is mediocre. You'd expect for such annoying setup and field time requirements you'll be rewarded with some respectable damage. Well, not really, she barely outdamages Fischl while also wasting a lot of your main DPS time. Her normal attack scaling is also bad and her charge attack takes forever.
5) Yae doesn't enable any new teams. Shenhe for example at least made some niche cryo teams playable and actually boosted their performance. Yae brings literally nothing to the table. She doesn't provide any utility too. Kokomi felt underwhelming at first too but her hydro application obviously had a use in freeze teams. Yae has nothing like that.
6) Even Yae's passive book talent is disappointing. It's pretty much Xingqiu's talent but with random effect. The effect already weaker than similar Eula's talent and it's even worse since it's random. Absolutely useless, so much for the head of Yae Publishing House.
Overall, it honestly feels like nobody in Mihoyo plays their own game. All these issues are so apparent yet nobody bothered to fix them. They did bother to gimp her performance to bait you for C1 and C2 which solve her energy issues and boost her damage. Before we had contellations which were simply damage boost or light QoL improvements. Now it seems more like a necessity. This is just insulting for f2p or low spenders.
