"#FixDehya" trends as Genshin Impact players demand changes for the new worst five-star character in the game

Genshin Impact Dehya
(Image credit: Hoyoverse)

Pile-driving the official Genshin Impact account into Reddit Hell didn't work, so disgruntled Genshin Impact players are now trying to get new character Dehya buffed by showering developer Hoyoverse in "#FixDehya" social media posts and in-game feedback suggestions.

In case you've missed this particular storm, Dehya was released last week as part of Genshin update 3.5. Like Tighnari before her, she'll be added to the standard banner character pool once her debut patch comes to a close. Unlike Tighnari, Dehya is almost unusably bad. Her low damage, weak defensive utility, poor Pyro application, and clunky mechanics make her a strict downgrade in almost every situation, and some of her animations make her difficult to even play. 

As players have pointed out, it's perilously easy to accidentally cancel Dehya's elemental burst – the source of nearly all of her damage – by getting too close to objects, getting frozen by enemies, or simply hitting the jump button. It doesn't help that her burst also locks you into a few seconds of attack animations with wonky auto-targeting that doesn't even register some enemies. 

Dehya is unquestionably among the worst characters in Genshin Impact, and there's a fair argument for putting her in the bottom spot, perhaps even below the likes of four-stars like Dori and Candace. If nothing else, she's easily the worst five-star, and while technically someone has to be, they don't have to be this weak. 

Unsatisfied with the gap between her canon power level and playable kit, fans have drawn up a digital "#FixDehya" poster and plastered it anywhere they can, especially in replies to the official Genshin Twitter. As it happens, Hoyoverse recently shared an illustration of Dehya and Candace to celebrate the English account hitting five million Twitter followers, and you can imagine how that went. 

Several major Genshin fan accounts, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, have joined the cause, asking players to share the word online and use the in-game suggestion box – which has its own Dehya feedback category – to express their disappointment. As the extra-disappointed Dehya Mains Reddit community pointed out, the cause has even spread to Japanese and Chinese Genshin players, so I suppose this is technically a global effort. 

Genshin Impact hasn't directly buffed a character post-release since the Zhongli fiasco around the game's launch, and that was a special exemption for an archon. We've seen bug fixes, wording tweaks, new artifacts and weapons, and additional characters who formed new combos and strategic niches, but characters are generally set in stone once they launch. However, I don't think any character since Zhongli has gotten this kind of blowback. That said, some of the "four easy steps" described in the #FixDehya battlecry are pretty overkill and probably imbalanced, so whatever happens, I certainly wouldn't hold out for those exact changes, and that's charitably assuming any come at all. 

Here's hoping Baizhu and Kaveh, announced for update 3.6, don't have the same issues. 

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Austin Wood

Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.