I’m saying it does take me significantly more than 5 minutes, and that’s not even counting getting around the map or Daily Commissions or regular events that also take time, which one might want to do if they want more characters and weapons without paying.

I’m also saying that to have your characters so optimized that it only takes you 5 minutes now, it means you likely grinded much more than 5 minutes a day for a long time, because fast clear times aren’t trivial to get, and in this game skilfull play doesn’t make up for raw stat numbers as far as clear time goes.

I am saying that solely counting daily grind, my playtime has surpassed hundreds of hours, and this is not hyperbole. I have played for more than a year, so over time even short daily playtime can ammount to that, but lets not downplay how many times you need to run the same XP Leylines, the same Talent Book Domains, the same Artifact Domains, the same Bosses over and over to gather materials to get new characters up to speed with the rest of your team, meaning, usable in gameplay.

God, if I didn’t like the game’s story so much I’d probably have dropped already from how repetitive and tiresome the grind gets. Like many live service games, it’s not even like this is earned naturally by playing however you want, no, you need to go out of your way to grind the same repetitive challenges. Maybe you know games that are even more griindy and tiresome… but I wouldn’t exactly say that this means Genshin is free from grind. Not at all.