Beginner's Guide to Honkai Star Rail
Honkai Star Rail is a turn-based RPG Gacha game, very similar to the old Final Fantasy turn based style of gameplay or the likes of The Legend of Heroes series ones. A strategy game at its core, this short guide will give you the basics you need to get started in Honkai Star Rail.
The Big Picture
You form a team of 4 characters and mix and match your composition based on the challenge (e.g. enemy elemental typing or single target boss and etc). Characters differ in 3 ways - Rarity (5 or 4 star), Classes (7 different classes) and Element.
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The 7 Character Classes Explained Simply
All characters in Honkai Star Rail are given a class which defines broadly the role the game thinks best suits the character (of course there are exceptions, as we elaborate more in detail in the Character Classes section of this site).
TL;DR - Damage Dealers, Supports, Sustain (although its really more complicated than this)
Damage Dealers (DPS) are split into Single Target (The Hunt Class) ,Area Of Effect / Multiple Targets (The Erudition Class) or Enhanced DPS (The Destruction Class). Depending on your team composition or enemy lineup, one of these classes might be more effective than the other.
Supports are split into Buffers (The Harmony Class) and Debuffers (The Nihility). The backbone of most team comps, I do find the supports the most versatile characters where they can fit into more teams than most.
Sustain are for the likes of Healers (The Abundance) and Tanks (The Preservation). Honkai Star Rail does place some emphasis on sustain type units, especially in the early game where players do not have the gear to one shot every enemy.
Elements: How they matter in Honkai Star Rail
Characters have different elements and mainly do damage in that particular element. Most monsters will have a particular typing attached to them and certain weaknesses which trigger damage to their "break" bar. Simply put, you want to hit enemies with the elements they are weak to in order to overcome them quicker.
Rarity
Characters are classified like most gacha games into 5 star and 4 star rarities. There are no three star units and getting multiple copies of the same character unlocks the characters "Eidolons" which give additional bonuses and effects to the characters kit (For those who play Genshin its basically Constellations). 5 star rarities are further split in which they are always found in the common pool or "limited" 5 stars which are found only in limited time banners.
[See Characters Section of this guide for more information]
Team Building Basics
This section can be an entire website on its own but to keep it simple to get most of us started, you want to look for 2 Damage Dealers, 1 Sustain and 1 Support to start of with. Preferably if they have different elements as well so you can tackle early game content well. This 2-1-1 formation is flexible, but as you get more advanced into your gameplay you likely will move on to other formations depending on your roster.
[Check out the Team Building Section for more recommendations to get started]
3 Types of Attacks
Each action phase, generally characters can do one of 3 actions - normal attack, skill or use their ultimate. Normal attacks usually gives a charge to the teams "action gauge", and to use a skill you need to use a point in the action gauge. i.e. if you have no charges available, you can't use the characters Skill. This makes you choose between balancing characters to build charges and use charges during battle, adding to some layer of complexity of choice. Characters can only use Normal Attack or Skill when its their turn in the Turn Order.
Ultimate is independent of Action Gauge bar and Turn Order and instead is focused on the Ultimate Gauge which is unique for each character and not shared. When an Ultimate gauge is full, players may cast the ultimate regardless of whose turn it is and the character using the ultimate will instantly be the next unit to act. Timing the ultimate properly can change the tide of battle, i.e. healing the party before a boss area of effect attack or killing an enemy before it gets a chance to release a power attack.
Dan Heng using his Ultimate Attack
Stats and Damage
Characters generally scale off Attack, Defence and/or HP. i.e. healers might heal based on the amount of HP or attack they have and tanks skills might scale with Defence, attack or both. When a characters HP drops to 0, the are unable to act for the remainder of the match.
Damage can be Critical or non-critical which is based on the Critical Rate and Critical Damage stat.
Being a turn-based game, Speed is largely the determining factor in who goes when and how often.
Healing Effectiveness, Effect Hit Rate, Energy Restoration round up the other stats in the game which affect healing, ability to land debuffs and the rate at which characters get their Ultimate gauged charged up, respectively.
3 Ways Characters gain power
Building your Characters - Traces, Levels and Eidolons
The first way characters improve their damage/utility is by leveling them up, which cost materials that can be obtained from resource nodes that cost rechargable energy to farm. Characters gain a significant amount of stats from leveling and players should focus on getting their characters to higher levels to do more damage.
The next way characters improve is through unlocking Traces, which gives a character additional stats based on which node is selected to unlock. Not all nodes can be unlocked at once and you must first hit prerequisite character levels in order to be able to unlock certain nodes.
You can also level up the main traces of skills, located in the center of the Traces tree. Each point in the skills improves the units actions in battle i.e. 70% attack scaling normal attacks -> 80% -> 90% and so on...
The third way is to unlock eidolons of characters by getting additional copies of the same character.
These 3 ways are investments into your character and are not able to be transfered to another character if you do chose to bench and no longer play a unit. Early game, character selection is key when resources are most limited to get the most value from your team.
Other than the above 3 ways, there are 2 other methods to increase character's power/utility. Relics and Lightcones, these are generally transferable from character to character.
Relics
In this game, there is a gear system called Relics (e.g. Artifacts if you play Genshin Impact), which boost stats and damage listed above.
There are 6 Relic slots per character - 3 of which have their main stats fixed at flat HP, flat Attack, flat Defence, which the other 3 are varying main stats which could be: Speed, Critical Rate/Damage, Energy Restoration, HP Percentage, Attack Percentage and etc.
Relics come with 2 piece, 4 piece and 5 piece set bonuses, which offer additional bonuses if you equip multiple pieces of the same set. There is no fixed rule on the best combination except you want to try to get as much set bonuses as possible as its free stats.
[See: Relics Section for more details on the types of relics in the game]
Hunter of Glacial Forest Relic Set
Lightcones
Lightcones are class specific, where only a particular class will be able to utilise the effects of a particular lightcone. e.g. The Harmony Lightcones when used by another class (The Destruction) will not be able to use its effect, you can equip the lightcone still and only get the main stats (Attack/HP) of the said lightcone. Majority of the time, players should stick to using a class lightcone for the respective class.
Lightcones are further divided within the classes into 5 star, 4 star and 3 star variations - all with varying effects. The 5 star Lightcone main stats are significantly higher than that of lower rarity counterparts, but some lower rarity lightcones do offer tremendous value.
[See: Lightcones section for more discussion]
Now that we've understood the basics, lets learn meta and advanced concepts next. I recommend you check out Tier Lists as a quick way to compare characters and check out more guides for specific advanced concepts in the Guides section.
Cheers Trailblazers