Honkai: Star Rail - How To Build A Strong Team

Team building is an invaluable skill in any RPG, and especially so in Honkai: Star Rail, where access to specific characters is limited either by your playtime or your tolerance of spending real-world money. Knowing how to build a team becomes incredibly important to the endgame, as you won't be beating the hardest content without a well-built team of high-level characters.

Getting a solid team up and running isn't too difficult, and the fundamentals you learn early in your playtime will carry you far. You'll learn the basics of good team building here.

Team Building Basics - Roles And Skill Points

Honkai: Star Rail follows a traditional RPG team-building system where characters have set roles that define how you play them and how you build them. In most cases, characters can be broken down into the following four categories:

• Main DPS: This is your primary damage dealer who will probably eat up a lot of your Skill Points and has little to no ability to keep themselves alive except by defeating enemies as quickly as possible
• Sub-DPS: These secondary damage dealers provide additional DPS that either supplements or synergizes with your main DPS, and they might also apply debuffs to enemy units.
• Support: These units are your buffers, providing bonuses to the damage of your entire team or to a single character (usually the main DPS). They might also be debuff-centric, reducing enemy defenses or making them easier to defeat in other ways.
• Sustain: Your Sustain unit's primary purpose is to keep the rest of the team alive. Their personal damage output is usually minimal, with some exceptions, and their kits revolve around healing, providing shields, or otherwise mitigating the damage the rest of the team takes.

These roles are fairly clearly defined in most teams, and while there are edge cases where you can make a Sustain into a DPS with specialized setups, don't expect that to work in most situations.

Each team member will also contribute to your team's Skill Point economy. You have 3 Skill Points when a fight starts and have a maximum of 5 Skill Points during battle (or 7 with Sparkle). Each time a member of your team uses a Skill, you'll spend one of those points. You gain a Skill Point back for using a Basic Attack with any unit.

One of the main goals of any team-building exercise is to create a team that's Skill Point-positive or generates Skill Points in surplus rather than running through them too quickly.

The best way to build a Skill Point positive team is to have the three non-main DPS characters use their Skills every other turn at most. The best Supports and Sustains in the game (Robin and Aventurine, for instance) don't need to use their Skills more than once every three turns or so, meaning they fit into almost any team that would otherwise need Points.

Skill Point-friendliness is a fairly common trait among Support and Sustain units, though it's not universal.

Team-Building Basics - Damage Types

One of the core mechanics of Honkai: Star Rail combat is Weakness Break, reducing your enemy's Toughness (the white bar above their health) to zero, stunning them temporarily and potentially making them more vulnerable to damage.

Almost every enemy has a set selection of weaknesses to the various elements in the game, and success in battle can hinge on how effective your team is at breaking that weakness. That means you'll always want at least one team member that can break an enemy's weakness.

That's especially true in the endgame, where enemy health and Toughness pools are so large that any free time you have is worth its weight in gold.

Each member of your team ideally uses a different element, so you have the widest possible coverage, but that's not always possible or optimal. There are times when having two or even three characters of the same element is viable, though these are more specialized cases that only come up with multiple limited 5-star characters in specific endgame scenarios.

By that same token, there are also different ways in which characters do good damage:

• Ultimate-focus. These characters rely mostly on their Ultimate abilities to deal damage, and outside of those abilities have a relatively minimal output.
• Follow-up attacks. FUAs for short, these attacks occur automatically and outside the standard turn order, functioning as a second, no-cost attack.
• Damate-over-Time: DoT, for short, damage dealers in this playstyle apply a debuff to enemies that activate a tick of elemental damage every time they act, preferably multiples at a time.
• Super Break: This damage type only functions when a character provides a buff to another and only activates when the enemy has its weakness broken. If the enemy has an active Toughness bar, even just a sliver, Super Break damage is impossible, but when it goes off, it can be some of the most potent in the game.

Some characters, especially those released farther away from the launch roster, can combine two or all of these damage types, and other, more straightforward characters rely on just one.

Acheron, for instance, has her damage tied up almost entirely in her Ultimate, but her Ult does so much damage it hardly matters. Feixiao, on the other hand, is also primarily an Ultimate-focused character but has access to so many follow-up attacks that you could double her damage out of her Ultimate and have the numbers come out correct.

These special cases aren't common, but aren't uncommon in the Honkai: Star Rail roster, either, and meta shifts can make entire playstyles obsolete in short order.

Team-Building Basics - Adjusting For Encounters With Meta Teams

As much as it sounds to have one team for every situation because there are so many different elements and mechanics in Honkai: Star Rail combat, you will need at least two well-built teams to make it deep into the endgame.

That's also true of the story campaign because the story bosses are difficult and all have different elemental weaknesses. What worked during the early parts of the narrative can hit a wall quickly after that.

The endgame activities tend to require three or even four teams, as each tier will have different foes to face, each with its mechanics and weaknesses.

The top teams will vary from patch to patch, but we've collected a few of the best for new players and endgame veterans.

Feixiao Follow-Up

Feixiao's follow-up attack team features Topaz or Imaginary March 7th, Robin, and Aventurine for maximum survivability and follow-up attack activation. Robin buffs the entire rest of the team and provides the ability to give her teammates a second set of turns with her Ultimate, which buffs them even further.

Firefly Super Break

The first Super Break-centric team, Firefly combines with Harmony Trailblazer and Ruan Mei to not only deal massive Super Break damage, but Ruan Mei's Ultimate re-breaks enemies when their toughness would otherwise refill.

Lingsha and Gallagher are essentially interchangeable on this team.

Free-To-Play Starter Team

Being new to Honkai: Star Rail doesn't mean you have to have a bad team. While not ideal for endgame, in most cases, having Qingque as your main DPS with Serval, Asta, and Natasha as a backup will carry you at least through the first two planets in the main story, and further if you invest into them.

So long as you dedicate the time to building multiple teams with multiple elements, you'll almost always be able to tackle any challenge the game throws at you.

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