Honkai: Star Rail, as many other modern gacha games, revolves around team-building. You need a proper team that works well together, not just with their skills and attacks – but their elements and archetypes as well. However, unless you plan to Honkai Star Rail Top Up services to boost your account and get stronger so that you can ignore team-building, or just get the best team that works well for your character, you’re going to want to be able to create a team on your own. You know what they say – Give a man a fish, and he’ll go hungry in a day, teach a man to fish… you know the rest.
Elemental Types
Just like in Pokemon, most enemies are weak to certain elements and strong to others. Building a team will require you to consider what enemy you’re fighting against and which characters you want to bring. If you’re under 40 Trailblaze level, it’s suggest to cover as many elements in your team as possible.
Considering you have only 4 Team Members to work with, it’s best if you cover 4 different elements with those members instead of focusing more on a single element since while you’re going through the story and exploring, you’ll be faced with enemies with all forms of elemental weaknesses.
Character Paths
There are currently 7 Paths in the game, and these represent your “Character Archetypes” or “Roles” in Honkai: Star Rail, but they also have a hidden “taunt” mechanic that the game doesn’t tell you about which is important for positioning.
Since we don’t have exact percentages of the taunt levels for each class, the Honkai: Star Rail community has a 4 tier system where they assigned Paths to how much aggro they draw, 4 being the highest taunt level and 1 being the lowest.
4 – Preservation – If you’ve looked a bit deeper into each Preservation character, you’d notice that they usually focus on Defense and have higher def than atk stats. They also draw the most aggro
3 – Destruction – These are a balanced mix of HP/Def/ATK – replicating the “bruiser” archetype. They’re your off-tanks that can deal a lot of damage as well
2 – Harmony, Nihility, Abundance – Low taunt rank, these are your supports and your healers.
1 – The Hunt, Erudition – These are your main damage dealers, with The Hunt being focused on single targets and Erudition being focused on AOE, sort of mimicking assassins and mages from most fantasy-based games.
Positioning
Positioning your team according to their taunt levels is imperative for having a good team because of one simple mechanic: Enemy AOE.
If you position your highest taunt unit at one of the edges, say on the first slot available – the enemy will usually target that unit and if they use an AOE attack, it’s only going to hit the tank and the unit next to it. But if you positioned your tank in the middle, then it’s going to hit two units.
No matter where you put your tank – your preservation or destruction unit – you’re going to want to put the others in a descending order based on their taunt levels, meaning that if we use 1 – 4 slots as an example, here’s what it would look like
1 – Preservation
2 – Destruction
3 – Harmony/Nihility/Abundance
4 – The Hunt/Erudition
You can obviously mix and match these and if you feel like you don’t need two tanky units, you can set them up differently, but that’s generally how you should go about it.
Conclusion
And that’s what covers the basics of Team Building for Beginners! Ignoring Team Building entirely thanks to whaling and using shop game items is viable, of course – but if you don’t want to spend money and you’re a beginner, you’d do well to adhere to the above guidelines and position your team properly while covering all elemental and role needs as well!
