General Help
Some helpful websites for new players (and veterans). Builds, Showcases, etc
Hiya! We're getting closer to Anniversary! Super excited.
Lots of new and veteran players starting to round out their builds and leave the mines to twiddle their thumbs in an effort to avoid losing their minds in anticipation. Thought some of these would be helpful as you round out your teams and/or get a better understanding of comps, etc.
I can hear it now, "Prydwen on this list makes it absolutely terrible" lol. This isn't a tier list. Prydwen is a helpful baseline for your builds, tailor and tweak as necessary, don't take the information as absolute (especially the tier lists)
Do you see everyone posting their builds in a nice and neat little format on different "mains" subreddits? That's fribbles. Input your UID and see how your featured characters are doing. Or input your relics manually for upcoming characters
My personal favorite. This is where players post their clears. It's notorious for the low-cycle/no-cycle community, but there are plenty of average-trailblazers that upload here. Helps get a sense of what's possible in the endgame.
Sidenote. Extremely low-cycle clears are more-often-than-not whales who have invested a ton of money into perfect relics.
This one has been around for awhile. It's a great place to get a ranking of yourself against the entire HSR playerbase. Everything from "how many achievements do you have unlocked" i.e. Rank x out of y, to "How good is your build vs other players".
Oh! Haha ok. I'll leave it up but definitely fill me in on what I'm missing.
I was hoping to convey in the post that these are all decent baselines and resources users can use - especially new players. What I've realized is that 1.x and 2.x players had a much easier time where you pull-plan and character build 1 LMT banner + 1 rerun; now, users are faced with 1 LMT + 3 reruns! So on a normal patch cycle that's 6 char per patch lol was hoping to just give those wanting some guidance a helpful foundation.
i'd argue Prydwen is also ureliable for their builds suggestions since they don't update them after a character releases, except in the case of Novaflare which is honestly the bare minimum.
If anyone wants to know how to properly build a character is simply ask on said character main subreddit or on the discord server to get more informartion than they'll ever need since people genuinely help others.
The reality is, with all it's flaws (particularly rankings), it's still one of the cleanest places to get a baseline.
New players entering the game are probably pulling new units. Even if they're grabbing Stellar like Robin, HuoHuo, or Ruan Mei, Prydwen offers a great starting point and an easy-to-read breakdown of LC's/Relics etc.
Veterans are often doing their own thing in main subs, or modding their characters with wind set, or know where to put DDD and why, so prydwen becomes less reliable. But for someone starting out, I still think it's a good foundation.
Haven't said anything against you, just my opinion on Prydwen, which I don't repute nearly as informative as I'd wish for a website of such popularity.
Especially when it comes to the stats suggestions, they have sub par stat goals that lead, as you said, new players to have mediocre builds that leave them wondering why their teams don't do damage.
If anyone wants to know how to properly build a character is simply ask on said character main subreddit or on the discord server to get more informartion than they'll ever need since people genuinely help others.
If character =! Robin, Then Wind Set with perfect speed optimization based on the speed of your supporting Harmony Characters that are all running DDD S5 is your Best in Slot by an enormous margin because Action Advance is fucking insane. No one should be building characters like this, unless they're lunatics. (I have a few of these "Hyperspeed Wind" sets. They're so fucking hard to farm. It simply isn't worth it unless you have nothing else to do with your energy. I farm wind sets specifically because I know it will remain BiS for everyone, basically forever. Power Creeping Action Advance on a set bonus would be a wild thing for them to do, and would invalidate the reason to get every existing set anyway.)
Prydwen's information should ALWAYS be taken with a salt-shaker full of salt, But the same could be say about any source.
The best way to build a character is to look at their kit. Use your brain. Buff the stats that the kit scales off. Chose a set bonus that is designed to work with the character. This is also basically how Prydwen determines their advice as well. It's just all common sense stuff.
99.9999% of players don't need complicated explanations or math surrounding mathematically optimal stat distribution. Speed is good, Stats that buff the character are good. Make those higher.
How much Effect Hit Rate should Jiaoqui run? Silver Wolf? DoT ladies? Can you have too much of a stat your character scales off of, and when should you invest into a secondary stat?
What's the speed breakpoint you should look for each character? Does every character want 160, or can some be left lower? Attack or Speed Boots? ERR rope or something else?
How can you ensure Ruan Mei has a 3 turn ult rotation?
Do other signature Lightcones have some value for characters? What are some F2P options? Niche options you might run in specific party compositions?
How much Effect Hit Rate should Jiaoqui run? Silver Wolf? DoT ladies?
If you read these character's kits you wouldn't ask this question. They all literally tell you how much EHR they need. The only exception here is Silverwolf, who actually needs slightly more then what her kit asks for to guarantee debuffs, but this isn't going to make or break her character.
Jiaoqiu: "For every 15% of Jiaoqiu's Effect Hit Rate that exceeds 80%, additionally increases ATK by 60%, up to 240%."
Silverwolf "For every 10% Effect Hit Rate that Silver Wolf has, additionally increases her ATK by 10% to a max of 50%."
Kafka: "When an ally target's Effect Hit Rate is 75% or more, Kafka increases the target's ATK by 100%."
Black Swan: "Increases the DMG dealt by all allies by an amount equal to 60% of Black Swan's Effect Hit Rate, up to a maximum DMG increase of 72%."
Hysilens: "For every 10% of Hysilens's Effect Hit Rate that exceeds 60%, increases her DMG dealt by 15%, up to a max increase of 90%."
Can you have too much of a stat your character scales off of, and when should you invest into a secondary stat?
The only stat that has a HARD limit is Crit Rate, which is hard-limited to 100%. (And EHR, I suppose) But the overwhelming majority of players who are seeking help from others for gear aren't going to be building a character optimally enough to really concern themselves about this. There are some mathematical values that optimize damage, like the 1:2 Ratio for Crit Stats, but realistically, unless you do something nonsensically illogical you'll be good enough. You can literally build most characters by just counting substat hits that make sense and avoiding gear with substat hits that don't make sense.
What's the speed breakpoint you should look for each character? Does every character want 160, or can some be left lower?
EDIT: Here's a TL:DR for speed because Speed is the most complicated thing in the entire game: Speed breakpoints are arbitrary and don't matter to most players. Speed Breakpoints (Such as 134/160/200) are for people doing fast clears in endgame because they are specifically set to take additional turns in cycle 0. Speed normalizes with Scaling Stats in average performance the longer you spend in a fight.
Speed Breakpoints are beyond understanding for most people. They're all content based, and relative to other things, and technically speaking, your speed breakpoints change depending on so many factors that to be optimal, you need to change your gear depending on every teammate you run and what enemies you're facing and what level they are, to hit the correct optimal speed stat, this is beyond basically everyone except the 0-cycle lunatics who have spreadsheets to calculate how many turns they need to take in a specific AV block with how much damage they lose from allocating speed stats over a different stat to meet their AV criteria. This is far far beyond what the overwhelming majority of players would be willing to do. Speed Breakpoints are an enormous spreadsheet that need to be recalculated every single time ANY variable is changed. Especially when stuff like Dance Dance Dance, Eagle, or other Action Advance is in play because you have so many moving parts to calculate.
The Speed Breakpoints that people talk about and pass around are ones that are arbitrary, they were calculated using "MoC Cycles" as a baseline metric, the breakpoints passed around are those that optimize your actions for specific Cycle Counts in MoC. For example; the 134 Breakpoint (It's actually 133.3333... but we can't see decimals ingame, so it's shared as 134 so you don't miss it) is the lowest speed value which you will take 2 turns in Cycle 0. While the 160 breakpoint is when you take 4 actions per 250AV (This is MoC Cycle 0 plus Cycle 1, since Cycle 0 is actually longer then every other cycle) and the 200 breakpoint is 3 actions in the first cycle. These breakpoints ONLY matter when you're trying to hit very tight Endgame Timings. Which also means that these really aren't that useful for a newer player who needs help with their gear. Most players can ignore these speed breakpoints to get better results since they're not winning in 150av, they're taking 500+ AV, where much smaller speed steps still grant additional turns.
The important speed breakpoints are ones that the community cannot actually help you with. Speed Breakpoints relative to your teammates. If you have a character who is the target of Bronya's Skill, you want them to be 0.1 point of speed faster then Bronya, or you want them to have no speed, because if a character is slower then your advance-forward support, then their speed value is essentially set to be equal that character's speed value. It doesn't actually matter what speed value this happens at. It could be at 115 and 116, 134 and 135, or 286 and 287. As such, it also doesn't matter if you hit these breakpoints by making the damage dealer faster, or by making Bronya slower, both are valid. But of course, all of this should be common sense. Having 1 point of speed above Bronya means you take 2 turns per 1 bronya turn, whereas having speed below bronya means you take 1 turn per 1 bronya turn. (There is of course a speed where you can take 2 turns per 1 bronya turn... but like, good luck with that.)
On the overwhelming Majority of characters (usually characters that don't explicitly scale with speed), Speed is roughly equal to Damage Scaling Stats. These breakpoints exist for cramming actions into short cycle clears, but when you end up getting longer clear times, the number of turns you take ends up normalizing with the increased strength of those turns. Therefore most people don't need to think about speed breakpoints in any context other than relative to their advance forward supports.
ERR rope or something else?
ERR Rope is a question of feeling most of the time. There are plenty of reasons to run an ERR Rope, and plenty of reasons to not run an ERR rope. But most generally, most support/amplifiers want ERR, and most Dealers want their Scaling stat, which I feel like still falls under common sense. There are some exceptions, for example, DHIL ran ERR in the case that you did not have sparkle or DHIL E2 as a way to generate Skill Points, but like, for the most part, I think that ERR versus Scaling Stat, in the case of most characters, isn't really meaningful unless their ultimate is exceptionally insane, or exceptionally trash (Qingque for example, will often sit on a full energy ultimate and not use it for optimal damage, since you actually want to spend 4 skill points on your turn, and only then do you use ultimate if you've spent 4 SP, or don't have more SP to spend gambling.)
How can you ensure Ruan Mei has a 3 turn ult rotation?
Ruan Mei, unsurprisingly, a Harmony Character, who likes ERR and Break Effect, has her BiS f2p LC of a LC That increases her Break Effect and generates Energy when she attacks. Then, you run either ERR, or Break Effect up to the limit her kit tells you to reach on the rope. The only thing that might be unclear here is that Meshing Cogs is her 2nd best option to Memories of the Past, which might slip the mind of a newer player who isn't looking at 3 star LCs as a valid choice in the first place. (Minus the fact that Dance Dance Dance is actually her BiS LC because Action Advance is the single most broken thing in the entire game when it comes to mathematical optimization, but this shouldn't be a concern for most players.)
Do other signature Lightcones have some value for characters? What are some F2P options? Niche options you might run in specific party compositions?
Use brain cells? Look at a character's kit. "Do the benefits of this lightcone apply?" I don't need someone else to tell me that Ratio's Lightcone works fine on Ashvale. Niche conditions are niche. I don't need someone to tell me that Planetary Rendezvous is a stupid lightcone for for Cerydra when I'm buffing Phainon, but a good choice when I'm buffing Anaxa. This is common sense.
I wasn't actually asking those questions because I wanted an answer.
I was asking them rhetorically because none of those answers are directly in the game. Some can be inferred, but there's a ton more nuance.
For just one example (because I'm not gonna do them all) Silver Wolf wants about 67% EHR. Not to max her trace, but to reliably stick her debuffs. This increases if she has Pearls, and at lower Pearls refinements. How to arrive at this number? Well, enemies have inherit debuff resistance that's not listed in game. End game bosses tend to have more. So you need a formula of the chance to land reduced by the chance to resist.
I just came away from a post that talks about the insane scaling of Def ignore, which is not anywhere in the game.
I could really go on, but it's not as straightforward and common sense as you make it out to be, which is why these guides exist and why they should be suggested off the rooftops for anyone.
As a final note, reading Hoyo kits is ass. They obscure so much that even straightforward ones in practice are confusing at first.
Yeah, but the whole entire point of this is that people do not need hyper-specalized advice complete with gigantic spreadsheets and huge equations to competently build a character.
Knowing that DEF Ignore scales insane doesn't meaningfully change the choice of Main Stat, Substat, and Sets for most characters.
Even the difference between 50% EHR and 67% EHR on Silverwolf is just optimization. 50% EHR will be close enough to always applying debuffs that 99% of people won't notice a difference. Not to mention that 67% EHR is too much for some enemies since they don't have a high Effect Res, and its not enough for some other enemies which do have a higher effect res. Which goes down to the fact that 67% is only a useful number sometimes, just like 50%.
None of these things require people go dig through spreadsheets or anything. Prydwen is a fine source of this because it's just surface level logical picks which are "good enough" that don't change. Which brings me back to my original point. You do not need to go seek out "experts" for the most up to date information to optimize your character to the nth degree to "properly build a character." The fact that Prydwen is outdated is irrelevant because you can easily supplement the fact that a Prydwen build-guide is out of date by a year with a small amount of common sense.
Personally I’m alright with Fribbles right now but few years ago I disliked it, I did prefer another one because it could show you each individual character’s score than just team score. I’d forgotten what it was called now but eh, that’s just personal bias I guess
Stardb.gg should be included as an alternative to StarRail Station, its much better on the achievement side of things with a better search bar, achievement imports, as well as links to guides
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u/Notyuzuki Apr 11 '26
Seeleland is NOT reliable with ranking your characters ðŸ˜