Discovering the Stellar Strengths: Unveiling Honkai's Star Rail Support Heroes (Part 1)

Honkai: Star Rail ventures into the familiar territory of turn-based gameplay. Among its array of characters, supports play a pivotal role, often determining victory or defeat.

In today's discussion with Mytour, delve into the realm of Honkai: Star Rail's support characters. Explore their functionalities, compare their prowess, and unearth the ultimate support champion worth pursuing.

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Damage-Boosting Support

• Included: Asta, Tingyun, Bronya, Yukong, Fu Xuan
• Commonly Known Role: Buffer

The buffer role is favored by many players for their ability to enhance output-related stats such as attack, critical damage, critical rate, or even HP increase.

Among buffer characters, Fu Xuan follows the Qlipoth destiny - Protector and can boost the team's critical rate by 12%, increase allies' HP limit by 6% of Fu Xuan's HP. 4/5 characters fall under Xipe's Harmony destiny; players are likely familiar with names like Bronya, Yukong, or Tingyun, as this trio frequently appears in Mytour's team-building guides.

For Bronya, the Belobog archetype serves as a turn booster, output damage enhancer, critical damage dealer, and attacker; she can even provide healing akin to a healer's role. Hence, players should aim to acquire at least Bronya's soul rank 0 by obtaining her after spinning the regular banner 300 times.

Two foxy ladies, Yukong and Tingyun, are the 4-star buffers worth noting in Honkai: Star Rail. Tingyun offers straightforward gameplay, handling the dual roles of damage enhancement and attack. Equipping her is budget-friendly, requiring just the Xianzhou Eternal set paired with Wheatgrass Blades.

Yukong, Tingyun's companion, excels in buffing the highest damage stats currently available. However, players must endure the challenge of adjusting pace and utilizing the team's skills effectively.

While the aforementioned characters specialize in damage, Asta can buff 50 speed, not to mention a maximum of 70% attack boost based on the recipient's ATK stat from the Energy Convergence effect. This is without considering various additional stats if the team includes Fire-element characters. Due to such specialized attributes, Asta is selective with team compositions, which might include Jing Yuan hypercarry or mono-Fire setups.

Thus, support characters specializing in damage augmentation vary in strength depending on the player's lineup. For speed emphasis, players should opt for Asta or Bronya; for pure damage, Yukong and Tingyun are viable choices, while a safer approach could involve selecting Fu Xuan.

Health Restoration & Shielding Support

• Included: Wealthy and Guardian characters
• Commonly Known Role: Healer (Wealthy) & Shielder (Guardian)

In the support position specialized in health restoration and shield creation, the aeons Yaoshi and Qlipoth represent this role. This is a particularly crucial position to have in the lineup, as every team composition requires the presence of at least one shielder or healer. In VTMP, these two positions are even more emphasized since almost all the blessings of the destinies are related to healing or shielding the team.

For the healer role, Honkai: Star Rail offers players characters like: Bailu, Luocha, Natasha, and recently Lynx; additionally, for the wealthier players, March 7th could serve as a decent temporary healer. All healer characters possess self-healing abilities based on their HP and revival (except for Luocha), making their builds relatively straightforward. Simply equipping the Silent Wanderer set along with the Xianzhou Eternal set is sufficient for all 4 healer characters.

Of course, the 5-star characters Bailu and Luocha excel the most in the healer category. The key difference lies in Bailu (and 4-star characters), who require their turn or have to accumulate energy to restore a large amount of health, whereas Luocha can continuously heal but requires high ATK stats. Thus, if there are many controls, and the damage is weak to moderate, Luocha stands out as the strongest.

For the Shielder role, players have 3 characters to choose from: Fire Element Explorer (Fire main), Gepard, and March 7th. All three characters have different roles, shielding abilities, strengths, and usage methods, but they all depend on Defense stats.

Gepard is known for his role as Belobog's sentinel, capable of only creating shields through special moves, but the amount of shield he can produce is the largest in the game. For example, with a defense stat of only 2500 points, the basic shield amount that Gepard can create is 1725 (2475 with expertise), which is more than 2/3 of the current characters' health bars, and this shield amount can even be higher. Gepard also only requires 100 energy points, which means just about 3 attacks, and he will continue to activate his shield.

Moreover, Gepard can even 'die and come back to life' a total of 3-4 times in VTMP. As for March 7th, she is known for her excellent single-target shielding buff, resilience, and revival abilities akin to a Healer. 'Sis Seven' also possesses a skill that freezes enemies between turns, so if a monster attacks twice like the Wind Inviter, it will interrupt the next attack sequence. Due to this powerful skill, some players have switched to using March 7th instead of Gepard.

Fire mains are present in many player lineups due to their 'cost-effective and robust' nature. However, instead of creating shields, Fire NKP focuses on reducing damage, provoking monsters, which is its strength. The damage reduction from Fire main is truly formidable, capable of reducing more than half of the damage. Furthermore, the main's skills can all create small shields, so blessings like 'just one shield point' such as Reflection, Amber Effect, and Inequality of Annihilation (Annihilation Cancel) can fully take effect.

Therefore, the strongest shielding position in the Virtual Space Simulation will be the Fire Element Explorer. In normal gameplay or gear farming, Gepard will have a slightly better advantage due to its endurance and slightly stronger shielding compared to March 7th.

Conclusion

The support role is the most essential role in Honkai: Star Rail. Gamers from Hoyoverse often say: 'Four DPS can't make a team, but four supports can,' and this holds true even in this turn-based game. Therefore, players need to understand their playstyle and strategy to create the strongest team in the game.