In Honkai: Star Rail, the value of your account is the sum of the characters you’ve pulled for it. Certain characters are absolute game-changers that all accounts should have, so here are the best ten characters you can pull in Honkai: Star Rail.
Top 10 Strongest Characters to pull in Honkai: Star Rail
The characters mentioned here are based on the overall value they have to your account but are in no particular order. These characters allow you to progress difficult content, such as the Memory of Chaos, much more easily, and give you a cozy level of role comfort.
Acheron
As far as DPS characters go, Acheron is the gold standard for both F2P and paid players alike. Her damage is simply on another level even when compared to big hitters like Inhibitor Luaue and Jingliu, even at a lower investment. At E0, Acheron favors top-tier Nihility supports like Pela and Silverwolf, as both enable her to deal her maximum damage potential while simultaneously providing her with a constant supply of debuff applications for her Ultimate. Her only real caveat is her reliance on these supports, which does limit her team comps a bit.
For spending players, Acheron’s Eidolons are all massive power gains, especially E2, removing the need for her to have two Nihility supports on her team, in favor of just one. This allows you to slot in a Harmony support like Sparkle, dramatically boosting her damage potential. At E6, Acheron becomes a universal DPS, able to damage the Break bar of any enemy in the game with any of her attacks. Acheron is a meta unit and will likely continue to be far into the future.
Sparkle
The devious Masked Fool has charmed most of the playerbase with her crude dark comedy and “harmless” appearance. She is also an absolute powerhouse when it comes to providing Harmony support to her teams. Sparkle is extremely powerful at E0, and really does not require Eidolons to excel, making her a fantastic pick-up for any players looking for a game-changing character.
Sparkle is rightfully desired because of her ability to Advanced Forward a teammate using her Skill and generate Skill Points using her Ultimate. Sparkle’s 50% Advanced Forward means that she effectively transfers her own SPD (Speed) stat onto the teammate she targets with her Skill. With this, you can run Sparkle with a slow main DPS, as this allows you to focus purely on building DPS on that character. Her Ultimate provides a teamwide damage buff while also restoring Skill Points to the degree of allowing a team that normally isn’t Skill Point friendly to become so. If you get the opportunity, consider picking up Sparkle for your account. You won’t regret it.
Fu Xuan
No matter how powerful your DPS are, or how much support you have, if you cannot stay alive in a fight, then nothing else matters. Enter Fu Xuan: the ultimate comfort pick for literally any team in Honkai: Star Rail. She provides an incredibly cozy teamwide damage reduction buff, allowing you to run teams without the need of a healer. She also provides a very nice 10% CRIT chance buff while this reduction is active.
She is a real game changer, especially for players who are newer to the game and don’t have access to other Preservation or Abundance units. This is a simple explanation, but that is because what Fu Xuan provides is simple, yet just as potent as anything else on this list.
Ruan Mei
While not the first character designed to actively interact with the Break mechanic in Honkai: Star Rail, she is the premium support to do so. Ruan Mei does a few things that place her on this list. The first, and arguably most important, is that she is one of two supports that provide a significant teamwide buff without the need for external factors (such as Energy, team comp limitations, etc…). This makes her ideal for team comps that have two DPS characters on them, such as the Topaz/Dr. Ratio setup. Already this alone places her on the list, but there’s more to this package.
Secondly, Ruan Mei greatly empowers the effects of the Break mechanic, influencing it so that you’d want to focus on ensuring her teammates can Break the enemies they are fighting. An enemy broken in Ruan Mei’s presence takes a unique instance of extra damage from her, which can pack a punch. When they are broken while affected by Ruan Mei’s Ultimate, an enemy’s recovery from a Break is delayed, allowing them to stay broken longer. If you’re running two DPS in your team, you need Ruan Mei.
Robin
Robin is the second character in Honkai: Star Rail that can provide a significant teamwide damage buff with no strings attached. In many ways, Robin is a lot like Ruan Mei, and there is a fair bit of overlap between them when it comes to team comps. However, where Ruan Mei focuses on enhancing the Break effect, Robin prioritizes Follow-up attacks, effectively becoming any Follow-up attack team’s best-in-slot Harmony support.
Robin’s Ultimate is the real star of the show though, as the more your team attacks during its effect, the more overall damage Robin will provide via her own separate instances of damage. It is for this reason that Follow-up teams value Robin much more than Ruan Mei.
Huohuo
HuoHuo is the unrivaled champion of Abundance and healing in Honkai: Star Rail, making her already ideal for any account in need of such services. However, what places Huohuo on this list is her incredible passive ability to cleanse debuffs. As long as Huohuo’s Skill is active, your teammates are almost entirely immune to the effects of debuffs. When a teammate with a debuff has their turn, the debuffs are immediately cleansed without them taking effect. This completely trivializes fights that rely on debuffs to make it difficult, such as the Kafka boss encounter.
This cleansing ability is also unrivaled and is reason alone to pick up Huohuo, but she also comes with the extra nice perk of being able to generate Energy for her team via her Ultimate. While this isn’t as big a deal when compared to her healing and cleansing, it only adds value to your account should you decide to pick her up, which you should. She doesn’t need any Eidolons to do what I mentioned above.
Kafka
Kafka is one of those characters that seems overrated when compared to the others on this list. Her damage alone is rather lackluster, and you’d likely not be impressed with anything else she offers on the surface. However, Kafka is way more valuable than what is obvious due to her ability to detonate Damage Over Time (DoT) effects. Why is this important? DoT effects can normally only activate on the enemy’s turn. However, Kafka can activate and amplify them using her Skill and Ultimate abilities. She is the only character in Honkai: Star Rail that can do this, making a required character for the gameplay style.
Kafka is underwhelming unless she has teammates who make active use of DoT effects. Black Swan is her best teammate, as her DoT is unique in its own right, counting as several DoT effects at the same time and stacking up to ridiculous heights if played well. Kafka is a pillar of the DoT team comp, and as long as she is the only character who can explode DoTs, she will remain the highest-value character for the comp.
Pela
Don’t let her four-star status fool you. Pela is an incredibly valuable character to have on any account because of her powerful DEF Down debuff she inflicts enemies with. Pela has the largest DEF Down debuff in the entire game and it is applied through the use of her Ultimate. She can also remove debuffs from enemies using her SKill, which is not as useful, but still valuable nonetheless.
Due to her following the Path of Nihility, Pela is one of Acheron’s best supports, able to help satisfy Acheron’s Nihility teammate quota, while also acting as a battery to help charge up Acheron’s Ultimate. The DEF Down debuff also lets Acheron hit even harder. Needlessly to say: don’t sleep on Pela.
Black Swan
If Kafka is the premium DoT detonator, then Black Swan is the premium DoT applicator in Honkai: Star Rail. Unlike all other DoTs in the game, Black Swan’s Arcana is unique in that it stacks within itself, and is always applied to all enemies in a fight. This means that Black Swan is always dealing damage to the enemy team, and there is no way for them to resist it.
What’s more, Black Swan comes with a DEF Down debuff attached to her Skill. While it is not the same caliber as Pela’s, it is significant enough for Black Swan to play the role of support/debuffer on any given team. Black Swan excels with Kafka due to her reliance on other DoT teammates to apply more DoTs, but she is also an extremely solid sub-DPS for Acheron teams due to her following the Path of Nihility, and her ability to apply a debuff every single turn without using a Skill Point. At E0, Black Swan is quite powerful, but at E2, she becomes less reliant on Nihility teammates and more reliant on enemies dying in rapid succession to stack up her Arcana DoT.
Aventurine
Aventurine is technically the most damaging sustain unit in Honkai: Star Rail thanks to his utility-stacked Follow-up attack. Though his role is to protect your team by providing constant, self-repair shields, he is capable of significant AoE (Area of Effect) damage, while sustaining your team at the same time.
Aventurine excels with Follow-up attackers the most but is perfectly viable to be slotted on any team in need of a sustain character. It is his ability to be hyper-flexible with team comps that places him on this list, and if you don’t have HuoHuo or Fu Xuan, then he is a must-pull for you.
