Honkai: Star Rail is another gacha game from the people that brought you Genshin Impact. Starting any gacha game is always going to be a struggle to understand, seeing as how there can be a lot of gameplay mechanics that can make things super confusing. But the great thing about jumping into Star Rail now is that you will be playing a newly released game.
With that said, you will need to have a beginner’s guide to help you navigate the world of Honkai: Star Rail. If you need such a thing, then look no further than here.
Rerolling
When you start the game, you will be a very long tutorial that can take up to a maximum time of 2 hours. The tutorial shows you how to play the game and what not, before letting you do a summon. When you do summon, you will to at least get a 5-star character. But what happens if you don’t? You reroll.
Reroll is the act of starting all over again from the very beginning when you get a bad pull. So, if you get a bad pull on your first summon, then you will most likely want to reroll. Here’s an article about what your Reroll Priorities should be, but the bottom line is that you will want to have at least one 5-star character. Anything less than that demands a reroll.
But ask yourself: do you want to play through another two hours’ worth of tutorial just because you failed in getting a good 5-star character? That choice is entirely up to you, but remember that having a good first summon will help a long way.
Combat
Honkai: Star Rail’s gameplay is vastly different from Genshin Impact. For starters, the combat is turn based now, similar to old Final Fantasy games. Your characters will essentially take turns attacking enemies, and the enemies will take turns attacking you. It’s not fast or riveting compared to Genshin Impact, but it is still fun.
Paths
However, there are a couple of things that you should be aware of when playing. First off, there are class types, but they go under name of Paths. There are seven Paths in total, and each Path all specialize in one thing.
Check out this table to see what the different Paths do:
| Paths | |
| Hunt | High single target damage |
| Erudition | High AoE damage |
| Destruction | A balanced mix of single target damage and AoE damage |
| Harmony | Buffs allies to do more damage |
| Nihility | Debuffs enemies by either giving them negative statuses or lowering their stats |
| Abundance | Healers that can remove debuffs from allies or revive them |
| Preservation | Grants shields to allies and can focus all aggro on them |
Look at each character and their Paths to determine their role. This will help you in the formation of the teams you will be using when you play through the game. The ideal team formations usually compose of two DPS characters, one tank character, and one healer. However, you can always mix and match the team to suit your playstyle more.
Turn Order & Break Bar
You should also watch out for two things when you are in a fight: Turn Order and Break Bar. Starting with Turn Order, that is the list icons on the top left corner of your screen (illustrated on the image below). There, you can find out who will be going next, whether it’s you or the enemy.
The other thing you should look after is Break Bar. This is the white bar on top of the red health bar on enemies. The reason why this is important is because depleting the Break Bar will stun an enemy. The stunned enemy will be suspectable to double the damage, so always aim to deplete the Break Bar.
You can learn more about the combat of Star Rail by checking out our Combat Guide.
Character Progression
No matter how good you may understand the combat of Star Rail, it won’t matter if all of your characters are all weak and under leveled. It is important to make your characters stronger as you progress through the story of Honkai: Star Rail. There are four ways to make your characters become stronger in Honkai: Star Rail: leveling up characters, Traces, Eidolons, and Light Cones.
XP Leveling
The process of leveling up characters is actually quite easy and similar to Genshin Impact. You can either fight enemies and defeat them to earn XP, or you can use XP books that you have collected from the world.
The XP books all vary in the amount of XP they give. Here are the three XP books you can find:
- Travel Encounters – Grants 1,000 XP
- Adventure Log – Grants 5,000 XP
- Traveler’s Guide – Grants 20,000 XP
Invest your XP books into characters you want to use first. However, I do advise saving some for other characters you plan on using in the future. Don’t splurge all of your XP books on characters that you don’t see yourself using a lot. XP books are relatively rare, and the more XP they give, the rarer they are.
However, you will find yourself not able to continue investing XP books on one character. That’s because you need to ascend your character first before anything else. There is another reason why your character won’t level up past a certain point, but that will be explained later.
Traces
Moving on to Traces, this is essentially your skill tree. It’s the same as Talents on Genshin Impact. The image above will show you what the menu for Traces looks like. Each skill in Traces can be unlocked as you level up more. There are also some skills that you can upgrade multiple times to increase their effectiveness.
Just like with XP books, I do not advise you to splurge all of your materials just because you have them. Only get the skills you need for now. This allows you time to experiment with the skill you unlocked and see if it can fit into your playstyle.
Eidolons
For Eidolons, these are passive skills that you can unlock by using the materials you gain when you get a duplicate character. Eidolons are considered to be the most powerful upgrades you can get for a character, so being able to unlock them can boost your characters performance in battle.
The process of getting Eidolon is very heavy on wallet (if you spend money on the game), as you need to use the games premium currency in order to do summons. Even then, you have a small chance to get the character you want to get more Eidolons. For F2P players, it takes time as you need to invest in the game to get more premium currency.
Light Cones
Lastly, Light Cones. They work similar to weapons in Genshin Impact, in which they increase stats of characters. However, they require something specific in order to function properly. Each Light Cone will have a symbol on the bottom left of the image. That symbol will be one of the seven Paths in the game.
For example, Memories of the Past is a Light Cone that features The Harmony Path. With that information in mind, you will then equip this Light Cone on a character within the same Path. You can technically equip this on other characters with different Paths, but the effects of the Light Cone will not work, making it useless.
You can learn more about character progression by checking out our Character Progression Guide.
Raise Your Trailblazer Level
Your Trailblazer level is very important. It determines all of the things you can do in the game, and how far your characters can level up to. Not only that, but the higher your Trailblazer level is, the more content is unlocked in Star Rail.
I mentioned earlier that there is another reason that you won’t be able to raise your character level past a certain point, and it is due to your Trailblazer level. If your Trailblazer level is level 3, then you can only level up characters until level 3. The game effectively stops you from making your characters too powerful. It’s not a good feature to have, as it restricts the players freedom.
With that in mind, do your best to raise your Trailblazer level as fast as you can. Do your Dailies and Weeklies, complete main and side quests as all of these can help you progress your Trailblazer level.
And that’s all for the beginner’s guide for Honkai: Star Rail. What are other things you can add to help other starting players for the game? Comment down below.
READ NEXT: Honkai Star Rail Guide for Genshin Players
