Honkai: Star Rail tier list rework! - Prydwen Institute Blog (2024)

As Honkai Star Rail crosses the one-year service mark, it has collected far more characters than it originally had with many of those characters being incredibly viable in the endgame. The increase in overall power and number of characters revealed some flaws in our old tier list we aim to remedy under the reworked one.

The letter system changed to the number system

Under the letter system, we felt the closeness of character power was not well conveyed. The difference between an A-tier character and an S-tier character was largely up to the interpretation of the viewer and whatever experience they’ve had in the past with tier lists and their letter rankings. To help with this we’re changing the format from letters to numbers to better represent the closeness of the characters between the tiers. For those used to our old tiers here is how things changed:

• S+ Tier -> Tier 0
• S Tier -> Tier 1
• A Tier -> Tier 2
• B Tier -> Tier 3
• C Tier -> Tier 4
• D Tier -> Tier 5

New feature – Meta Lines

The above is a start but not good enough to fully explain the positioning of characters on the list. For this reason, we’ve also added a new feature “Meta Lines” which categorizes each section of the tier list into a power bracket. Here are the brackets:

• Apex Characters (T0 & T0.5)– characters in this bracket are the cream of the crop. They can do outrageous amount of damage, provide massive buffs (or debuffs) or keep the team alive no matter what the enemy throws at them. They simply can achieve the best, most consistent and accessible results in their best teams, allowing you to easily clear MoC and PF,
• Meta Characters (T1, T1.5, T2)– characters in this bracket make clearing MoC and PF a breeze, but compared to the Apex characters they require more work from your side. Either their team options are more restrictive, they require bigger Relic investment or they possess a notable weakness or downside. Still, they are all great and won’t disappoint you if you give them what they need to shine,
• Niche Characters (T3 & T4)– characters in this bracket are lacking in one or many fields of their role in MoC or PF. These characters still possess the ability to clear all content with the right build, endgame blessing, team or enemy line-up but have much lower play rates and success rates than Meta and Apex characters,
• The Forgotten Ones (T5)– characters in this bracket struggle. A lot. Either their kits simply don’t work in the mode or they require a ton of investment and love to be able to work. Just avoid them unless your husbando or waifu landed here and you believe in the power of love.

Half tiers

To further define the tier list and correctly represent the power level of each character in relation to each other we have added half tiers to the higher tier brackets. Under our previous system, a tier rating jump of 1 tier rating made it difficult to position characters accurately, often leading to multiple characters ending up in the same tier despite a clear power and utility difference.

New feature – Tags

Tags are another new feature that should improve the tier list.

They are split into 3 categories:Pros,Cons,andArchetypewhich represent the most defining features of a character’s kit and the current meta archetypes they fit into. Archetype tags indicate a connection between characters with that tag e.g. Acheron requires debuffs to work and Silver Wolf applies them. Here is a full list of all current tags and what they mean:

• Break– the character belongs to the Break archetype focusing on Break Effect and Break Efficiency,
• Debuff– the character belongs to the Debuff archetype applying one or many debuffs or has a kit that directly relies on them to function,
• DoT– the character belongs to the Damage-over-Time archetype specializing in applying and/or amplifying DoT effects,
• FuA– the character belongs to the Follow-up Attack archetype benefitting from, buffing or delivering powerful Follow-Up Attacks.,
• Advance– the character can manipulate the turn order by either action advancing their allies or themselves,
• Buff– the character can apply various Buffs to help their teammates,
• Delay– the character can delay enemies and hinder their actions in battle,
• Energy– the character can recover the teammates’ energy,
• SP+– the character is substantially more skill point friendly than other characters in their role.
• SP-– the character is substantially more skill point un-friendly than other characters in their role.

New Light Cone criteria

Star Rail has been out for a year now and many players have accumulated a very healthy amount of characters, but also Light Cones on their account compared to the early days of the game. Due to this, we’ve decided to relax the Light Cone restrictions on the tier list by slightly changing the criteria from only allowing exclusively absolutely free Light Cones to also including 4-star S5 gacha Light Cones (Like S5 Memories of the Past) and 5-star S1 standard banner Cones (Like Clara’s Signature).

Please note that this change does NOT include any form of battle pass Light Cones, any event limited Light Cones, or higher superimposition levels of standard Light Cones.

Some tier placements explained

Acheron

With Acheron’s release firmly in the past, she has since proven herself to be an absolute powerhouse at almost all levels of account investment thanks to her flexibility in team building, strong inherent damage increases and multipliers, and the ability to deal toughness damage to all elements. For these reasons under the new half-tier system, we feel she edges out Imibitor Lunae and Jingliu at this time.

Robin, Sparkle, and Ruan Mei

The holy trinity of Harmony with each having their own defined specialty but with the capability of being used in almost any team to great success.

After extensive testing and long long discussions, we’ve decided to place all 3 of them in the same tier for MoC and Robin and Ruan Mei slightly above Sparkle in Pure Fiction for now.

• In Memory of Chaos, these 3 characters are all absolutely at the Apex tier but with such defined specialties and varied powers our team could not decisively place 1 or 2 of them in the absolute top tier of T0 just yet. And as a result, we’ve placed them all in tier 0.5 together.
• For Pure Fiction, double-DPS teams are far more common than in MoC. That’s why we feel Robin and Ruan Mei are more valuable in this mode and we have placed them a half tier above Sparkle. Still, with many highly anticipated damage units on the horizon, we will be revisiting the trio in the future.

Feedback

You can find our tier list here and if you want to give us feedback, please leave it in the comments of this post or join our Discord. The latter option is better for us as the team is daily discussing stuff in the H: SR channels.