Honkai Star Rail - you need to know this before you start

Honkai Star Rail isn't bad at first -- and that's despite the gacha lottery involved in getting fun characters to play with. Of course, if you can't handle gacha, you probably wouldn't try Star Rail at all. No, what we're going to talk about in this post is the gameplay experience beyond the first week or so.

And it's important to know what you're getting into because it starts to get worse and worse.

Character collection

A big part of the game is collecting fun characters. They have regular "banner" events that promote new characters and signature gear (Light Cones) for those characters. Obviously they want you to spend spend spend getting your roster of waifus or husbandos.

However, you won't be able to actually have fun with many of them -- at least not for a long time -- for several reasons.

Characters can cost new player more

The newest characters on the current time-limited banner are typically related to the latest world expansion -- which, for a newer player, can be very far away. The game is still new so it's not so bad now, but months or a year later this can be significant for a newer player, especially one who isn't going to no-life the game and zoom to the end of the current story.

There are some ways to still get the necessary materials for these characters, but it will essentially cost around twice and much and resources are scarce to begin with.

Lack of resources

The main reason will be a shortage of resources. If you are a whale and you are willing to spend spend spend not just to get a character but to accelerate your resource production, this can be mitigated, but as you reach the various Ascension milestones by increasing your "Equilibrium Level", the resource cost starts increasing a lot.

Maintaining even one team of four characters will be costly enough, and if you don't diligently farm resources every day, you will start to fall behind. Then various events such as Forgotten Hall or Simulated Universe start to get harder, further reducing your ability to gather materials and upgrade. A big problem here is Equilibrium Level.

Four characters is actually not enough if you want to work on Forgotten Hall, which is a must because after the first gruelling fifteen stages, you finally unlock the version where you can get weekly rewards.

And if you along the way you get a new character you'd like to use, maybe an exciting new character from a banner event, you have to upgrade them from zero. The further along you are in Equilibrium level, the more resources you have to pour into them before they are viable for the content you are currently doing. A character isn't just their level -- appropriate gear provides vital attribute boosts to make them useful against the enemies you face.

Games like Angel Legion, and even as old as League of Angels, "solved" this early on by allowing characters to be recycled or reset and all the upgrade materials returned to the player with little or no loss. This not only let the devs control the amount of materials given out, but let them constantly promote new characters because players could try them "right away".

Equilibrium Level is a demotion

The game text simplifies it this way: "As your Equilibrium Level increases, you will obtain better rewards from Calyx, Stagnant Shadow, Cavern of Corrosion, and Echo of War. However enemies will also become stronger."

What they fail to mention is that as you Equilibrium Level increases, those rewards simply do not keep pace with the required materials to upgrade your characters. So each time your Equilibrium Level increases, you will have to work longer and harder to get back to where you were before. Every Equilibrium Level increase is in fact a demotion to more grind.

Further, the instanced modes for farming necessary upgrade materials suggest higher difficulties have better loot, but there is simply too much randomness for this to reliably be the case.

• For example, Echo of War (limited to 3 attempts per week) has purple upgrade materials and a chance of Light Cones.
• What isn't shown is the actual probability a Light Cone will drop. You can go weeks without ever seeing a single Light Cone.
• And a higher difficulty Echo of War won't necessarily get you more purple upgrade materials. For example, two out of three runs of Echo of War V got me the same amount of purple upgrade materials as every single run of Echo of War IV that I'd done in previous weeks.

Eventually -- and this can be a very long slog -- you will hit the maximum Equilibrium Level, and theoretically access to the best probabilities of reward drops. Assuming that the game won't introduce even more levels, once you are at that plateau, you can finally "finish" upgrading each character and move on to the rest of your roster because you won't be demoted again.

Will you survive the tedium until then?

Overland Combat used to be fun

Meanwhile, what are you going to do with your roster of characters? You could deliberately slow down your progress or refuse to improve your Equilibrium Level, but really that just means slowing down getting resources and possibly locking yourself out of future game expansions and events.

Are you doomed to focussing only on one team?

This was where Overland Combat used to be fun. The enemies on the world maps that spawned once per day are generally so weak that you could bring in an underlevelled, undergeared, unoptimized team and still clear the fights with auto-combat.

Maybe you have gear meant for other characters, but having levelled them, the raw stats they provided were enough to give any character wearing them some bit and survivability -- at least enough to clear overland mobs.

So overland combat was in fact a fun place to be. Not only did sweeping the map let you gather assorted resources at a steady pace (including credits, which start to be very important around Equilibrium 4+), but you could pretty much pick any four characters from your roster. Even if you didn't have a healer/Abundance character with them, you could back them up with a shielder/Preservation character and occasionally go to a Space Anchor to heal up in between fights.

You still need a solidly levelled and geared team for various farming activities like Simulated Universe or Echo of War, but you could relax and have fun with your entire roster with overland combat.

Overland Combat is no longer fun

Unfortunately, all the fun of overland combat was removed by v1.1 with the introduction of Lost Trotters. Now, overland mobs have a chance of also spawning a Lost Trotter. If you could beat the timer and defeat it before it escaped, you got extra loot.

On the surface this sounds like a fun addition. Except it isn't. It removed a lot of fun elements.

• You have no idea when you'll run into a Lost Trotter. So you need to be ready all the time. No more fun experimenting with team combinations or playing the characters you like. You need to be optimized.
• You can no longer have an under-developed team or you generally won't have enough firepower to kill the Trotter before it escapes. Some specific characters under some circumstances can kill one, but generally it'll be a team effort.
• Even with a good team, you generally had to save your use of Ultimates for a fight involving Lost Trotters so you can burn it down quickly.
• You generally can't use auto-combat because the script does not prioritize the Lost Trotter, and the distributed damage allows it to survive long enough to escape.

Alternatively, you can see these Lost Trotters and bonuses and just ignore them. Watch them escape and experience over and over again feelings of frustration, defeat, loss, and failure. Enjoy your overland combat.

Damage is always the focus

The Lost Trotters expand on the disappointing trend of focussing on massive damage quickly. Existing game systems already have this -- where you need to finish fights by a number of turns -- such as Forgotten Hall, An Eye for an Eye, and the time-limited rewards in Boulder Town Super League. Even some story boss fights like the Abundant Ebon Deer, which can repeatedly summon adds almost as soon as they are defeated, put pressure on building a dps team.

This means that your party composition will generally be damage focussed, which in turn means many characters are "not useful", five-star or not. The hardest challenges are all time limited so your team needs to output damage fast. And besides, faster clears mean less damage taken, less damage you have to deal with.

In some cases, you can go in when you are overlevelled (e.g., Forgotten Hall, where the enemy is not scaled to your Equilibrium Level), but that is hardly satisfying and in any case will only go so far. Once you are at the maximum possible level, that tactic will no longer be viable, and you are stuck again.

Previously you could still pick up any character or team you wanted and have fun with them at least during overland combat, but is no longer possible. Unless you like feeling like an impotent loser every time a Lost Trotter escapes.

You need two healers but you only get one

Probably one of the biggest oversights (or working as intended?) is Forgotten Hall. At some point, you will need two teams, and on top of that you will need to clear the stages under time pressure. But you get only one Healer (Natasha) for certain. Until Luocha shows up late in v1.1, there is no other healer option than Bailu, and due to the nature of gacha, there is only one guaranteed way of acquiring her -- 300 pulls on the Standard Warp.

The initial Forgotten Hall players have access to has one-time rewards only, so it doesn't seem like there's a big rush to clear it. But after you clear all stages, Memory of Chaos unlocks, and that has recurring rewards that reset "periodically" (approximately every two weeks?), including Stellar Jade (important for buying Warps). And Memory of Chaos is really rough without two healers, and you don't just need to survive the stages, you need at least 3 stars to get any rewards at all.

For most people, not having two healers means progress in Forgotten Hall will be stuck for a long time -- until they can overpower the challenges with overlevelled and overgeared characters, or they get lucky on a Warp pull. Although it's possible to clear all basic stages of Forgotten Hall with only free-to-play characters and good Relics -- Which brings up another deeply unsatisfying experience in Star Rail (and it's predecessor, Genshin Impact): Luck.

Luck is more important than skill - Relic lottery

Of course luck is a big feature in selling the gacha lottery, but luck also features significantly in gearing and getting useful Relics. You can get a gold-rarity Relic, but if it's got the "wrong" stats, it's basically useless.

Even if you have Self-Modeling Resin (a very, very, rare item that is basically only obtained during events) to control what Main Stat your artifact has, you are sacrificing 10 gold-rarity Relics to do so, and when you upgrade the Relic, the secondary stats might turn out to be rubbish.

Maybe more than the gacha lottery, the Relic lottery is probably the most depressing system in Star Rail. And even more when you read about the exploits of others who have gotten lucky with their Relics. Having good Relics -- assuming you have the resources to produce and upgrade them for your team -- contributes greatly to your success in the game, more so than your "skill", especially in turn-based combat.

Here is an example of what happened when I tried to find useful pieces for my characters. I was looking for relics at the highest difficulty, which meant the highest chance of gold-rarity Relics. The only really useful pieces are for the Chest and Feet, because they have randomized main attributes. A "Useful" piece of Chest or Feet is gold-rarity and with the correct main attribute.

• Number of runs: 10
• Total number of gold Relics - 20
• Total number of gold Relics of the correct Relic set - 6
• Total number of gold Relics with randomized main attributes - 3
• Total number of Useful gold Relics - 1

Of course random results can give lousy distributions. But consider this:

• For each character, there are four Relic slots that have Randomized main attributes
• Each team in Star Rail is four characters
• Forgotten Hall in Star Rail requires two teams (plus some extras, realistically, because the elemental alignment of characters matter)
  

So to outfit 8 characters, how many runs will I need?

And what about new and exciting characters I pull from banners? What about the rest of my roster? Collecting characters is fun but when will I actually get to play them?

Luck is more important than skill - Simulated Universe

Another recurring circumstance in which luck is more important than skill is Simulated Universe. The Blessings you get -- which are entirely determined randomly (i.e. were you lucky?) -- can absolutely determine whether you clear the final boss or not.

While this might seem to randomize the experience every time and theoretically make every run feel different, the truth is most people don't even watch the fights and put them on auto-combat while they go get a coffee. When they do come back, they are frustrated by the lack of Blessings they are hoping for.

Simulated Universe is basically a game mode that tells the player they are not important, that factors out of their control are more important than their active presence.

The fun doesn't start until the end

So really, the "fun" doesn't really start until you have finally reached the highest Equilibrium level, and can start farming materials at the best possible probability distribution (i.e. chances). If you have survived the steadily increasing grind through the intervening Equilibrium levels, you are now basically faced with even more grind. And believe it or not, that's another strike against Star Rail. (Yup, the bad news isn't over yet).

Boring daily grind

The only really fun things about your dailies are the Daily Missions. Each basically tells a tiny story or portion of a longer story, and you are rather unlikely to see the same one twice. So at least there's some variance and surprise to your day. Because the rest will be the same repeated instanced content you've seen multiple times every week if not every day.

And worse, the same fights play out in two equally tedious ways:

• You can clear it with auto-combat. So you are just bored waiting for an end to same fight you've seen literally hundreds of times.
• This is particularly bad with Simulated Universe where the Elites take a long time and the final three-stage Boss takes at least three times as long as an Elite.
• You cannot clear it with auto-combat. So you slog through a long instance until you get to the part where you have to turn off auto-combat and fight manually. Hoping that you can win.
• This is especially depressing with Simulated Universe since this happens mostly at the final boss Stage 2 or 3, and just getting to that eats up a lot of time watching boring auto-combat and hoping for good Blessings along the way.

Basically it's like watching the exact same movie over and over again. How many times can you handle it?

What might help is in fact a "blitz" mode -- Instant combat resolution without having to actually watch the combat play out. However if the devs put that into Star Rail, that would be admitting that most of the fights are boring, repetitive grind. However, I feel this would actually still be a good thing. Players can focus their precious time on actual manual combat in the hardest challenges -- instead of wasting their time waiting for long boring fights to be over.

Your investment is not guaranteed

Of course just because Honkai Star Rail is a free-to-play game doesn't mean you should never spend any money on it. To a great extent it's only fair, and the overall production value of Honkai Star Rail is excellent.

However your investment is not really guaranteed. Unlike single player games, you cannot spend a flat amount and be guaranteed a complete game experience. For example, if a new character banner event arrives, you are only guaranteed a single copy of the character at 180 Warp pulls. If you get it any sooner, it is literally luck. 0.6% each time, and 50% at the first 90 pull milestone. You can easily end up spending multiples more on Star Rail than any AAA title single player game, and have only a fraction of your gameplay affected.

Gacha games like Honkai Star Rail are their own type of video game for a special demographic that sees value in the possibly enormous sums spent in gambles. If you are not in that demographic, you can expect various levels of frustration and envy at what others can achieve with sheer luck.

Play the game, don't let the game play you

Now that you've seen what's to come, make a careful decision about whether you want to commit to playing Star Rail, and how.

Systems like the Relic lottery are really the game playing you. As is any kind of gambling, in a video game or otherwise.