Honkai: Star Rail elements explained

Honkai: Star Rail is HoYoverse’s upcoming title on mobile and PC. It will release on April 26, bringing tons of new characters and more returning ones from the previous license’s title, Honkai: Impact 3D, to a new story and epic turn-based fights.

Although the game will share some common points with Genshin Impact, such as an emphasis on elements, they are different. There are a total of seven elements in Honkai, and they’re all important.

Enemies feature several elemental weaknesses that players can take advantage of. When dealing damage to enemies, players can reduce their Toughness bar. When the bar is empty, every kind of damage dealt to that enemy will be increased and “break” them, inflicting a status impairment.

Related: This Honkai: Star Rail cheat sheet makes choosing your character super easy

To get a balanced team, players need to include characters from different elements. Read on for the full list of elements, their effects, and how they can be used in Honkai.

Honkai: Star Rail elements explained

Honkai features seven elements in total. Players will likely know most of them, but others are more cryptic, such as the Quantum and Imaginary elements.

Each playable character is affiliated with one element and deals damage infused with it. They’ll see the enemy’s Toughness bar lower as they hit them with their Elemental weaknesses, and they will be inflicted with a break status when the bar gets empty. Usually, enemies have several elemental weaknesses.

The elemental damage dealt to the target in broken state doesn’t matter, what’s important is to empty the Toughness bar beforehand so they reach this state.

Here are the individual effects of every element in Honkai: Star Rail:

• Physical: applies Bleed (DoT).
• Fire: applies Burn (DoT).
• Wind: applies Wind Shear (DoT).
• Lightning: applies Shock (DoT).
• Ice: applies Frozen (DoT, stuns target).
• Quantum: applies Entanglement (DoT, delays enemy turn)
• Imaginary: applies Imprisonment (speed reduction and action delays).

Honkai characters and their elements

At release, Lightning is the most-represented element among all available characters. On the other hand, Quantum and Imaginary characters are rare, which might make those more valuable. Here is the list of every character per element:

• Physical: Clara, Natasha (free), Sushang, Trailbazer (free)
• Fire: Asta (free), Himeko, Hook, Trailblazer (free)
• Ice: Gepard, Herta (free), March 7th (free), Pela, Yanqing
• Lightning: Arlan, Bailu, Jing Yuan, Kafka, Serval (free), Tingyun
• Wind: Bronya, Dan Heng (free), Sampo
• Quantum: Qingque (free), Seele, Silver Wolf
• Imaginary: Luocha, Welt

If you’re wondering which free characters to go after, in order of priority, in Honkai, here is a detailed list.

Honkai: Star Rail is planned to release on April 25, with over 10 million preregistered players at the time of writing.