Honkai: Star RailHimekoBest build, teams and other guides

Himeko is a strong AoE damage dealer with access to out-of-turn follow-up attacks. She is particularly powerful against numerous weaker enemies, able to wipe these smaller foes from the field relatively easily, and her Ultimate also refunds Energy for every enemy it kills, making her very good in content with respawning enemies. She has a reliance on the team being able to Break the enemy fairly consistently to be able to launch her follow-up attack, and her single-target damage is not particularly impressive.

Himeko has typically been a rather scorned unit for her not particularly powerful kit. However, with Pure Fiction now in the game, as well as plenty of enemies who summon reinforcements as well, Himeko has had new life breathed into her.

Himeko’s Talent is the focal point of her kit. When an enemy is inflicted with Weakness Break, Himeko gains 1 point of Charge, up to a max of 3. At 3 stacks, she will immediately launch a follow-up attack on all enemies, dealing up to 140% ATK and consuming all stacks. She starts the battle with 1 stack, and she will instantly gain 3 stacks whenever an Elite or Boss is Broken.

Naturally, this puts Himeko in a position where Breaking is of the utmost importance to make full use of this Talent. The Talent itself can also accrue stacks of Charge but its Toughness damage is on the lower end at only 30 — the same as a standard Basic ATK. This also skews Himeko much more in favour of many smaller enemies as opposed to fewer tougher ones. Even though she immediately gets a follow-up attack upon an Elite or Boss getting Broken, it is challenging for Himeko to be the one to do that herself and it usually takes too long to do so, so it’s not preferred to take her in pure single-target scenarios for this reason.

Himeko’s Skill is a Blast AoE dealing up to 200% ATK to the main foe and 80% ATK to adjacent. Initially it may seem strange that an Erudition unit with a primary focus on AoE has a Skill only capable of hitting 3 targets at once, but you must remember that as a Blast AoE, the primary enemy takes more Toughness damage than they would if it was a truly AoE Skill. Even still, it limits how much coverage Himeko can provide without her Talent and again puts more emphasis on said Talent.

Her Ultimate is an AoE attack dealing up to 230% ATK to all enemies. For every enemy defeated by this Ultimate, Himeko regains 5 Energy. With an average Energy cost of 120, this Ultimate is already up fairly frequently, and any kills will further accelerate the acquisition of the next Ultimate.

As you can see, Himeko is all in on the AoE playstyle, both to her benefit and her detriment; it makes her exceptionally powerful if the content and enemy lineup favour her kit, but it makes her damn near useless if things don’t go your way. There’s not really any overlap like with some other units.

The biggest issue is the activation criteria for her follow-up. Needing enemies to be Broken in order to build up to the attack is kind of a tall ask for how little damage it ends up dealing. Worse still is that it means you have no choice but to match the Weaknesses of the enemies you’re facing — yes you should ideally be doing this anyway, but usually the only unit for whom this truly matters on a team is the primary damage dealer. For Himeko, you ideally want every single teammate to be capable of dealing Toughness damage to more quickly gain Talent stacks and be able to launch more follow-ups outside of her turn.

This causes an interesting dilemma where Himeko is stuck trying to accommodate her own kit and losing efficacy as an actual Erudition unit as a result of that. Her Skill being Blast is good for the Toughness damage, but is actually quite a bit worse as an actual AoE clearing tool, especially since you’re going in with the assumption of decimating minor foes, meaning you’re also losing out on Energy from kills you could otherwise gain. It’s a little tricky but it’s possible to account for these issues with proper team building. 

Compared to a unit like Herta, Himeko is more favorably tailored to dealing with Fire-weak foes, but Herta is arguably far more generally applicable due to Herta’s Skill being fully AoE and her Talent only needing the criteria of an enemy falling below 50% HP. Both units struggle in single-target scenarios, but without the Weakness Break restriction, it’s a lot easier to slot Herta into a team to deal with respawning adds than it is to slot Himeko, generally speaking.

Himeko’s Bonus Ability Traces are somewhat underwhelming to be frank. A2 makes it so that any of Himeko’s attacks have a 50% base chance to inflict Burn on the enemies hit for 2 turns, with the Burn itself dealing 30% ATK at the start of enemies’ turns. A4 causes her Skill to deal 20% more DMG to Burned foes, and A6 increases her CRIT Rate by 15% as long as Himeko is at or above 80% Max HP.

With the exception of the CRIT Rate, these are kinda awful, actually. A 50% base chance to burn is basically not going to happen ever against endgame enemies, even if you did absolutely turbo invest into Effect Hit Rate (which you absolutely should not). Even if it does land, it’ll be doing a laughable 30% ATK damage which is just not even worth looking at. Really the Burn is there to enable the DMG bonus on her Skill, but again with such a pitiful chance to actually Burn the enemy, the only way you’re consistently taking advantage of the A4 is if you have a teammate constantly reapplying Burn.

I should reiterate at this point that Himeko is definitely very strong when it comes to dealing AoE damage, just that it comes with certain caveats that perhaps other units don’t have. As long as you account for these caveats, you’ll have no trouble destroying AoE content.

Himeko pairs quite nicely in a sort of ‘mono-Fire’ setup involving Topaz, as they both play off of each others’ strengths and help to cover their weaknesses as well, with Topaz being an extraordinarily powerful single-target damage dealer. The comparison with Herta definitely puts Herta a step above in my opinion, but you can absolutely play them together and just watch the fireworks fly — you may think you were playing manually but if those two really get going, you may be led to question that.

What's better you can forgot about focusing on CRIT and instead use Himeko with Ruan Mei and Harmony Trailblazer, playing her as a substitute for Firefly - yes, Super Break Himeko is also a thing and it works really well against Fire-weak enemies.

As a standard 5-star character, it’s possible to get Eidolons for Himeko over time. The performance boost that Himeko gets is not particularly noteworthy, and Himeko is fully functional at E0. Each Eidolon is a small overall boost but none of them are really worth chasing specifically.

She’s good. Pure Fiction definitely gave Himeko a much-needed glow-up, but really she was just waiting for the right time. Definitely far from the worst character to lose your 50/50 to.