Honkai: Star RailHysilensBest build, teams and other guides

[Overview]

Hysilens is a long-awaited addition to the Damage over Time (DoT) archetype, and a powerful one at that. She creates many different DoT effects on enemies through allies attacks, and actually deals the appropriate damage types too, letting her ramp up DoT on enemies quite quickly. Her Ultimate creates a Zone that reduces enemy ATK and DEF, and will allow Hysilens to deal direct damage whenever enemies take damage from DoT effects. She is also able to Detonate DoT effects with her Ultimate. Hysilens provides the DoT archetype with numerous favoured debuffs to push damage further, and pairs excellently with Kafka to make the archetype extremely fearsome.

[Intro]

The DoT archetype has been somewhat forgotten about for quite a while now; not many situations exist where DoT is clearly ahead of other teams, and this is the first truly DoT-centric character to be released since, uh let me check my notes... Black Swan?? It truly has been an age now hasn't it.

Hysilens is here to save the archetype. I use 'save' rather loosely since really it was Kafka's recent rework that enables DoT to truly thrive again from a mechanical standpoint, but it's been missing that something special to push it into the modern space, and Hysilens is that something special.

She also takes the phrase 'let me be clear' way too literally.

[Talent]

Hysilen's Talent is her way of applying DoT effects. Whenever an ally attacks an enemy, Hysilens has a 100% base chance to inflict the enemy with one of the four main DoT types: Wind Shear, Burn, Shock, and Bleed. Priority is given to inflicting one of a different type with the goal of having all four on an enemy.

The Wind Shear, Burn, and Shock effects will deal their respective damage types (Wind, Fire, and Lightning) as a DoT effect at the start of enemies' turns, dealing up to 25% ATK, and lasting for 2 turns. The Bleed inflicted will have enemies take 20% of their Max HP as damage each turn, with a damage cap equal to 25% of Hysilens' ATK.

This functionally means that when all four DoT effects are on an enemy, Hysilens is dealing 100% ATK as damage each enemy turn. This, uh... kinda sucks. For reference, Kafka's DoT is 290% ATK, so it's not exactly 'up there' in terms of immediate DoT damage, but the Wind Shear effect can actually stack up to 5 times, meaning that the actual total DoT damage can reach 200% ATK, which is better, but will take some time to actually ramp up Wind Shear.

This is, however, just a pretext for her Ultimate's effects, so the most important part is that Hysilens is able to apply 4 separate DoT effects with great ease. Keep this in mind.

[Skill]

The Skill is pretty simple. Hysilens attacks all enemies on the field for 140% ATK, and at the same time has a 100% base chance to increase the DMG taken by all enemies by 20%, lasting for 3 turns.

An easy to access and easy to refresh Vulnerability effect is well appreciated in the DoT team, especially since it lets all the characters in the team benefit from it. Hitting all enemies on the field is also nice, since this can also speed up the DoT application from her Talent.

[Ultimate]

Now for the real juice of her kit. Hysilens will deploy a Zone that reduces enemy ATK by 15%, and also reduces enemy DEF by 25%, at the same time as dealing 200% ATK to all enemies on the field.

Inside this Zone, every time enemies take damage from a DoT effect, Hysilens will immediately deal 80% ATK as Physical DoT damage (the distinction is for effects that specifically target DoT damage, but is functionally just up-front damage). This occurs at the start of each turn, or after one ally attacks Detonate DoT effects, up to a maximum of 8 times per turn (cannot trigger off of itself).

This means that if an enemy has at least 8 DoT effects on them, after they've taken all the damage from those accumulated DoTs, Hysilens will blast them with a staggering 640% ATK. Even though this damage cannot CRIT, it's a huge amount of extremely consistent damage to be able to deal for just doing what you would have been doing anyway, and all buffed by the DEF reduction inherent to the Ultimate.

The Zone will last for 3 of Hysilens' turns and will be dispelled in the event that she falls in battle. It only costs 110 Energy, so it's going to be up a lot, and 3 turns is more than enough to be able to have this Zone up permanently.

Also the damage numbers show up as fish.

[Bonus Traces]

Already things are looking really damn good, but the Bonus Traces come in to sweep us off our feet even more.

Her A2 will automatically deploy the Ultimate's Zone at the start of a battle for 3 turns, functionally giving you the benefits of her Ultimate immediately without any hassle whatsoever. In addition to this, whenever Hysilens deploys a Zone, she will recover 1 Skill Point, granting her a surprising amount of SP efficiency.

Hysilens' A4 will allow her Ultimate to immediately Detonate all DoTs on an enemy for 150% of their original DMG. This is an extremely powerful effect to have, and 150% efficiency is the highest ever seen — Kafka's Ult Detonation is at 120%, so having both of them can create incredibly high ramping damage scenarios. Even better is that Hysilens' Ultimate costs a below average 110 Energy, so you will be able to make use of this quite often indeed.

Lastly, the A6 is an increasingly more common stat conversion Trace. For every 10% Effect Hit Rate that Hysilens has that is above 60%, she will gain 15% increased DMG. This caps out at a 90% DMG increase, attained when Hysilens reaches at least 120% EHR.

This is extremely potent since you're likely to be building Effect Hit Rate anyway to ensure that your DoT effects are reliably applied. This also further synergises with Kafka's A2 passive which grants 100% ATK if a teammate is above 75% EHR, as not only are you going to have the EHR necessary to max it out, but the bonus that Hysilens' A6 grants is not at odds with the ATK boost from Kafka.

[Eidolons]

Usually there is not much reason to talk about Eidolons anymore, since the general running theme has become 'E2 is probably busted and the rest above that don't really matter'. As such, you can anticipate that if there's a section for them, it's probably going to be about a particularly spicy E1.

This is indeed the case. Hysilens' E1 is rather insane. When Hysilens is on the field, ally target DoTs will always be dealing 116% of their original DMG. This is just kind of nuts on its own, noticeably increasing the damage across the entire team, but also more importantly, multiplying itself with the stronger Detonation effects that we have, making Kafka Ults and Hysilen Ults hit some extremely funny numbers.

But wait there's more! When she inflicts one of her four Elemental DoTs, she has a 100% base chance to inflict an additional instance of the same DoT effect that can co-exist with her original ones — straight up doubling the amount of DoTs that Hysilens can apply through her Talent, doubling her total passive DoT damage, and also providing enough DoTs to fully max out the Ultimate's additional damage procs all by herself. 8 DoTs with no help at all. Madness.

[Synergies & Meta]

Hysilens is clearly a top performer in her preferred team of DoT, giving great amounts of everything that is needed: Vulnerability, DEF reduction, SP generation, and a lot of extra DoT effects to get Detonated.

Now for the whale in the room. To say that Hysilens 'synergises' with Kafka, while not wrong, is somewhat disingenuous. It's like saying that one's lungs 'synergise' with one's heart. Yeah, N.S., it's a package deal and you need both to actually accomplish something. It's the same principle here.

Kafka was already the face of DoT even before her rework, but this has been solidified fully after it. She is designed to draw out the full power of DoT units by offering incredibly consistent and frequent DoT Detonations, and she already does this really well — probably a lot better than many may realise.

Now with Hysilens showing up, Kafka's usefulness is once again demonstrated, as Hysilens' very kit is screaming for more DoT detonations, 'Please miss, may I have another' all for the big school of fish damage numbers from Hysilens' Ultimate.

This is not a new phenomenon, there are plenty of incredibly strong DPS units who are tied to certain support characters, such that any other pairing would drop them down by at least one half-tier. It's particularly annoying when that certain support character happens to be an absurd generalist (I'm going to find you, chicken boy), but usually there are plenty of alternatives that can get close to the performance of the best-in-slot.

Kafka is unique in this regard, because she is the exact reverse of this: she is entirely uncontested in any team apart from DoT, where she currently faces no competition whatsoever, but the trade-off is that Kafka is the DoT team. If you don't have Kafka, you don't have a DoT team, and this is not changing with the release of Hysilens.

As such, if you are interested in building a DoT team including Hysilens, then step 0 is acquiring Kafka first. It sucks to hear, but it's how it is, so keep in mind that the discussion about Hysilens' teams and synergies talks about Hysilens as an implied duo with Kafka.

Beyond that, Hysilens naturally pairs well with Black Swan, as the myriad DoT debuffs that can be applied and made to deal damage will have a fantastic and easy time stacking Black Swan's Arcana to the absolute maximum with no issue.

This is a very big deal for Swan because getting the maximum benefits of Arcana has been pretty much impossible in regular endgame content, and the maximum damage multiplier of Arcana is laughably high as well.

Worth noting is that the vertical investment potential for this team is also very high, with all three of Hysilens, Kafka, and Black Swan having very potent E1s that can skyrocket damage even further. With the release of Hysilens, this team is already dealing damage that competes with the top performers, and if you're willing to go all in for DoT, it's a surprisingly sound investment.

If you don't have Black Swan, or need something else for the specific fight you're in, you're not out of luck. The old support that was used with the Kafka Swan duo still works (as she does in every team and bit of content) and that's of course Ruan Mei. Ruan Mei provides RES PEN and SPD, both of which are incredibly valuable for the DoT archetype, especially for Kafka whose new kit revels in being an absolute speed demon.

In addition to this, the Weakness Break Efficiency from Ruan Mei is invaluable in a mode like Apocalyptic Shadow, especially since the DoT characters (with the sole exception of Kafka) are not really pumping out crazy Toughness damage, meaning they can struggle to Break things quickly if the fight isn't directly shilling for the archetype.

Robin can still work very well, especially since there is going to be a very high frequency of attacks coming out from Kafka especially, that Robin can proc her Ultimate off of quite a bit. The extra ATK is also very appreciated as it'll help to increase the base DoT damage the team deals, and of course, the teamwide 100% Action Advance from Robin's Ultimate is extremely potent.

Since DoT is somewhat backloaded in its damage output, needing a bit of ramp-up time to reach the funny numbers, Robin is able to alleviate that issue somewhat by just granting more actions to ramp up with in the same amount of AV. Do note that this will put more strain on the team's SP reserves, and being put in a position where Kafka can't Skill will inflict The Great Despair upon you.

Other supports like Tribbie and Cipher are also great, but the supports from this point on get highly contested and are unlikely to be available for this team, especially once the 3-team endgame mode comes out.

Should you be able to use them, Tribbie gives great follow-up damage and frequent uses of it thanks to Kafka spamming Ultimate like no tomorrow, and provides much appreciated RES PEN; Cipher gives a lot of Vuln and has her own Ultimate in reserve to provide a huge burst of damage which is useful for annoying Bosses who like to phase change and cleanse all the DoT effects on them. Cipher is also incredibly fast and SP positive.

Aside from that, one other potentially noteworthy ally is good ol' Sampo Koski, specifically at E4. Hysilens' direct DoT damage from her Ultimate does not care about the strength of the DoT detonation used, and so the Wind Shear Detonating that Sampo gets on his 6-hit Skill at E4 can actually eke out a surprisingly high amount of damage from Hysilens' Ultimate.

[Wrap up]

Yeah, Hysilens is pretty good and works with quite a bit of the existing units, but I wouldn't say that she 'saves DoT society', since that's already somewhat been accomplished by Kafka from the team side of things.

The system side of things still does not like to favour DoT all that much. As briefly alluded to, most Bosses like to rid themselves of debuffs upon entering a Phase Change, meaning that DoT will have to reapply all their effects anew.

Pretty much every other team that has to ramp up will have one singular period of ramp up at the very start of the fight, and then be completely set for the remainder of the fight. To be suddenly flung back to square one midway through a fight is honestly just rude.

And yet despite that, Hysilens' new DoT team is amazingly powerful. It has a great deal of consistency, and gets better against faster enemies. Even in fights that aren't shilling DoT, this team performs exceptionally and has a lot of different third and fourth slot permutations, allowing for even greater flexibility.

While Hysilens is not as archetype-defining as Kafka, Hysilens' mechanics bring much to the table, and then some. If you are interested in continuing the Legend of the Forgotten Archetype, definitely get Hysilens, you will not be disappointed (but get Kafka as well, of course).