Honkai: Star RailRappaBest build, teams and other guides

Introduction

Rappa is a strong Erudition Break DPS unit that decimates AoE content. She gains native Weakness Break Efficiency and bonus Break Effect, and has Weakness ignoring Toughness damage. She ramps up relatively quickly and can continue to deal both Break and Super Break DMG to enemies after they are broken. She is even able to increase the Break DMG enemies take by up to 10% for simply existing on the team, giving her good synergy with the rest of the Break archetype. She has an immense amount of potential, but currently lacks the necessary elements to fully take advantage of it.

I guess all Galaxy Rangers have some sort of quirk to them, because Rappa is a graffiti ninja and... quite invested in rap and manga as well? I guess it's not all in her head since she does casually summon giant shurikens to throw at her enemies. Rappa is another addition to the ever growing Break archetype, and this isn't exactly an archetype that's lacking for great units. Luckily, Rappa does have her place in it for those interested in pulling for her.

Skills Overview

Rappa's Skill is a standard Erudition Skill, hitting all enemies for up to 120% ATK. There's nothing noteworthy about this besides the fact that it's useful for Energy regen. The much more interesting ability is her Ultimate. She enters the Sealform state and will immediately gain an Extra Turn, alongside 3 points of Chroma Ink. During this state, Rappa has 50% increased Weakness Break Efficiency and up to 30% additional Break Effect. This costs an above-average 140 Energy.

The Sealform state Enhances her Basic ATK and locks her out of her Ultimate and Skill. After each Enhanced Basic, Rappa consumes 1 point of Chroma Ink, and when there are no more points of Chroma Ink, she ends the Sealform state. The actual Enhancement itself gives Rappa three attacks in one action; her first two hits of the Enhanced Basic ATK are Blast AoEs, dealing up to 100% ATK to the primary foe and 50% to adjacents, and the final hit strikes all enemies on the field for up to 100% ATK.

This doesn't restore Skill Points, but since it's usable up to 3 actions, it makes Rappa noticeably more SP efficient than other characters. The Enhanced Basic ATK can also reduce enemy Toughness regardless of Weakness at 50% of the original effectiveness. Each swing of the Enhanced Basic has its own associated Toughness DMG and small Energy gain, and the total single-target Toughness you can deal is quite significant, especially factoring in Rappa's native Weakness Break Efficiency.

'This is all well and good but where's the damage? This is supposed to be a Break unit!' Astute observation, friend, and the secret lies with Rappa's Talent. Whenever an enemy's Weakness is Broken, Rappa gains 1 point of Charge, up to 10 points total. Additionally, upon using the third and final strike of her Enhanced Basic ATK, Rappa will deal Break DMG equal to 60% of her Break DMG to all enemies hit.

This DMG can ignore Weakness Types to deal some small additional Toughness DMG, consuming all accumulated Charge in the process. For each point of Charge consumed, the Break DMG multiplier of this Talent increases by up to 50% per point of Charge, and will also increase the Weakness ignoring Toughness DMG as well. Breaking an enemy with this DMG will result in an Imaginary Break.

You can see how this can be a veritable nuke when consuming all 10 points of Charge. It's unlikely that you'll ever have that many in reserve, but even just a couple of points can raise the Break DMG you'll be dealing to rather impressive levels. It's important to note that this is the same style of damage as what Boothill does, meaning this is proper Break DMG and will correctly scale off of the enemy's Max Toughness as well, but do keep in mind that Imaginary Break is considerably weaker than either Physical or Fire.

Bonus Abilities

Rappa's Bonus Ability Traces enhance her abilities further.

• Her A2 will give Rappa an additional point of Charge and an extra 10 Energy whenever an Elite-level or higher enemy's Weakness is Broken, giving her a nice extra bump to her setup.

• A4 will grant Rappa the ability to deal Super Break DMG with her Enhanced Basic ATK; 60% Super Break DMG per instance of damage from the Enhanced Basic. That's pretty good considering this is in addition to the direct Break DMG her third hit will be doing, and makes for some very colourful numbers explosions.

• A6 is another stat converter Trace. Whenever an enemy is Broken, Rappa increases their Break DMG taken by 2%. If Rappa's ATK is higher than 2400, for every 100 ATK over that, the value of this vulnerability increases by 1%, up to an additional 8%. This results in a total 10% increased Break DMG taken at 3200 ATK.

This is a pretty impressive boost to have for the low cost of just existing and doing what you were going to be doing anyway, but the nature of the boost makes it hard to maximise; Rappa is a Break unit, so building for ATK is a lot less desirable than building Break Effect and SPD, so this is unlikely to be fully maximised without 5-star Light Cones. In addition to this, the boost itself is additive with the Break boosts provided by Gallagher and Lingsha, so it’s not too too crazy, but is a nice boost all the same.

Eidolons

Eidolons are not necessary for Rappa to decimate things, but she does have some good ones. E1 in particular is quite nice, letting Rappa ignore 15% DEF during her Sealform state, and then regenerating an additional 20 Energy once it ends. E2 increases the Toughness DMG of the first two hits of her Enhanced Basic against their main target by 50%. E4 increases all allies' SPD by 12% during the Sealform state, and E6 jump-starts her Talent by giving her 5 points of Charge at the beginning of combat, and then subsequently refunding 5 points of Charge after the third hit of each Enhanced Basic.

The Good Things and The Bad Things

With all this in mind, Rappa can clearly roll with the punches and dish out some serious damage to everyone on the field, quite consistently too. The ability to reduce enemy Toughness without matching elements is very valuable, and having built-in Weakness Break Efficiency is very rare, with only Firefly having the same. The mixture of Break DMG and Super Break DMG makes Rappa quite consistently deal large numbers on Broken enemies.

The issue is that Break teams already have veritable giants in Boothill and Firefly. Boothill covers the direct Break DMG, and Firefly has the Super Break variant. Between the two of them, you have an option for any gamemode, and their team is almost always the exact same combination of Ruan Mei, Harmony Trailblazer, and either Gallagher or Lingsha. Rappa is no different in this regard. While she can technically be played without the Harmony Trailblazer, it's not quite to the same level of consistency as Boothill and so a Bronya pairing isn't really in the cards, even if Rappa is SP efficient enough to make it a consideration, and there's unfortunately no getting away from Ruan Mei at this current stage; more Weakness Break Efficiency is always preferred, and the ability to keep enemies Broken for longer is also invaluable for Break setups.

This raises the question of 'do I actually need Rappa?' and this is complicated. Rappa wants enemies to be getting Broken fairly frequently in order to regain points of Charge to turbo boost her Enhanced Basic and deal a lot of damage. Without this Charge, Rappa's damage potential starts to taper a bit.

Rappa is also quite Ultimate reliant like Firefly, making it quite devastating to be left without enough Energy, especially because you deal quite literally dismal damage without that Sealform state. Unlike Firefly, Rappa cannot jumpstart herself anywhere near as quickly, meaning the ramp-up to that first Ultimate can actually be quite a bit longer than you may like, even if it does usually just boil down to 1 additional turn before Ulting. However unlike Firefly, Rappa can be easier to fuel with Quid Pro Quo due to having a substantially lower Max Energy than Firefly.

This can be quite a big deal if you're not actively Breaking things or decking weaker enemies, because Rappa's Energy gain can fluctuate quite a bit, and with a steep 140 Energy cost for her Ultimate, it can sometimes be quite painful to climb back to having enough Energy to Ult, and Rappa outside of her Ultimate is not a real character. The longer you're outside the Sealform state, the more your damage starts to fall off, and if you're having like 5 action rotations, your damage stops existing.

One of the biggest downsides to Rappa is that she lacks the one thing that Boothill and Firefly really take to the bank, and that's having a Weakness Implant. Being able to deal Toughness damage regardless of Weakness Type is incredibly useful for having a general spread across many enemies, but it comes at the cost of having reduced effectiveness, and when your greatest source of damage requires enemies to be Broken, then this is simply worse than being able to implant your element as a Weakness onto enemies. Boothill shoots enemies with his Ult and now they're weak to Physical, meaning: he breaks them, they Bleed, he shoots, they die. Firefly casually implants Fire Weakness upon using her Enhanced Skill, and this lets her break things way faster to start dishing out her Super Break, and happens to match element to the two best Break sustains of Gallagher and Lingsha.

Rappa doesn't have that, and it's quite noticeable against the tougher enemies. Obviously, it stops mattering once enemies are actually Broken, especially if Rappa was the one to do so since Imaginary Break delays the enemy greatly and thus giving more time to deal damage... but the extra time it takes to Break the opponents initially is very noticeable, especially if one is already used to the expeditious Breaking provided by Boothill and Firefly.

Now, because of her nature, Rappa relies on having things to Break. Plenty of enemies, plenty of things to Break, and Elites that have reduced Max Toughness are all exactly what she wants, and she sneezes at foes and they die. As enemy count goes down, or as enemies start to become harder to Break, Rappa starts to ramp up more slowly and that's when things can get tricky.

This is mostly the case for Memory of Chaos, as Apocalyptic Shadow is also the Break team's personal playground, so she's unlikely to ever really struggle there either. However for MoC, if there's ever a cycle where there's only a couple very durable targets, Rappa may not be the best choice for that at this current time.

As such, if you are already a proud owner of Boothill or Firefly, I'm not sure if it's justifiable to get Rappa at this stage — sure, each of them have an edge over each other in different circumstances and some are easier to build, or harder to play, or what have you, but they're also ultimately quite similar in output too. Rappa is a Break unit, so by virtue of what that team entails, she can't be bad, not even remotely close to it. I'm just not sure she's so good that it warrants the acquisition of her if you already have one of the aforementioned two.

Rappa is also similar to Boothill in that she's not exactly the easiest character to pilot; because of the Blast AoEs on her first two hits of the Enhanced Basic, there is a need to have careful target selection to maximise the spread Toughness DMG, and while she can deal Toughness damage to anything, she undoubtedly still prefers matching element to be at maximum efficiency.

Rappa has an extraordinarily high ceiling, both in terms of optimisation and also damage output, but at the cost of significantly more effort expended, and she currently feels like she’s missing a piece of the puzzle. You can of course just unga bunga your way to victory, she is a Break unit after all, but if that's your only way of playing, then Firefly is likely to be more your speed. Because Rappa has the potential to deal her insane damage to all enemies on the field, this gives her a pretty funny advantage over enemies with Linked HP bars, as it'll essentially multiply her damage to absurd values, especially if there's a full field of 5 enemies.

The relatively new mechanic of Exo-Toughness is also something that Rappa can take fantastic advantage of, since it can give her many more points of Charge within the same encounter, even against lone enemies. Being able to Break enemies more than once also means Rappa’s Energy economy can skyrocket, giving her far more consistent uses of her Ultimate. If a way to induce Exo-Toughness onto enemies is ever added into the game, Rappa will ascend to an entirely new level, likely flanked by Boothill and Firefly too.

It's also currently quite difficult to assemble a second Break team due to the over-reliance on both Ruan Mei and the Harmony Trailblazer, so if you do already have Firefly and Boothill and go for Rappa as well, really what you're doing is adding a second member to the bench while only one of these three is off doing their thing in whichever endgame mode you're currently doing.

Admittedly, because Rappa has the same sorts of conditions as Boothill, wherein she doesn't need to be the one Breaking enemies to gain benefits, you could try an interesting combination of both Galaxy Rangers on the same team, both making mincemeat of the opposition and having a pretty good element spread as well, or alternatively pair Rappa with Firefly to have an easier time Breaking through enemies that aren’t Imaginary weak by implanting Fire Weakness for Firefly and Gallager or Lingsha to tear through. Fun though this may be, it runs into the same problem as above; you still can't make a second Break team because Ruan Mei is shackled to this archetype, and reducing the available team slots means potentially losing out on either Ruan Mei or the Harmony Trailblazer, and there’s not yet a character that can consolidate the effects of both of those units.

Rappa’s Energy concerns also warrant addressing directly; Rappa even with the Trailblazer isn’t able to deal damage outside of her Ultimate, something that isn’t an issue for the percent Energy restore that Firefly has, and something that is a complete non-issue for Boothill. Ideally, you have a 3-action rotation, resulting in extremely competitive damage, but this is currently quite unreliable, so you’re more often going to be getting a mix of 3 and 4 action rotations, which is ‘fine’. As mentioned earlier, if it’s taking you more than 5 actions for a rotation, the damage output plummets, and it can be extremely difficult to make it up, especially if your next Ultimate is unable to deal any Super Break damage.

You need all the help you can get, including going for things like Quid Pro Quo or even the Thief of Shooting Meteor set, which is potentially not what you want to be doing as it’s sacrificing damage across more than one character. Even in the event that a perfect support character appears, with Super Break, Weakness Break Efficiency, and maybe even Exo-Toughness application as well why not, this character would also be benefiting both Firefly and especially Boothill as well, so it really comes down to personal preference and choices as to whether or not you want to go for Rappa at this stage.

Until such time as a support character that stupid comes out, Rappa will remain 'potential woman'. Always ‘if’ and ‘when’, but never ‘is’. Obviously, if you have yet to obtain any Break DPS, then Rappa should definitely be on your radar because Break is funnily enough quite broken, and Rappa is no exception. It's just unfortunate that everything one could compare her to is, ironically enough, also pretty broken.

Even still, I’m intrigued to see just how Rappa shapes up over time.