Honkai: Star RailRobinBest build, teams and other guides

Robin is an exceptionally potent Harmony support. She provides highly competitive teamwide buffs at relatively high SP efficiency, while also contributing a very significant amount of her own damage through her Ultimate. She possesses the highly coveted ability to Action Advance teammates, only she is capable of Advancing the entire party, excluding herself. Her method of contributing damage cannot be interrupted by enemy Crowd Control effects and is directly tied to how many attacks the team as a whole can launch, with even further benefits for follow-up-centric teams.

I'll cut to the chase this time around, this is yet another unsurprising slam-dunk for Harmony. Robin is on a similar power level to that of Ruan Mei, being better in some particular specialized teams and worse in others. Even despite that, there is a fairly good amount of overlap where they can be used, and Robin may prove to be an even more enticing option for the practiced player.

With that bar established, let's elaborate on why exactly Robin reaches these heights, starting with the less dramatic portion of her kit, her Skill. It's a simplistic teamwide DMG buff of up to 50%, lasting for 3 of Robin's turns. This makes it quite an efficient boost for the whole party as you're not having to constantly keep up a buff on specific teammates. Robin's Talent is also simple, providing a permanent CRIT DMG boost to the whole party of up to 20%. It also has the added effect of granting Robin 2 additional points of Energy whenever allies attack enemy targets.

The iconic part of Robin's kit is her Ultimate. She brings an entire concert to life upon use, immediately Action Advancing all other characters by 100%, and Robin herself enters the Concerto state, increasing all allies' ATK by up to 22.8% of Robin's ATK plus a flat 200. She starts to sing and a countdown shows up in the Action Order bar, essentially acting as a way to keep track of when Robin's Concerto state will end. During Concerto, Robin has a fixed SPD of 90 with absolutely no way of affecting this; when the countdown ends, Robin will take her turn, but cannot be Action Advanced, Delayed, or affected by Crowd Control or SPD influencing effects.

If you are familiar with how the likes of Bronya and Sparkle work, you may already understand why being able to instantly grant the entire rest of the party an immediate additional Action is so ridiculously powerful. You grant more total Actions over the course of a fight than you would otherwise be allowed, and can bring allies up into a cycle that's about to end, essentially cheating out extra time to finish the fight or potentially sparing yourself from a powerful enemy attack.

Sending Robin to SPD purgatory by design may seem like a steep price to pay, especially since the cost of the Ultimate itself is a staggering 160 Energy, and this would definitely be the case were it not for the second part of the Ultimate. While Robin is in the Concerto state, in addition to the ATK increase and Action Advance, she will deal additional Physical DMG whenever any ally launches an attack against an enemy, dealing up to 120% ATK per attack action. This damage also has a fixed CRIT Rate of 100% and a fixed CRIT DMG of 150%.

Now, in addition to the other benefits she's providing with her Ultimate, Robin is also dealing damage of her own, and let me tell you that it's very substantial — in other supports' reviews it's been mentioned that their damage output is 'non-negligible' meaning it's nice to have but shouldn't be likely to be a significant portion of the team's overall damage. This is absolutely not the case with Robin, her damage is absolutely a massive increase and is actually quite easy to account for.

If upon reading 'per attack action' your mind immediately went to follow-up teams, you're right on the money. Any action that lands a hit on the enemy will cause Robin to chuck a treble-clef at the enemy, including Ultimates and especially follow-ups. The low SPD that the Concerto state enforces on Robin is therefore actually a boon, giving the team more opportunities to proc Robin's additional damage. Even better is that since her Skill's duration is based on Robin's own turns, she can keep a single Skill activation going for an incredibly long time, making her extremely SP efficient to boot, and of course thanks to her Talent, she is able to regain Energy even during the Concerto state.

The steep Energy cost of the Ultimate is absolutely justified, and careful usage of it can result in downright illegal maneuvers against even the toughest enemies — heck, even haphazard usage is strong enough in pretty much all cases. It's unlikely that you will be able to keep up the Ultimate indefinitely even with outside sources of Energy like Turbulence effects, and even if you do regain enough to prolong the effects, you're usually better off waiting until the last character before Robin has acted before using Robin's Ultimate, as this is the most efficient way to utilise the 100% Action Advance the Ultimate provides. However, if you're pressed for time and overall Actions like in Pure Fiction, you may want to maximize how many Ultimates Robin can get off, in which case it's better not to wait.

Robin's Bonus Ability Traces also tie into her powerful performance. The A2 will give Robin a 25% Action Advance at the beginning of a fight, making it much easier to use her Skill before any of your other DPS characters get their first actions off. A4 will improve upon the innate follow-up synergies by granting follow-up attacks a 25% CRIT DMG boost during the Concerto state, and A6 will make Robin's Skill regenerate an additional 5 Energy on use. A6 in particular can make it quite a compelling choice to use Robin's Skill even if she doesn't need to refresh it purely for the massive influx of Energy it provides.

Talking about Eidolons for limited 5-star characters is becoming increasingly redundant as they all follow the same pattern for the most part. As always, absolutely no Eidolons are necessary for Robin to excel, and she is not rated with them in mind. E1 provides a teamwide 24% All-Type RES PEN while Robin is in the Concerto state, and E2 will also increase all allies' SPD by 16% also during Concerto, while also increasing the Energy gained from her Talent to 3. E4 will instantly dispel all Crowd Control debuffs on allies when they get Action Advanced by the Ultimate, and will also improve their Effect RES by 50% during Concerto. Finally, E6 makes Robin really put the 'Harm' in Harmony, giving herself 8 uses of a hyper-enhanced additional DMG instance during her Ultimate, having a 600% CRIT DMG bonus instead of the usual 150%, going back to the usual amount after 8 attacks have been launched and resetting the stack count when the Ultimate is used again. It, uh, destroys pretty much everything in the blink of an eye. Have fun with that, Anemone.

Because of the unique way that Robin plays out, her stat requirements as a Harmony character are very non-standard; thanks to the Concerto state setting her SPD to a fixed value of 90, she doesn't really care about SPD that much beyond being able to get the first Action of a fight, something that is rather easy to achieve thanks to her A2 passive, meaning a paltry SPD value of around 120 is good enough in most cases unless your DPS character is a speed demon. Additionally, because the Concerto state’s additional attacks have fixed CRIT values, literally any amount from stats or substats is entirely wasted. Robin cares almost exclusively about ATK, and can make very good use of it, meaning it's very reasonable to focus on defensive stats after you've hit the ATK and SPD values you were aiming for.

Energy is a bit of a sore spot, not only because of the aforementioned high Energy cost of 160, but also because how much Energy exactly Robin will be getting depends entirely on the team you're running her with, as well as the enemies you happen to be facing. It's quite free-form and you'll have to get a feel for it for yourself, so the general recommendation is to get as much Energy Regeneration Rate as you can without it hindering Robin's supportive capabilities. For this reason, it's also recommended to place Robin in the middle of the team to increase the likelihood of her getting clipped by enemy AoE attacks for that sweet 'hit me' Energy — another good reason to invest in defensive stats. This makes Robin arguably the easiest support character to build in the entire game, almost laughably so. When pretty much every other support wants to be as fast as possible and aim for having around 160 SPD or even greater, the paltry requirements of Robin are a very, very welcome change of pace.

In terms of teams, Robin is highly flexible. For clarity, Robin is not an exclusively follow-up centric support. She's giving Ruan Mei a run for her money in pretty much all teams that aren't explicitly Break focused. Having said that... Robin does see the greatest benefits in follow-up teams. Dr. Ratio, Topaz, and Aventurine all have easily accessed follow-up attacks that can frequently trigger Robin's extra DMG and self Energy restore, while also benefiting from the near-permanent 25% extra CRIT DMG offered exclusively to follow-up attacks, getting a total of 45% CRIT DMG from Robin just existing, really. Topaz especially will always be benefiting from this as all of her attacks count as follow-ups.

Huohuo is also particularly noteworthy as a good general sustain to pair with Robin if one does not have Aventurine, as Huohuo's Ultimate restores a percentage of Energy to all other allies. With Robin having a Energy cost of 160, this results in a very significant amount of Energy coming back with just a single Huohuo Ultimate. The ATK buff provided by Huohuo will also naturally increase Robin's own damage output during the Concerto state. This is particularly amusing to see in the now classic Damage over Time (DoT) team with Kafka and Black Swan, where Robin feels surprisingly at home, mostly in part thanks to Kafka's extremely frequent and consistent follow-up and the rest due to DoT teams being naturally very SPD heavy in the first place. The sheer amount of ATK buffs in that team makes the DoT damage staggeringly high.

If one does not have these other 5-star limited characters, Clara is also someone who benefits from Robin — extremely so, to the point where Robin could very well be a best-in-slot support for Clara moving forward. The only limit on how many follow-ups Clara can throw out is how often she can get hit, meaning in particularly enemy-dense encounters or against speed demon bosses, Clara can output a very impressive amount of damage when bolstered by Robin, and Robin can do much the same thanks to Clara.

If you are of a… particularly driven nature, you can try assembling a team of alacritous assistants attempting to aid Robin's attacks, by which I mean: fast team makes Robin hit more, so more SPD is good. You'd be shifting the focus more onto Robin herself by trying to eke out as many additional hits from her Ultimate as possible, so Asta would see great value in this regard, especially as she herself offers a very powerful teamwide ATK buff that Robin can also benefit from. This support pairing works very well with a great many DPS characters and is highly accessible due to Asta being a free 4-star character. It's not the most recommended setup for more storied players with access to more limited 5-star characters, but it definitely does work, and it's funny when things go zoom.

As I said in the beginning, Harmony stays winning, and Robin is another fantastic addition to the roster. I've made the analogy before of 'it's like comparing gold to platinum' when there's something great and something that's also great but slightly better, but when it comes to the Harmony characters, they’re all so good that having any of them is going to be great for you. Sure there are cases where one shines more than the others, but for the overwhelming majority of people, it's the same picture. There are only winners in this race.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to Robin's Ultimate song for 10 hours. It's a bop and everyone knows it.