Honkai: Star RailSeeleBest build, teams and other guides

The hot-headed swallowtail of the Underworld is an immaculate single-target damage dealer on the Path of the Hunt, strong enough to overcome the intrinsic weakness of Hunt characters and hit hard enough to where even resistant foes need to be on the lookout for her attacks. Enemy reinforcements need to be impressive to go toe to toe with Seele, because deadweights will only serve to fuel Seele’s destructive power further.

Seele’s skill deals damage to a single target, and will simultaneously increase Seele’s speed by 25% for 2 turns. Maintaining this speed boost indefinitely is extremely easy, and the speed boost is already very significant, meaning Seele is automatically one of the fastest-acting characters in the game. The multiplier may initially seem low, but with the help of Seele’s talent, her damage shoots skyward.

Seele’s ultimate immediately puts Seele into a Buffed state before dealing single-target damage. This Buffed state will have its effects active for the actual ultimate hit and will also persist for 1 turn after, meaning Seele’s ultimate always has the Buffed values in-game.

Her talent describes what her Buffed state does; she gains up to an 80% damage boost at max trace level whilst Buffed for 1 turn. Additionally, if Seele defeats an enemy, she will instantly gain an Extra Turn (not turn advance, a true extra action) and will become Buffed. She cannot trigger this extra turn again by scoring a defeat with the previous extra turn. Buffs do not tick down after Extra Turns, unlike Turn Advances.

This is where Seele’s great damage comes from. By simply playing her as you would any other SP spending damage dealer, you will end up benefiting greatly from the impressive dmg% boost the Buffed state gives you; using her ultimate will immediately trigger the Buffed state for Seele, and combining it with the passive procs from her talent after scoring defeats, Seele can end up spending the majority of combat affected by this Buff.

Seele’s Bonus Traces are mostly nice bonuses to have, with the exception of A4, which gives Seele a huge 20% Quantum RES PEN while she’s in her Buffed state. Resistance penetration is a rare and powerful boost to damage, as it affects a separate multiplier in the damage formula, leading to much larger increases in damage. Because of the way this specific bonus works, it makes Seele even more effective against foes that are already weak to Quantum, equalises the field against neutral enemies, and even goes a long way to allowing Seele to put in damage against resistant foes! (Don’t actually bring Seele if you know you’ll be against super resistant foes, obviously.)

What’s more, Seele can manage to circumvent the inherent weakness in AoE scenarios that the exclusively single-target Hunt characters have thanks to her talent; if there are enemy reinforcements during a tough encounter, Seele can actually use them as a springboard to deal extra damage against her primary target, since spending a turn to defeat them will instantly grant Seele an extra turn with which to attack said primary target, only this time you’ve got the exceptional damage increase and Qua RES PEN from the Buffed state. 

She can virtually ping-pong across the battlefield, simultaneously dealing increased damage to the main foe whilst also indirectly dealing aoe damage, making her the only Hunt character who arguably gets stronger in aoe scenarios. The only caveat to this is that she becomes inordinately SP hungry, and maintaining this sort of pace can become incredibly challenging, unless of course you’re killing off the trash adds with Seele’s basic attack to conserve SP, in which case, that is a certifiable gigachad play.

Something to consider when forming teams is the potential to encounter diminishing returns, due to how many damage buffs she already has, but usually if there’s more than just another generic damage boost from the other supporting character, it will still contribute a lot to boosting Seele’s already impressive damage (so yes, feel free to pair her with Bronya, it is the law, after all).

All of this together makes Seele one of the hardest scaling units currently in the game. Being a Hunt character, she naturally has higher-than-average crit stats that are only boosted further by Light Cones, and her passive bonuses give her a huge leg up on many other units. Keep in mind that with every patch, the HP of the enemies is increasing which means that Seele constantly hits a 'wall' of being able to one-shot the trash mobs. So you need to keep investing not only into her Relics, but also her teammates (via their Eidolons for example) to make Seele continue to work. Because the moment Seele can't just one-shot the trash mobs to 'start going' is the moment where she stops working and performs badly.

… She also does need to chill out.