Honkai: Star RailXueyiBest build, teams and other guides

Xueyi is a strong generalist damage dealer capable of dealing Toughness damage to enemies not weak to Quantum. She interacts with enemy Toughness Gauges to gain stacks towards a powerful follow-up attack, greatly increasing her effectiveness against Quantum-weak foes. Xueyi scales with Break Effect, gaining bonus DMG% per point of Break Effect, resulting in a large permanent boost to her damage output, but due to her reliance on doing Toughness damage, the teams and scenarios you can use her are pretty restrictive.

The Ten-Lords Judge inhabiting a puppet body and sister to Hanya, Xueyi, is a formidable ally. Alongside Ruan Mei, she has a heavy focus on Break and Break Effect, making great use of an otherwise neglected and suboptimal stat. She has a wordy but relatively simple and effective kit.

Xueyi’s Skill is a Blast AoE, dealing up to 140% ATK to the primary target and 70% to adjacent foes. Xueyi’s Ultimate deals damage to a single enemy, up to 250% ATK. This attack deals 120 Toughness damage, notably higher than almost all other single-target Ultimates in the game and having parity with Imbibitor Lunae’s Fulgurant Leap. Even more impressive is that this Toughness damage ignores the Weakness Type of the enemy, meaning this attack does not care if its target doesn’t have a Quantum weakness.

If this Toughness damage Breaks the enemy, the attack will also inflict Quantum Break on them, causing Entanglement. The more Toughness reduced, the higher the DMG dealt will be, up to an increase of a very substantial 60%, meaning it is more powerful when used on an enemy that still has a good amount of Toughness remaining.

The wordy part but also one of the most important parts of Xueyi’s kit is her Talent. When reducing Toughness with attacks, Xueyi gets stacks of Karma, up to 8. At 8 stacks, she will unleash a 3-hit follow-up attack, each one dealing up to 90% ATK to a single enemy. When Xueyi reduces Toughness, she gains Karma stacks based on how much she reduced it by — 1 stack for every 30 Toughness reduced. When allies reduce Toughness, Xueyi gets 1 Karma stack.

The follow-up deals 270% ATK in total and ends up being a fairly big part of Xueyi’s personal damage. The follow-up itself will not add stacks of Karma, but with the increased acquisition that Xueyi herself gets as well assistance from allies, she will still be able to get to this follow-up attack fairly frequently, especially when you consider that her Ultimate deals Type-ignoring Toughness damage, and the 120 Toughness damage it deals will immediately add 4 stacks. The follow-up attack also deals 15 Toughness damage per hit and restores 6 Energy in total, so it also helps with Energy economy.

Looking at just the raw numbers makes it seem like Xueyi doesn’t deal very much damage, and, aside from the Ultimate, doesn’t stand out at all. This is where her Bonus Ability Traces swoop in to tell the rest of the story. The least impressive of these is her A4 will let her Ultimate deal 10% more DMG against enemies whose Toughness is higher than 50% of their Max.

The big one is Xueyi’s A2. It will increase the DMG she deals by an amount equal to 100% of her Break Effect stat, up to a maximum bonus of 240%. Yes this is as silly as it sounds. This means that you take whatever your Break Effect% is at — and now that’s the DMG% bonus you have, just passively. Racking up enough Break Effect for this to reach some amazing heights is not hugely difficult especially since her Minor Traces give her 37.3% Break Effect for absolutely free, meaning a Break Effect Link Rope will put Xueyi’s Break Effect to just over 100%, which of course thanks to her A2 means she’s also getting a permanent 100% DMG bonus to everything.

Any extra Break Effect is just icing on the cake, and this one Bonus Ability Trace makes Xueyi deal very substantial and, more importantly, very consistent damage. With her ability to Break whomever she wants as well, she can very easily make use of the extremely powerful burst of damage that the Entanglement status provides with this amount of Break Effect.

Because this provides so much DMG% for Xueyi, she actually doesn’t really want a Quantum DMG Planar Sphere, since they’re the same type of DMG%, and so it’s not providing as much as it would for others. This means you finally have a use for your definitely not copium ATK% Spheres, and it’s actually her best stat for that slot. You shouldn’t get too entranced by this though. Investing into CRIT Rate and DMG is also important and you can't rely on the Break Effect alone.

A6 essentially keeps a tally of how many stacks of Karma you overcap by, making it so that if you annihilate a Toughness bar at 7 out of 8 stacks, you aren’t just throwing away all those Karma stacks.

This combination makes Xueyi a decent damage dealer, and with this amount of natural DMG% in her kit, she plays very well with pretty much all supports, especially the ones that can increase her Action rate to get more Energy for Ultimates and more of those Karma stacks for her follow-up. Bronya and Tinyun are natural pairings, though Asta and Hanya can also be good thanks to their SPD buffs and due to them always attacking on their turns for more potential Karma stacks for Xueyi. Silver Wolf, Pela, and Ruan Mei are also great partners for Xueyi as they can increase the Entanglement damage done by her.

Xueyi is already strong at base at E0, but she has some very impactful Eidolons that can noticeably improve her performance. E1 increasing the DMG of the follow-up by 40% is always appreciated since it’s free, and E2 will let Xueyi’s follow-up attacks deal Toughness damage regardless of Type and even give her a slight heal of 5% Max HP. As with the Ultimate, Breaking enemies with the follow-up will similarly inflict Quantum Break. E4 increases Break Effect by 40% for 2 turns after using her Ultimate, which is just more DMG% on top of everything else, and E6 will reduce the max stacks of Karma down to 6, resulting in yet more follow-up attacks.

Surprisingly there’s not much left to say. Xueyi is a very potent and consistent character, and her interactions with Break and Break Effect make her not only quite unique but likely to only improve over time. Maximizing the Toughness damage that she deals is key to skyrocketing her performance, meaning using your Ultimate on enemies without Quantum Weakness so that you have more to hit with her Skill.

A definite issue to keep in mind is that because of the uniqueness of Xueyi’s kit, her investment ceiling is so massive that it’s virtually unattainable; you’re only ever going to be ‘done’ with this character when every single one of your relics are 10/10 perfection, and the progression for this is also exceedingly steep. It’s been mentioned for other characters that they require a lot of investment, but they do not hold a candle to the grossly incandescent Xueyi.

The other big thing is that Xueyi annihilates Quantum-weak foes. This makes the performance difference when fighting non QUA-weak enemies rather stark when comparing to other characters — it’s not that she becomes unusable, it’s just that because of how good Xueyi is against the right enemies she feels wasted being put against anything else.

Mismatching Elemental Weaknesses is a negative thing that is shared by pretty much every character in the game (unless your name is either Firefly, Acheron or Boothill), and while Xueyi has the tools to work around a mismatched Weakness, you absolutely should not expect her to bring the same level of decimation to fights that feature literally zero Quantum weaknesses. I think we all know by now whose fault that would be. Putting Xueyi with teammates who are capable of dealing Toughness damage to enemies will greatly impact her performance, and if nobody on your team is capable of dealing Toughness damage, then I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood one of the core aspects of the game.

Xueyi is a great 4-star damage dealer, and when you're using her against Quantum-weak enemies, she can outperform even many 5-stars, but sadly in every other situation, she lags behind. This makes investing in her a bit tricky to do unless your account already has good coverage for other elements.

The road to powering her up is long… Long enough to make one mara-struck, but it is most assuredly worth it. Do not underestimate this character.