Team Archetypes

Teams in Honkai: Star Rail typically fall into an archetype that defines their playstyle in combat and serves as excellent templates when building your teams. From the classic beatdown playstyle to a more controlling one, these archetypes are generally categorized by the combat mechanic that they specialize in and rely on to dish out their damage.

Below are the most common team archetypes in the game.

The traditional RPG archetype that focuses on landing big critical hits to take down the enemy. A Crit archetype team will typically use one main damage dealer backed up by offensive damage supports as the core of the team. Some teams will opt to replace one of the supports with a secondary damage dealer if that Character has better synergy with the main damage dealer.

The game plan for this archetype is to stack as many offensive stats that enhance the damage dealer’s critical hits as much as possible. Once buffed up, the damage dealer can then deal out large critical hits to quickly take down the enemy. This process is done both through the damage dealer’s gear and during battle with the buffs or debuffs from the team’s support Characters.

Notable Crit archetype characters:

Here's a video showcasing this archetype in action:

This archetype focuses on breaking the enemy’s Toughness bar as quickly and as often as possible in order to inflict massive break damage to the enemy. To accomplish this goal, teams in this archetype will utilize Characters with skills that deal high Toughness damage or increase the Toughness damage their teammates can deal. Examples include random target skills like Asta’s or the Harmony Trailblazer’s Skill and skills that buff the team’s Weakness Efficiency like Ruan Mei’s Skill. Random target skills can hit the same target multiple times with each hit dealing its own instance of Toughness damage. Weakness Efficiency is a buff that increases the Toughness damage that a Character’s attacks will do. These types of abilities quicken the process of breaking enemies, making them ideal for Break teams.

Break teams will also try to stack as much Break Effect and Speed as possible since these are the two most relevant stats for this archetype. Break Effect is the primary stat that is used to calculate how much break damage the enemy takes. Other offensive stats such as ATK and Crit DMG do not increase break damage, so they are not needed for Break teams. Speed, on the other hand, provides an indirect boost to break damage as high speed Characters can act more often, allowing them to attack the enemies more often and thus breaking them faster.

Notable Break archetype characters:

Here's a video showcasing this archetype in action:

A variant of the Crit archetype that uses follow up attacks (FUA) to do the bulk of its damage. Follow up attacks are out of turn attacks that come in one of two forms: summon and triggered types.

Summon type FUA’s will summon an entity with its own turn on the action bar and will act in turn order like any other units. Examples include Jing Yuan’s Lightning Lord and Topaz’s Numby. Teams that revolve around this type of FUA Characters will try to maximize the number of times that the summon will attack as that is where most of these Characters’ damage is concentrated.

Triggered type FUA’s are follow up attacks that are automatically triggered once certain conditions are met. For example, March 7th will automatically perform a follow up attack on any enemy that attacks a shielded ally. They can also be triggered multiple times during a round, so teams in this archetype will try to take advantage of that and attempt to trigger as many follow up attacks as possible.

When it comes to Character builds, FUA damage dealers will want the same stats that the Crit archetype damage dealers want (i.e. ATK or the stat that their skills scale with, Crit Rate, Crit DMG) as their damage is still coming from landing critical hits with their regular and follow up attacks.

Notable Follow-Up-Attack (FuA) archetype characters:

Here's a video showcasing this archetype in action:

The DoT, or damage over time, archetype aims to inflict as many DoT effects on the enemy as possible, whittling away at their HP until they are defeated. Teams in this archetype will typically utilize Characters that can inflict DoT effects with their skills rather than relying on the DoT that occurs when an enemy is Weakness Broken. DoT effects that come from Character skills scale off of that Character’s ATK and can be stacked multiple times, greatly increasing the damage that the DoT effects will do. On the other hand, DoT effects that occur from Weakness Breaking enemies scale off of Break Effect and only occur once when the enemy’s Toughness bar is reduced to zero, so it is not very useful to DoT archetype teams.

When building Characters in this archetype, stack as much ATK and Speed as possible along with a healthy amount of Effect Hit Rate. ATK and Speed will allow for stronger and more application of DoT effects while Effect Hit Rate will help to ensure that the enemy will not resist the DoT debuff. Crit Rate and Crit DMG do not affect DoT damage, so they can be ignored.

Notable Damage over Time (DoT) archetype characters:

Here's a video showcasing this archetype in action: