In order to build your Honkai Star Rail characters as strong and efficient as possible, you have to understand how all the different stats work and influence each other. The probably most important of these stats is speed / SPD. Let's take a closer look at how it affects our gameplay and what you have to take into consideration when equipping your units!
Honkai Star Rail's character building is one of the more complex things this game has to offer, especially if you want to clear the end game content, or even further, attempt zero cycles.
To break it down a little, a complete character build exists of a Light Cone and six Relic pieces. Finding the right weapon is usually done quite quickly and easily, whereas the relic pieces can turn out to be a little more difficult, due to the sheer amount of different stats.
This time around, we're going to look at the probably most important one out of all these stats: speed / SPD.
Honkai Star Rail: Speed – The Most Important Stat
For everyone who isn’t quite as familiar with all the different stats of a Star Rail unit, we should first find out what speed is actually for in order to understand its importance later on!
Honkai Star Rail: Why Is Speed Important?
The Importance of SPD in a character build is highly dependent on the unit's role within the team and which job they need to fulfill. However, most units do like at least some amount of SPD, so it's never a terrible stat overall.
Let's check why SPD is so important:
1. Make actions happen faster!
- This point pretty self-explanatory and is great for nearly every unit, no matter if we're talking about a DPS or support. You just have to be careful, in which order your units will perform within the team, but we will get to that later!
2. Leave your enemies behind!
- This one is quite easy as well: If you have more SPD than your enemy, you can perform your actions before them, which can be useful in all kinds of situations! You can also set up your defensive buffs in that turn.
3. Buffs when they are needed!
- This point breaks down the importance of SPD on support units, since they HAVE TO go before your DPS' turn to make sure their very first attack is already enhanced!
Onto a little more complicated step!
Honkai Star Rail: How Does Speed Work
Speed in Honkai Star Rail is a fundamental aspect of combat strategy, influencing the turn order and the overall flow of battles. Understanding and optimizing it through character selection, equipment, and in-battle decisions is key to mastering the game's combat system.
Essentially, SPD affects the interval between the target's actions, which means the faster the Speed, the shorter the interval. At the same time, SPD will also impact the action order when entering a battle.
In this context, another factor plays an important role as well, being Action Value.
Action Value (AV) is a combat mechanic that influences the turn order and how often characters can act within the game's turn-based combat system. It determines the frequency and order of actions taken by characters and enemies during battles. It's a numerical representation of how quickly a character gets to act again after taking their turn.
Unlike a simple speed system where characters act once per round based on their speed stat, Action Value adds a layer of strategy by potentially allowing characters to act multiple times within a single round, depending on their AV score.
Honkai Star Rail: Speed Breakpoints
After all we have learned until now, there is only one major thing left to look at, being speed breakpoints!
A speed breakpoint is a specific value that your character's speed stat needs to reach or surpass to ensure they act before another character or enemy. This is particularly important in competitive play or against bosses, where acting before your opponent can provide a significant tactical advantage.
To give you a pretty good example: Many players try to reach the magical 134 SPD number, since this is when your units will have two turns in the very first cycle of a battle, making zero cycles for example much easier to achieve! On top of that, it also gives you more action further down the line when reaching cycle four or even seven.
However, for players who are fine with taking a few cycles more and don't want to compete against other players, 121 speed is a perfect place to stop!
And that warps up our little speed guide for now. SPD really is a pretty hard to understand stat in Honkai Star Rail, and there are a lot more layer to it than we were looking at just here, however most in depth stuff isn’t useful for most of us casual players anyway!