Honkai Star Rail has many mechanics, that can benefit you in battle, at least as long as you know how to use them! One thing that is overlooked by many Star Rail players is how strong the use of true damage can be! Luckily, the most recent character, Black Swan, makes true damage much easier to use!
Ever since the big 2.0 update of Honkai Star Rail, and the new character Black Swan, the meta of the game has been pretty much turned upside down. Many of today's strongest teams are taking advantage of Black Swan's new abilities and mechanics.
One pretty interesting part of her kit, is how effectively she can shred your enemies' defense stats, making them much more vulnerable, and easier to kill!
Honkai Star Rail: True Damage Explained & Team Guide For Black Swan
In order to learn more about true damage in Honkai Star Rail, and why Black Swan could be a huge game changer for your account, we have to understand the basics first!
Honkai Star Rail: True Damage Explained
Luckily, this part is quite simple to understand, since true damage can be found in different games, however it almost always means the same thing!
Let's make it short and easy:
Just like your own characters, each and every enemy in Honkai Star Rail has defensive stats, which can be found under DEF. The exact number of an enemy's DEF is not very interesting, since we will work with percentages anyway.
When entering a battle, your enemies will have 100% of their DEF up, mitigating a lot of your actual damage. With the help of certain debuffs, you can take DEF away from the target opponent, making them less tanky. Here comes the most important note: Always remember, that DEF reduction and DEF ignore are additive in Honkai Star Rail, meaning you can stack them on top of each other!
If you have enough of said effects, then this can lead to the point, where you take away up to 100% of the enemies' DEF, resulting in you dealing true damage. Means, true damage is the damage your units deal, without any resistances. If you reach 100% DEF reduction (true damage) you basically double your entire damage.
That wasn’t so hard to understand, right?
Honkai Star Rail: Black Swan – The Queen Of True Damage
But what does Black Swan have to do with all of that? — Well, basically you can achieve true damage by combining other units as well, however it would need you much more effort and investment!
Black Swan's big strength is the amount of DEF reduction she already has in her kit! Especially, her Talent “Loom of Fate's Caprice” is responsible for a big chunk of said DEF shred. Next to that, her signature Light Cone (S1) is also based on this part of her kit. Last but not least, her best in slot Relic set, “Prisoner in Deep Confinement” also takes away the enemy's defensive stats.
Adding all that up, you can reach a total of 87% DEF reduce with Black Swan and her Light Cone alone, if you play her correctly! Note: This DEF ignore only works for DoT, since this is Black Swan's preferred type of damage. However, we will build a fitting team around that in a minute!
With all of that combined, you can pair Black Swan up with, for example Ruan Mei, who also has a 20% DEF reduce effect, and you already reached true damage! Needing only two character slots for this is truly amazing!
Honkai Star Rail: True Damage Team Comps
Let's take a look at some possible and super broken team comps, which can achieve true damage, including the most recent character, Black Swan!
The Whale Team
The name of this team is indeed the motto! All units in this comp are 5-Star characters, which, when all combined, cost a lot of Stellar Jade. However, this is actually the best team that can be built in the entire game as of right now.
As I already mentioned above, Ruan Mei (E1) is a great addition to Black Swan, since she provides the last bit of DEF shred in order to achieve true damage. Next to her, Kafka is also one of Black Swan's best friends, since she can take advantage of all the extra debuffs and DoTs Black Swan puts on the opponents. Last but not least, we have Huohuo, who is a great healer and buffer in one!
Let's take a look at a little less expensive team next!
Affordable DoTs
This team is also based around damage over time, but works with much lass expensive units! (And works pretty good as well!)
In this option, Pela takes Ruan Mei's position! Pela can also lower your enemies' DEF by 45% with her ultimate! This, however, has much higher energy requirements than Ruan Mei's Skill, which has a higher uptime and is not bound to energy. Other than that, we have Guinaifen, who applies more DoTs, working as a budget Kafka. Last but not least, we need a healer. Just take anyone you have, really!
And that sums up our true damage guide! Hopefully this helped you to understand Black Swan's kit a little better in order to make smarter choices when building her and her team!