Honkai: Star RailBladeBest build, teams and other guides

Blade's buffs are long anticipated and are thankfully very good. They go a long way to increasing his overall damage, quality of life, and consistency within battles. He now has vastly increased aggro draw while he is buffed by his Skill making the likelihood of him getting attacked extremely high. His Talent Follow-up restores significantly more Energy. Blade no longer has split scaling and is now a fully HP scaling DPS character.

Blade is a man of few words. This updated review will also not have many words, because Blade remains a simple and effective character. With his new buffs, 500k is indeed reachable, and much to Blade's chagrin, he's gained a new lease on life.

Blade's always had a few issues that admittedly didn't really matter back when he was first released. Being from the ancient time of 1.2, the game's moved on quite a bit from then, and his old design really showed it (don't ask Blade mains about his old A4). You'll be pleased to see that pretty much all of those issues have been addressed — and not just in a 'make number bigger' kind of way.

Blade's Skill is still a self-enhancement. He consumes 30% Max HP to enter Hellscape. During Hellscape, his Basic ATK becomes Enhanced and he gets a 40% DMG increase. This Skill still doesn't restore Energy, still does not end the turn, and the buff lasts for 3 turns.

The new functionality is that Hellscape will increase the amount of aggro that Blade draws while he's buffed, and it's dramatically increased, to an extent that is higher even than the extra aggro that Yunli's Signature Light Cone provides, all at no extra cost. Having this kind of aggro makes getting hit far more consistent which is very relevant for his Talent. Seriously, this level of aggro draw is rivalling Tingyun's.

His Enhanced Basic is still a Blast AoE, but has been changed to be fully HP scaling, a trend that is thankfully present throughout all of his attacks now. He consumes 10% Max HP to deal 130% Max HP as damage to a target enemy, and 52% Max HP to adjacent targets. This is a pretty high HP ability multiplier, higher than even Mydei's Kingslayer Be King attack, for the main target at least.

Blade's Talent is mostly unchanged. Whenever he sustains damage or has his HP consumed, he gets 1 stack of Charge (they didn't have fancy names for these things back then), stacking up to 5 times. At 5 stacks, he will consume all 5 to immediately launch a Follow-up attack against all enemies on the field, dealing up to 130% Max HP damage, the same damage as his Enhanced Basic does to its main target. At the same time, Blade will heal 25% of his Max HP.

The newly buffed ability multiplier means this can do some very impressive damage now, and with the new Foxian aggro he has from Hellscape, he can get to use this Talent Follow-up substantially more frequently. This has always been a very good attack, especially since it's very strong on its own and happens to also be fully AoE, a quality that continues to be lacking in Destruction characters. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which—

Blade's Ultimate has also had the same treatment, having the previous split scaling removed in favour of pure HP scaling. The HP loss tally is unchanged, remaining at 90% of his Max HP, and it keeps track of how much damage Blade has sustained in the encounter.

Blade sets his current HP to 50% of his Max HP and attacks with a Blast AoE, dealing 150% of his Max HP plus 120% of the HP loss tally to the main target, and dealing 60% Max HP plus 60% of the HP loss tally to adjacent foes. After hitting with the Ultimate, the HP loss tally will be reset and will need to be accumulated anew.

This used to be quite a bit lower than it is now, and getting to use more of the HP loss tally for damage is extremely good since Blade is always taking damage. Important to note that the Ultimate still sets Blade's HP to 50% Max HP, meaning if you are below the threshold you will heal up to halfway, and if you are above the threshold you will consume HP to reach halfway. This can be very good for gaining extra stacks for his Talent Follow-up, as well as adding to the HP loss tally just before the attack (though it still gets cleared immediately after).

It's a very strong Ultimate but was quite hard to get to consistently, especially since the (at the time) above average Energy cost was likely designed with Energy-on-hit in mind. Once again, the increased aggro draw from Hellscape helps to build towards the Ultimate faster since you're already going to be getting hit way more than before.

Perhaps the most egregious part of Blade's kit before were the abysmal Bonus Traces. Relics of their time that they were, they've all been updated (and that god-awful A4 was binned in favour of a brand new one).

His new A2 is simple but extremely potent. When Blade uses his Ultimate, the total accumulate HP loss will be set to 50%. This means that the Ultimate will no longer fully clear the HP loss tally after it's been used, and will instead automatically set it to 50%. As you cannot lose out on the damage from the HP tally before the Ultimate has already been used, this functionally means that after the first Ultimate of the fight, Blade is already halfway to having a maxed out HP tally, greatly increasing the damage consistency of his Ultimate.

His new A4 is a permanent 20% incoming healing increase. In addition to this, whenever Blade receives healing, 25% of the healed amount is automatically stored in the HP loss tally for the Ultimate. This goes for all healing by the way, including Blade's own healing from his Talent or even the Ultimate itself if you're low enough. This coupled with his new A2 means that Blade's Ultimate is pretty much always at max power forever.

Lastly, the A6 still increases the damage dealt by his Talent's Follow-up attack by 20%, but a second part has been added. The Follow-up will now restore an additional 15 Energy. Yeah, that's kind of an insane Energy bump for something that's going to be getting used extremely frequently. This means every single Follow-up attack that Blade does will be restoring 25 Energy for him, almost as much as his Enhanced Basic restores. This leads to even more Ultimates, which, thanks to the new A2 and A4, will be more juiced than ever.

Everything fits seamlessly together now, the kit flows like water and it has resulted in Blade's power skyrocketing — but not just his power, but also his overall consistency and quality of life. I could honestly end the review here because this alone is already fantastic.

There is yet more to say, however. Blade has already been doing a lot lot better recently due to the many different favourable situations that have been appearing in the endgame as well as the new characters from Amphoreus that can make excellent use of him, like Castorice. Even just having access to newer and stronger Planars is making a very surprising difference, accidentally proving that Blade actually is a surprisingly long-lasting character like I said way back when.

And he's getting even better now. There are so many more powerful support characters than there used to be, and many of them are perfect fits for what Blade wants to be doing anyway. Blade's newfound smoothness means he can take advantage of almost every single top tier support with ease.

One day, I dreamt of a support like Bronya that could be SP efficient. One day, we were blessed with Sunday. Blade's love of SPD and Action Advancers has not changed in the slightest. Though he is vastly more consistent with getting charges for his Talent through Hellscape, him being fast himself is also extremely important as it allows him to get even more guaranteed stacks of Charge for his Talent.

Sunday and Bronya both allow him to take additional turns that he otherwise wouldn't get, and massively buff his overall damage output as well. Bronya technically has lost some of her usefulness due to Blade no longer having any use for ATK% buffs, but anyone who's trying to say she's suddenly bad for Blade is scamming you.

The modern supports are also naturally very good for him, and are unsurprisingly also at the top of the list when it comes to building a team for him. If you're coming from the other updated reviews (because let's face it, most of you read the other three first) and aren't sick of hearing their mentions yet, this mostly refers to Cipher and Tribbie. If you're already sick of hearing about them and you haven't read the other updated reviews yet, I got bad news for you buddy.

However, speaking of the updated characters, the newly revamped Silver Wolf is actually an extraordinary support option for Blade (and everyone else now), especially since Blade can put in extreme work against DEF reduced enemies. Blade basically not consuming SP means Silver Wolf always has some ready to be used in case she needs to rapidly reapply her debuffs or if she needs to fish for additional energy. Both thematically and in terms of gameplay, It just works™.

There may be some desire for a comparison to a certain Chrysos Heir that also literally cannot die, but... There's really little reason in comparing. They're both immaculate characters that do a tremendous amount of damage and only fall in battle with immense difficulty and maybe skill issue.

Alas, I already made a slight comparison when talking about Blade's Enhanced Basic. Both Blade and Mydei occupy this berserker archetype, taking damage to deal damage, and being very durable while they do it. Mydei's damage potential is extremely high, and his ease of use is... I mean he quite literally plays himself outside of the Ultimate, so there's not really that much thinking required on the part of the player.

For Blade, he's maybe not able to focus fire as much as Mydei, but he gets to attack far more frequently, and most important of all is that Blade's got real AoE damage in his kit. Yeah that foreshadowing's paying off now, huh. Getting to deal actual AoE damage is extremely important, especially since AoE has become more and more integrated into the general design of the game, and Mydei ain't got that going for him.

Lastly for this comparison, Blade doesn't care about the actual numeric value of damage he receives, he cares about frequency of attack; Mydei's Vendetta state sets his DEF to 0 precisely because he needs to sustain a specific amount of damage to gain access to Godslayer Be God, but since Blade doesn't have such a requirement, he also doesn't suffer the same penalty. Blade gets to be tanky in both HP and DEF, making him also very comfy to play.

Final teammate options can be those that somehow siphon away HP from their allies in order to achieve something else. People have already been using Blade with Castorice to astonishingly high success, and this is only going to become a stronger pairing. The newly revamped old partner Jingliu is still very good as well, and a certain heinous Signature Light Cone (Long May Rainbows Adorn the Sky) that can also have a significant impact on the frequency of Blade's Follow-ups. Oh, and also Ruan Mei, but you already knew that, didn't you?

One last thing to mention is that Blade's E1 got an enormous buff. Previously, it would let Blade's Ultimate deal additionally increased damage to the target enemy, equalling 150% of the HP loss tally. It still does this, but now this increased damage effect extends to the primary target of his Enhanced Basic ATK as well. With a maxed out HP tally, his Enhanced Basic is doing literally double its damage against the main foe. Now that Blade's a potential target to lose your 50/50 to, this is a hell of a consolation prize to get, folks.

Yes, as a pure DPS character, he will inevitably start to lose out the damage war to newer and newer DPS, but the interesting thing to see with a kit like Blade's is that he's still been good and relevant for pretty much this entire time (except for the Break meta, that was cursed for every non-Break character except Acheron). It goes to show that he is genuinely quite resilient to changes in meta.

I'd say he's back, but the truth is... He never really left.