Honkai: Star Rail is an incredibly enjoyable strategy role-playing game, but it can be difficult to figure out which characters you should be using to have the best chance at tackling the content you’re coming up against. Read on to get a better understanding of team compositions and characters that are valuable to invest in early on.
The Best Team Setups to Succeed Early in Honkai: Star Rail
You start off in Honkai: Star Rail with a small selection of characters. Luckily, they are all pretty decent. You’ll gain more characters to use as you play through the main story, complete challenges, collect daily rewards, and redeem Warp Tickets. While most methods get you characters for free, you can also purchase Warp Tickets.
The current welcome banner at the top of the Warp page provides a 20% discount. This means you’ll require only 8 Rail Pass Tickets to Warp 10 times. As you’re guaranteed a 5-star character after 50 Warps, you’ll want to take advantage of the opportunity, and it shouldn’t take you long to accumulate the required 40 Tickets given the number of early game rewards. The 5-star characters can define your team, so it’s worthwhile to spend your Rail Pass Tickets on this limited event first.
With that in mind, we can move on to team comps in Honkai: Star Rail. The ideal setup is to have one single-target damage character, one area-of-effect damage character, one offensive/debuff support and one defensive/healing support. You can find out how those classes map to the combat paths in Honkai: Star Rail here. A suitable variation if you don’t have the required characters would be to use one defensive support and one healer if you’re having trouble with the damage you’re taking.
Early on, you’ll have access to your main character (the Trailblazer), Dan Heng, March 7th, Asta, and Herta. You’ll also get Natasha, Qingque, and Serval further into the story. Using the ideal team composition with just these free characters we can already make a great team:
Best Free Character Team Comp
Dan Heng – Trailblazer – Asta – March 7th
This is the ideal team composition to tackle most content early on. It provides great type coverage with Dan Heng being Wind type, the Trailblazer Physical, Asta Fire, and March 7th Ice. These typings will cover most enemies that you will run into early on.
We also have an ideal composition. Dan Heng is our high-damage, single-target expert. Just make sure to use his second ability as often as possible to deal the most damage. The Trailblazer has awesome AOE damage, with their abilities and ultimate allowing us to burst down a bunch of enemies at once.
Asta is our offensive support, providing utility in the form of her ultimate which increases the speed of our whole team for 2 turns. This is huge as it means we deal a lot more damage before the enemies have a chance to attack, so you’re likely to break them more often and avoid taking damage. For the most part, you should use your basic attack with Asta and save the skill energy for your damage dealers or March 7th.
Speaking of, March 7th is our defensive support. Her second ability is to provide shields, which you’ll want to apply to whichever character is being targeted to tank the damage. Her ultimate enables her to freeze entire teams, which can help you avoid damage and get through tough encounters!
Make sure you also place the characters in your team setup in the order given above to optimize energy usage and therefore give the best damage output and timing for skills.
Once you get into Warping with your Rail Pass Tickets and get your first 5-star and some extra 4-stars, you can easily change up this core team to accommodate your characters.
Possible Variations on The Starting Team Comp
5-star replacements for Dan Heng – Yanqing or Limited 5-star damage dealers such as Seele or the upcoming Kafka
5-star replacements for Trailblazer – Clara, Himeko, Jing Yuan, or Blade
5-star replacements for Asta – Bronya, Welt, or Silver Wolf
5-star replacements for March 7th – Luocha, Bailu, Gepard, or Fire Trailblazer (unlocked later in the game)
4-star replacements for Dan Heng – Hook, Sampo, Sushang, or upcoming Luka
4-star replacements for Trailblazer – Sampo or Serval
4-star replacements for Asta – Tingyun, Pela, or Yukong
4-Star replacements for March 7th – Natasha (although she’s more of a sideways step if you prefer healing over shields)
That covers it for the best early game team comp in Honkai: Star Rail. We’ve also covered how you can upgrade your team from the starting comp as you add more characters to your roster. And you can find a ranked list of all the characters currently in the game here. Follow this strategy and you’ll be having a much better time tackling the content!
Related: How to Obtain Star Rail Special Pass in Honkai Star Rail on Siliconera
