The Problem With Destruction Characters in Honkai: Star Rail

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Destruction was supposed to be Jack of all trades, master of none. Instead it became. Jack of all trades, MASTER OF ALL

They need to make better erudition units, it’s as simple as that. Jing yuan isn’t even that bad but something about the entire erudition path feels off.

In theory Destruction characters are supposed to be bruisers, but I think Hoyo kind of forgot about that fact. Since Lunae and Jingliu have the power of Hunt units along with the AoE potential of Erudition it's not surprising that it feels like Destruction is overpowering the other paths. Especially Erudition, it kind of feels like they've completely lost their identity already.

I think that hoyo tried making destruction high reward high risk, by eating up hp(or skill points) to make the rotation more harder because if you don't do it right the damege will fall (and your character with it) the only reason why it isn't much of a problem is because we have great supports

one idea would be to add a buff to each class that all units of that class share. for example, erudition units deal more dmg the more enemies there are, hunt units deal more damage the less enemies there are, and destruction units deal more damage the lower they are. that way each class is better for a certain type of combat

I do want to point out that the problem with destruction was apparent to anyone who had Clara in 1.0, if you had her E1 she was better than any Erudition character at thier job with a better element and still had all of her counter damage.

A thing not discussed in this video but I think bears bringing up for Erudition characters in general: not only did Mhy not give the Erudition cast solid numbers (Qingque as a half-exception), they also hamstrung them with their light cone options. The only "accessible" five star, Night On The Milky Way, actively gets worse in most boss fights, since the more enemies you kill, the further the buff drops off, making your Erudition wave-clearer's power nadir even more painful. The f2p four star options are a complete tossup- Make The World Clamor only affects ultimate damage, Birth of The Self only buffs followup attacks, and while Genius' Repose gives a ton of crit damage, it's sort of a side grade to The Seriousness of Breakfast, which is the only universally solid Erudition light cone. Hunt characters have the same amount of 4 star options, but their options are considerably less niche: Swordplay gives stacking damage% as long as you're hitting the same enemy, Subscribe For More gives damage% on your basics and skills, even River Flows In Spring's conditional buff is universal and reliable for hunt characters due to their decreased threat level. But none of those really matter for the average player, because they have a fantastic, totally free option in Cruising In The Stellar Sea. If you only have one Hunt carry you're building, you can kind of ignore the gacha entirely and have a fully imposed CITSS in a few weeks from the jump. Destruction characters? Destruction characters have it even *better*. Something Irreplacable gives a ton of free stats and survivability while utilizing Destruction's increased threat level, and On The Fall Of An Aeon is a pretty equivalent giant stat-stick that's entirely free to play accessible. A Secret Vow is one of the most universally useful four start light cones in the game, and even the less stellar four stars like Nowhere To Run, The Moles Welcome You and Under The Blue Sky are considerably less niche than the entire four star roster for Erudition. It boggles my mind that they prioritized adding a Nihility light cone to the Herta Shop over Erudition when Nihility already has some of the best 4 star options and they had already had entries for the two other primary damage paths in there.

my prediction is as the game progress, classes in the game will be blurred with unit overlapping each other. we already see it with Fu Xuan and HuoHuo where defence type class (Preservation & Abudance) giving buff to teammate

The fact that Destruction characters sometimes have eidolons that focuses their damage on a single target further makes me think Hoyo is playing favorites

Its a bit concerning star rail's meta has already shiftet a lot from hunt to destruction, genshin needed 1-2 years to shift from hypercarrys to reaction spam

This is just like when yomiya released "oh no she can only deal single target dmg". A year later and the abyss was filled with single target bosses. Its very likely that content favoring hunt and erudition will come over time.

Good video. All I want to add is I think the real draw of hunt units isn't so much single target damage, but single target damage PLUS their ability to cheat the turn limit. This is why Dan Heng original and yanqing aren't standing the test of time as well next to extra turn Seele, self advance Sushang and "I get two turns minimum every round plus an ultimate that gives me another 2" Topaz. Or at the very least I'm hoping that's how it's gonna go. We'll see when L+Ratio comes out, but I think that would be the most interesting thing that could be done with Hunt characters.

In words of Dr. Zajef, In Genshin, there are more dimensions for characters to be worth pulling for- easy of play, gameplay design, Animations in overworld - with exploration being a much bigger part etc. But in a turn based game like honkai, powercreep would be much faster as characters would has less dimensions to be worth pulling for.

If they made Erudition characters have permanent damage buffs scaling with enemies killed, it could make Erudition way stronger.

"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one." This sums up Destruction well. Because they are general DPS, their application and ability to be the central to any team outshines the specialized Hunt and Erudition. Especially so when their Eidolons strengthen their shortcomings. This is only made more apparent because Destruction has a higher HP as well so they aren't a much glass cannons.

It's not just a Destruction doing better than Hunt or Erudition thing, it's been less than a year and already characters are doing things outside their class designation Fu Xuan is the most egregious example, as while protecting her team as a Preservation, she also buffs their HP and heals them like an Abundance, while buffing Crit Rate (and later Crit Damage at E1) like Harmony There is fair reason to run Hunt, but there's almost zero reason to run Erudition ... Hoyoverse wants Himeko dead so much that they already killed her whole class XD

Qingque feel more like a destruction character more than a erudition character

And then we have Qingque who is Erudition masquerading as a Destruction unit.

Blade I was understanding of cause he fits the self sacrificing /self destructive bruiser play style while the only thing lunae destroys is your skill points at lower eidolons. Jing Liu goes against that self destructive play style and actively damages your team if they re-released her as hunt or erudition nobody would be able to tell. Oh and another thing, damn the last three were edgy I guess it is to balance the personalities of the destruction class with three cheerful/playful characters and three edgy characters.