[Guide] Honkai Star Rail – Is Jing Yuan That Bad? How to Build Him Efficiently

It has been 2 patches since the release of Jing Yuan, Arbiter-General of the Xianzhou Alliance’s Cloud Knights in Honkai Star Rail, and fans are starting to worry that he might have become a bad unit due to being powercrept by the newly introduced characters.

Since Jing Yuan’s release, HoYoverse has introduced four new 5★ characters, including two that fill the role of a DPS, which is also his primary role, and some fans claimed that he might have been powercrept as numerous forum posts can be found on the Honkai Star Rail’s official Reddit, debating that he is now bad, which isn’t true.

It has been approximately 3 months since Jing Yuan’s release and our initial guide of him, but the landscape of the meta in Honkai Star Rail has since changed.

So let’s analyze his strengths and weaknesses, as well as why there are many concerns that he has fallen behind compared to the new characters.

Skill Breakdown 

Jing Yuan is a 5★, Lightning character who walks the Path of Erudition, thus specializing in attacking multiple enemies at once with his element.

To begin understanding how Jing Yuan fights, we need to look at his Talent, Prana Extirpated, which summons Lightning-Lord at the start of combat to battle alongside him. Lightning-Lord acts as a separate entity with his own base speed and will attack all enemies when it is their turn. They possessed a base Hits Per Action of 3 and every time Jing Yuan uses either his Skill or Ultimate, the Lightning-Lord attack hit count increased, thus also their damage, as well as their speed but upon ending their turn, all their stats deplete back to the base value. Note that Lightning-Lord’s attack is considered a follow-up attack for Jing Yuan and will take on any buffs that boost follow-up attacks.

Both his Skill, Rifting Zenith, and his Ultimate, Lightbringer, are simple abilities that deal Lightning DMG to all the enemies while boosting Lightning-Lord’s hit counts and speed. While his Technique, Spirit Invocation, increases the Lightning-Lord’s Hits Per Action in the first turn at the start of an encounter. As such, most of Jing Yuan’s damage potential is locked behind Lightning-Lord and his playstyle revolves around getting his summon to take their turn to attack.

Strengths

Jing Yuan is overall a solid hypercarry and can be the only DPS in a team due to his amazing Lightning damage output that hit every single enemy at once in battle. Given the right team composition and scenario, Jing Yuan can even outdamage other hypercarry DPS.

Since Jing Yuan walks the Path of Erudition, he innately excels at dealing with crowds of enemies that Hunt characters struggle with while not sacrificing much on the damage. Another thing that made Jing Yuan an appealing DPS to have is that a good chunk of Honkai Star Rail’s enemy rosters is weak to Lightning, from the Automatons to various Elite Enemies, to even quite a few of the bosses like Cocolia, Phantylia the Undying, and Svarog.

Weaknesses

That being said, Jing Yuan does have some obvious weaknesses that sparked concerns within the community. For one, he fights with backloaded damage, slowly building up to his Lightning-Lord to do the dirty work as both his Skill and Ultimate don’t deal particularly much damage. Such a mechanic also forces Jing Yuan to be extremely Skill Point hungry, forcing players to build teams around him to ensure efficient Skill usage.

This also means that in battles that require players to complete within a minimum set of turns like Memory of Chaos, Jing Yuan doesn’t perform particularly well as the buildup to Lightning-Lord can be slow and takes multiple turns. That said, he can still be able to clear stages quickly with the right setup and team composition, albeit more effort is needed.

One notable weakness of Jing Yuan, however, is that he gets countered by crowd control effects and once he is incapacitated, Lightning-Lord will not take their turn resulting in a huge loss of damage. That meant that characters that can provide cleanse effects such as Bronya, Natasha, and Loucha are needed, even still these supports need to purge crowd control debuff from Jing Yuan before the Lightning-Lord takes their turn.

As a result, this made Jing Yuan one of the hardest characters to build optimally as players are required to hit specific stat breakpoints for Lightning-Lord to take turns more frequently and consistently while still ensuring efficient damage output.

Is Jing Yuan Bad? 

No, Jing Yuan is not a bad character, in fact, he is still a great DPS character among the sea of other equally strong characters. If we compare him to the 3 non-standard banners DPS characters, they all are played wildly differently and provide different utilities.

Seele is a Hunt character that focuses on high bursts of single-target damage to take down enemies one by one, through repeated turns that required her to eliminate targets first. On the other side, we have Blade, who is good in both single target and crowd damage but consumes HP to do so, making him an uncomfortable character to use for some people.

Meanwhile, Kafka is a great damage dealer but relies on DoT effects to be efficient, so she would not be effective against enemies with higher resistances to debuff. Moreover, since Kafka plays mostly on triggering DoT effects, she struggles in dealing burst elemental damage to break enemy weakness which is something Jing Yuan can do better.

As mentioned before, given the right setup, Jing Yuan can still deal an equal amount of damage or sometimes even outdamage other main DPS characters through his Lightning-Lord, albeit more effort is needed compared to how other damage dealers are played. The reason why there are fans concerned about Jing Yuan getting powercrept is due to the nature of his potential damage output needing far more hoops to jump through compared to other DPS units.

How to Build Jing Yuan?

As said, Jing Yuan is one of the hardest hypercarry to build due to how his mechanics work, which forces players to consider a lot of each of his stats. Firstly, it is important to address Jing Yuan’s speed, tuning it just right so that he can take turns twice before Lightning-Lord so he could stack up the hit counts. The recommended speed for Jing Yuan would be somewhere around 141 points thus might require the Relic boots slot to have a SPD main stat.

The go-to Relic set would be Band of Sizzling Thunder, which boosts Jing Yuan’s Lightning damage, but it is advisable to bring other allies along to try to support Jing Yuan in hitting some of the stats breakpoints. Asta is a great choice as her Ultimate provides the entire team with a great boost of speed and she can also boost ATK through her Talent.

Alternatively, if you have Bronya, you can bring her along as her Skill, Combat Redeployment, solves his speed problem by allowing him to immediately take a turn to start building up toward Lightning-Lord. Another great support for Jing Yuan is Tingyun, who can boost his ATK and also speeds up his energy charge through her Ultimate, thus allowing him to cast his Ultimate more.

Unfortunately for the Light Cone choices, the best option for him is still his signature 5★ Light Cone Before Dawn, which is not accessible until his eventual rerun. At the moment there is not much great free-to-play alternative to bring out Jing Yuan’s full potential. That said, if Jing Yuan can already unleash great damage without using Before Dawn, there may have other great budget-friendly Light Cone for him in the future as HoYoverse updates the game.

Verdict

As explained, Jing Yuan is not a bad character and has the potential to unleash damage comparable to other popular DPS characters. The problem of Jing Yuan is not his damage output or his job as an Erudition character, but how difficult it is to build him to meet the requirements for Lightning-Lord to take turns consistently.

If Lightning-Lord is not able to take turns, Jing Yuan loses the majority of his damage output thus making him lackluster when compared to other characters that don’t require much setup to deal an equal amount of damage. That being said, once built optimally and paired with great teammates, Jing Yuan can carry you in most content especially ones against enemies weak against Lightning.

It is also important to note that Honkai Star Rail has no competitive PvP mode, so as long as a character is able to clear content, you shouldn’t worry about a character slightly underperforming. Your enjoyment of a character should come first, not the chase of the tier list ranking.

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Honkai Star Rail

Publisher: miHoYo

Developer: miHoYo

Release Date TBC

Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows

Honkai: Star Rail is an all-new strategy-RPG title in the Honkai series that takes players on a cosmic adventure across the stars.

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