Honkai: Star Rail – an in-depth look at the elements and the toughness/weakness mechanic

Just like Genshin, Honkai: Star Rail has an element-based gameplay system that once mastered will lead to much easier victories over your enemies. The elements are closely tied to the most exploitable combat mechanic called Weakness Break, which when you inflict massively weakens your enemies and leaves them in a vulnerable state. We’ll explain what each element does and how they interact with the break mechanic. 

Of course, managing all of the elements and weaknesses becomes less of a pain when your characters are overpowered, and if you want to get them strong pretty quickly, you should consider Star Rail top up.

A few things to note before we go into more details:

• Toughness/Weakness Break are commonly referred to as Break bar/Break by the community
• Elements are officially called “ATK Types/Combat Types” by the game, but as with toughness and weakness break – the community at large refers to these types as elements

Going into the guide we’ll be referring to these aspects of combat the same way the community refers to them as.

The Break Bar and Break Mechanic

To explain how the elements work we’ll need to go over some details regarding the break mechanic first.

Each enemy has a break bar above their health. Some have more, others less, and the bosses and elite enemies have the most sturdy break bars. Each opponent s also weak to one, two, sometimes even three elements. When you hit opponents with the element they are weak to, you inflict break damage along with a little bit of HP damage and once their break bar is broken completely, they’re left in a vulnerable state where they’re turn is moved down and they take more damage from all characters.

Along with being broken and weakened, they’re also inflicted with an ailment based on the element that broke them. As you can see in the image below, when the enemy was broken by Ice, the status “Frozen” 

was inflicted on them. We’ll cover the effects in the next section.

The Elements.

There are seven elements in Honkai: Star Rail. One thing to note is that they aren’t called “Elements” in the game but “Types” and “Combat Type/ATK Type”. For the sake of clarity we’ll continue calling them Elements instead as most other people and even the Honkai Wiki calls them that. That said, here are all of the elements and the effects they trigger when they break an enemy

• Physical: Inflicting Weakness Break with Physical attacks will cause the enemy to bleed and inflict them with the “Bleed” DoT debuff. It lasts for 2 turns and deals damage at the start of the enemies turn
• Fire: Inflicting Weakness Break with Fire attacks will inflict the Burn DoT effect which lasts 2 turns and inflicts damage at the start of the enemy turn.
• Ice: Inflicting Weakness Break with Ice attacks will cause the enemy to be Frozen, removing their turn and taking additional Ice damage.
• Lightning: Similarly to Physical and Fire, Lightning will inflict the Shock DoT debuff which lasts 2 turns.
• Wind: Breaking the enemy with Wind damage can inflict 1 Stack of Wind Shear to normal enemies or 3 stacks to Elite enemies and Bosses, with a maximum of 5. Wind Shear does Wind DoT damage.
• Quantum: Weakness Breaking the enemy with Quantum damage will cause entanglement, delaying the enemies turn and making them take more damage each time they are hit during the entanglement.
• Imaginary: Inflicts Imprisonment on Break, causing the enemy speed to suffer (10% for 1 turn) and delays their turn by 30%

Closing Tips

Since all enemies have 2-3 Weaknesses, you’d be wise to take this into account when creating a team to tackle each challenge. Not only that, but you’ll want to know based on your team which types of breaks you want to effect, as some characters might have additional effects to their skills and ultimates based on the debuffs the enemies are suffering from. These mechanics can be disregarded if your team is much stronger than the enemy, and if you have strong 5* characters and weapons. The easiest way to achieve this is by topping up with U7BUY, see more.