How elements and elemental weakness work in Honkai Star Rail

Screenshot by PC Invasion

Honkai Star Rail lets you unleash the power of the elements when you fight foes in the game world. However, this is primarily tied to the break mechanic, where you destroy a target’s shields. Here’s our guide to help explain how elemental weakness works in Honkai Star Rail.

Note: We’ll have a Honkai Star Rail guides and features hub once the game has officially released, so stay tuned.

How elements and elemental weakness work in Honkai Star Rail

There are currently seven elements in Honkai Star Rail. We list these, as well as their colors and symbols, below:

• Physical – grey; two crossed swords.
• Fire – red; flame.
• Ice – light blue; snowflake.
• Wind – green; cloud or gust.
• Lightning – purple; spark.
• Quantum – dark blue; orb with sharp edges (looks a bit like a chakram or an eye).
• Imaginary – gold; shining cross.

Screenshot by PC Invasion

Elemental combat in Honkai Star Rail versus Genshin Impact

If you’ve been playing Genshin Impact, then the Honkai Star Rail elements or elemental weakness system will be quite different from what you’re used to:

• Each enemy in Honkai Star Rail can have one or more elemental weaknesses. If you hit them with a character with that element on the overworld map, you can apply a weakness effect once the battle begins.
• There are no elemental reactions, at least none that I’ve noticed so far during the closed beta. That means using a lightning attack on a target, followed by fire, wouldn’t cause Overload. Similar to that, the wind element doesn’t necessarily spread applications akin to Swirl.
• For the most part, elements are just there to denote which one deals more damage so you can break a target’s shield. Once the shield is broken, the target suffers an additional debilitating effect based on the element that depleted it (i.e., if an opponent is weak against ice, and ice is used to deplete the shield, the foe will get frozen).
• If several enemies have the same type of elemental weakness and a character has a multi-target/AoE attack that matches the element, you can deplete the shields of those hostiles.
• Do note that attacking a shielded enemy with a character that doesn’t match its elemental weakness will simply do minuscule or ineffective damage.
• The shield will be fully restored once that enemy’s turn has begun, so you’d need to reuse the same characters/elements to deplete it once more.

Related guides: Character paths/classes and turn-based combat system.

Screenshot by PC Invasion

Honkai Star Rail is available via its official website.