Honkai: Star RailArlanBuild and Guide

Arlan is a primarily single-target damage dealer that consumes health to deal damage instead of consuming Skill Points. His Ability multipliers are decently high, especially for a 4-star, but they come at the cost of needing to juggle Arlan’s health for damage and survivability without Arlan having really any way of accommodating this himself.

Arlan is odd, and a little misunderstood. He’s definitely not the best unit in the game, to put it lightly, but he’s often written off completely as ‘unusable’. Look I’m going to level with you right off the bat, unless you quite literally have nobody else to level up, I guarantee you have better options to spend your extremely valuable and limited resources on. Arlan definitely has real use-cases but is overshadowed by other characters — not because he doesn’t perform well in those scenarios, but because he simply requires too many things to facilitate his gameplay.

Arlan’s Skill deals up to 240% ATK to a single enemy and consumes 15% of Arlan’s Max HP. If he doesn’t have enough HP, his health will be set to 1 when using Skill.

Two things to note here; the first is that while the actual text for Arlan’s Skill says ‘his HP will be reduced to 1’ if he doesn’t have enough health, it does in fact set his HP to 1 as mentioned previously, meaning that he may continue to use his Skill at no further penalty when he is already at 1 HP. The second thing to note is that this HP cost is in place of a Skill Point cost, meaning Arlan is quite literally incapable of using Skill Points for the purposes of any mechanics or interactions involving their consumption.

Arlan’s Ultimate is a Blast AoE that deals up to 320% ATK to the primary target and 160% to adjacent. It’s a fairly low-cost Ultimate requiring only 110 Energy. It has a pretty substantial multiplier considering its cost as well.

Arlan’s Talent is what is supposed to be the reward for staying at lower HP values. Arlan’s DMG increases for every percent below his Max HP up to a maximum bonus of 72% more DMG. This coupled with his surprising Ability multipliers should lead to pretty astounding damage in total, and this is partly true… The issue is that maintaining Arlan at low HP values is actually rather challenging without him immediately dying thereafter.

This immediately leads to the next issue; Arlan’s base stats are bloody awful, haha. I laugh to hide the pain, naturally, but this guy unironically has the worst DEF of literally any character, and he’s the one they chose to be the berserker archetype. Oof, talk about getting done dirty. His ATK isn’t the worst but it’s also fairly low for a character like his, and the fact that his HP is the one that’s above average is just another slap to the face.

Let me elaborate. When a character is all about consuming their own HP, the way in which they do it determines which defensive stat is worth more to them, out of HP or DEF. If the HP consumption is a flat amount, then having more HP will greatly offset the cost. However, if the HP consumption is via a fixed percentage of the character’s Max HP as is the case with Arlan, then DEF far outweighs HP because having more HP will just see the char burn through it faster. So for Arlan to have above-average base HP only to have the worst DEF stat of any character in the game is… Just why though?

His Minor Traces are equally questionable, giving him HP boosts again instead of DEF. The Major Ability Traces attempt to alleviate some of the pain of managing his playstyle but don’t really end up doing too much in practice. His A2 will restore 20% Max HP to Arlan upon killing an enemy if his current percentage is at or below 30%. This is the only HP restore in Arlan’s entire kit, leading me to say very clearly that Arlan is an expert at throwing his life away and struggles immensely to regain it.

A4 grants a passive 50% chance to resist DoT debuffs. This is only for the initial application of the debuff, it does exactly jack if you’re already afflicted with the DoT. A6 essentially grants a damage barrier to Arlan if he enters battle with 50% or less HP, similar to what the Automaton Beetles have. This would have been a fantastic thing to have if you were ever actually able to utilise it at the endgame; you just never have the option of doing so, and Arlan’s technique doesn’t consume HP either.

With Eidolons, Arlan’s respectable damage goes up even higher, but regrettably, none of his issues with survivability get meaningfully solved. E1 gives a 10% DMG boost to his Skill if executed at or below 50% HP. E2 is actually quite useful at removing pesky debuffs like ATK downs or Guardian Shadow’s Bans, but ironically does nothing against crowd control, since you actually need to be able to act to take advantage of this. E4 is also questionable as it gives Arlan a second chance after being knocked down but this only works for 2 turns after the battle has begun, disappearing into that good night if it’s not used prior to that point.

E6 is actually very notable. At or below 50% HP, his Ultimate will gain 20% DMG, and the DMG multiplier of the Blast AoE portion will be boosted up to the same amount as the primary target. This means his Ultimate is now dealing 320% ATK to 3 enemies, becoming a very potent AoE attack. Combined with the Ability Trace boosts from his E3 and E5, Arlan’s Ultimate actually becomes pretty absurd.

Now, at this stage I should reiterate that Arlan can do some very astonishing damage if he’s well invested, and especially at E6. I will also reiterate that the damage has never been the issue with Arlan. The reason so many bemoan the nerfs Arlan received upon the game’s launch compared to his performance in the final closed beta test is not because his damage is suddenly in the dumpster, it’s because it feels like it’s no longer justified by the rest of his kit.

If you’re looking to make use of Arlan, your main goal is making sure that he does not die before the enemy. You are essentially automatically signing up for a battle of attrition and the perfect defensive character does not yet exist for Arlan. Because of this, and his desire to stay at low HP values to max out his Talent, you are bottlenecked into using either March 7th or Gepard as the team’s sustain. Arlan needs very beefy shields to stay alive, because when you’re permanently at 1 HP, a sneeze will off you, let alone any of the nonsense moves like Decaying Shadow’s ‘sagacious discernment’. Stacking defensive units will improve Arlan’s survivability but will negatively impact the team’s overall damage.

Because of Arlan’s inability to use SP, he makes for a great second damage dealer on a team, contributing a surprising amount of damage without needing much in the way of buffs due to his Talent already providing a large amount of percent DMG. Double carry teams are not exactly chic right now, even in the wake of Ruan Mei’s release, but especially if you’re covering for Elemental Weaknesses, this can be a very good way to make use of Arlan.

You could also play Arlan as a hypercarry, again due to his quite impressive damage multipliers, though keep in mind that his desire for SPD can be questionable at best — a faster Arlan means he’ll burn through shields quicker as well, so you need to make sure that your shielder is fast enough to be able to reapply those shields in a pinch. This also unfortunately rules out Bronya almost immediately since her Action Advance will just massacre any shields Arlan has on him. 

If you are able to circumvent these issues for yourself and actually put Arlan to good use, you may be surprised by his performance. The unfortunate thing is that for the same amount of effort, you could play any of the other 4-star characters available to you, and last I checked, none of them seem so eager to maim themselves.

But I’ll end it with this; I like him. I even prefer him to Serval in a lot of cases. Do with this information what you will.