Honkai: Star RailCipherBest build, teams and other guides

Cipher is a Quantum universal support following the Path of Nihility. Cipher will store a percentage of the actual health damage dealt to enemies by all allies, and this stored damage can be dealt instantly through her Ultimate as True DMG. Cipher can launch a follow-up attack whenever allies attack her Talent's marked target, and she can even inflict high enemy damage vulnerability passively. She is able to provide an incredible and impactful amount of damage amplification for the team by simply existing within the encounter, but making the most of this is at the mercy of the individual player's skill.

Cipher is an excellent character and is on the ever-growing list of MVPs in Amphoreus. She's a fantastic, flexible support for any team you may like and even has strong potential to stay relevant beyond what one may normally expect. However, seeing peoples' reactions to Cipher from her trial version during the Galactic Baseballer event, it's clear that there are quite a few misunderstandings about our favourite car.

Immediately and before even going into her skills, I have to say that Cipher heavily encourages manual play; you most certainly can just set her to auto and walk away, but a sizeable portion of the reason you would want to be using Cipher in the first place can very easily become wasted by the Auto AI. You'll see why when we get to her Ultimate.

Cipher's Skill is the least noteworthy part of her kit. She will perform a Blast AoE attack, dealing up to 200% ATK to the main target and 100% ATK to adjacent enemies. She also has a 120% base chance to Weaken the enemies hit, reducing their DMG dealt by 10% and increasing Cipher's own ATK by 30%. These effects last for 2 turns. It's a fairly standard Skill, with standard amounts of Toughness damage and Energy regeneration. The Weaken can end up being quite nice for overall team survivability, but it's not something you should rely on, and in general Cipher is much better used for generating Skill Points, though the option of spending them is there if you need.

Cipher's Talent and Ultimate work together to highlight why this character can be so impressive. We'll start with her Talent. Cipher can mark enemies with the Patron state. When there are no Patrons on the field, Cipher automatically marks the highest HP enemy as the Patron, but she can also manually mark new foes by using her Skill or her Ultimate on them. When the Patron is attacked by other ally targets (not Cipher), Cipher will immediately use a follow-up attack against the enemy, dealing up to 150% ATK. This can happen once per Cipher's turn. The damage is not hugely impressive, but interestingly enough this follow-up attack has above average Toughness damage at 20.

Now the important part. Cipher will record 12% of the non-True DMG that allies deal against the Patron, discounting the Overflow DMG. This means that only the real health damage is considered, so the maximum total recorded DMG from a single Patron is equivalent to 12% of the enemy's Max HP.

This is what the little Coin gauge Cipher has represents; it is your stored damage in multiples of 1000. If you see 20, the stored damage is equal to 20000. If you see 1000, you've got 1 million stored. It's not one to one since it's considering the small numbers as well, but it's just not shown to avoid clutter.

Cipher's Ultimate is what allows you to use this stored damage. She will hit a single target enemy for 120% ATK and then hit the targeted enemy again alongside the adjacent enemies for 40% ATK. This one attack is dealt in two stages. The damage stored by Cipher's Talent is then redistributed across the duration of the Ultimate; the initial single-target hit will deal 25% of the stored damage as True DMG, and the Blast AoE hit will deal the remaining 75% of the stored Talent damage as True DMG, spread evenly across the targets.

This means against 3 enemies, the central target will take 50% of the stored damage as True DMG (25% + 25%), and the adjacent foes will each take 25% as True DMG. If there are fewer than 3 enemies, the redistribution will become more generous until you're hitting only a single enemy, at which point you will be dealing the full 100% stored Talent damage as True DMG.

After using the Ultimate, the stored damage tally is cleared, and you will need to build it up again for the next Ultimate to utilise.

With this, Cipher can end up dealing a colossal damage nuke of what is essentially fully True DMG whenever you feel it's time to use her Ultimate. As a reminder, True DMG is unaffected by almost everything, so it does not care how resistant the enemy is or if it's currently got that pesky Safeguard buff, or whatever mechanics need to occur before it takes 'real damage'. Cipher's Ultimate WILL deal its damage.

Now you see why the Talent doesn't allow True DMG to count for the stored damage tally, because you could get infinite scaling. This is also the reason why Cipher is potentially wasting her benefits on Auto mode, because using her Ultimate on cooldown is not always efficient for the purposes of stacking damage onto a single important target. As a result of this, even if you have access to her Ultimate (which only costs 130 Energy), you're encouraged to NOT use it until you have a sizeable amount of stored damage on the Talent, and Auto mode will not have the best judgement in this regard.

There are some exceptions to this such as in the case of a Feixiao team, where you may want to use her Ultimate more frequently for extra hits to fuel Feixiao’s Ultimate faster, or if you wish to more quickly end a specific boss phase, you can use it earlier. The important thing is that you need to be aware of how you’re using the Ultimate in order to get the most out of it.

• Her A2 Bonus Trace will give her a boost based on her SPD value. When at or above 140 SPD, Cipher gains 25% CRIT Rate and the recorded damage value from her Talent increases by 50%. When at 170 SPD or above, Cipher will get 50% CRIT Rate and the recorded damage value from her talent increases by 100% instead.

  • This straight up doubles the amount of stored damage, and gives her a lot of CRIT Rate for free to boot. As such, it is imperative that you reach the 170 SPD threshold when using Cipher or you're basically trolling yourself.

• Cipher's A4 will expand her Talent to also record 8% of the non-True DMG that ally targets deal to enemies that are NOT the Patron, and overflow damage is similarly not considered. This is affected by the aforementioned Bonus Trace, meaning it can be up to 16% if Cipher is at 170 SPD.

  • With this Trace active, AoE damage dealers become very good at stacking up damage for Cipher's Talent, and while it's at a reduced rate compared to the damage dealt against the Patron, it is still extremely significant.

• Lastly, Cipher's A6 will increase the CRIT DMG of her Talent's Follow-up attack by 100%, and will additionally give her a new passive effect that increases the DMG received by all enemies by a whopping 40% as long as Cipher is on the battlefield.

  • The increase to the Follow-up is nice even if her personal damage isn't hugely impressive, but really that permanently active 40% DMG Vulnerability is what pushes things over the edge. You absolutely must have all of these Bonus Traces active.

So now, factoring in all of these Bonus Traces with the rest of the kit, you can hopefully see just how absurd Cipher can be for a team. Non-negligible personal damage, a no-cost permanent enemy Vulnerability debuff, and the ability to store a significant portion of the damage allies deal to enemies, to be released later with Cipher's Ultimate.

When it comes to using the stored damage, one could consider this as essentially just a 16-24% True DMG boost, in much the same way that the Remembrance Trailblazer can provide. If considered in this way, you may be led to think it's not very impressive, but this is an incomplete view.

Cipher is able to provide this to the entire team, so everyone's contributions are considered, and most importantly, the damage isn't dealt instantly. YOU get to decide when you want to use it, and because of this, Cipher is actually quite damage efficient. Overkilling enemies is something that can happen quite a lot with strong teams, and especially when the first wave or two feature weaker enemies, applying lots of buffs to your DPS can have a sizeable portion of that damage go to waste at that stage.

With Cipher, you get to essentially take that bonus damage you would be dealing with a traditional buff and store it for later, meaning you can avoid egregious overkill while also charging a devastating one-action nuke. This is especially potent if you 'transfer' the damage you dealt in the first wave to a subsequent wave, carrying over damage you may otherwise have wasted and getting to explode an entire Boss phase instantly.

This is very consistent too, since Cipher's Talent doesn't consider overflow damage to begin with, you'll always have similar amounts of damage stored from a wave of the same enemies; if you have an enemy with 100k HP, by defeating them you will always have 24% of the real health damage dealt stored by Cipher, which would be 24k. In this way, the more HP enemies have, the more damage can be stored by Cipher in advance (provided your team can deal the damage necessary to kill the enemy in the first place).

In this regard, Cipher can be considered to be a unit with a fairly long inherent lifespan, quite fitting for a feline character. The only true downside is that Cipher requires your undivided attention to extract all her benefits — a ‘cerebral approach’ if you are so inclined. As such, Cipher will still be useful for pretty much everyone and anyone, provided you're willing to put in a small amount of brain power towards using her Ultimate well. Even just exhibiting patience and not using her Ultimate immediately will get you very far.

But this is also definitively the reason why you would want to use Cipher. She's a universal debuffing support that can take damage you were already doing anyway, amplify it and repurpose it to delete something later. Her own personal damage, while non-negligible, is lacking enough that she's not able to steal the DPS show like Anaxa can.

The self-buffs are fairly good, but the ability multipliers are modest, and she cannot afford to go for damage stats and substats in relics if it means you don't reach the 170 SPD threshold. However she is still quite flexible in her build, as you can opt for an ATK rope to improve her personal damage and make it matter a little bit more, or you can opt for Energy Regeneration Rate for quicker Ultimate access in the teams where you may want to use it far more frequently.

She's even got some great synergies with existing DPS characters, especially the ones that like lots of attacks or that want frequent debuffs. With Cipher's Signature Light Cone, she can also provide DEF reduction to all enemies at a very consistent rate and can reapply the Light Cone's debuffs on every attack, meaning she's particularly noteworthy as a partner for Acheron.

Feixiao also appreciates the frequent follow-ups and general fast attacks that Cipher can provide, and not needing to worry about maintaining any of the amplifying effects that Cipher provides is a huge boon, especially since it means more SP is available for the rest of the team to use.

And for pretty much every other team as well, Cipher is fantastic. She may not always be the absolute undisputed best in each respective team, but she's is always the direct runner up, and it's a CLOSE second, too. It just works™.

The only real downside at this moment (besides requiring conscious thought) is that Cipher's Light Cone options are somewhat limited, encouraging the acquisition of her Sig. This is sadly not a particularly new phenomenon for Nihility characters. The most generally good option is Resolution Shines as Pearls of Sweat for the DEF reduction it can provide as well, but it's a gacha-exclusive Light Cone so far from everyone has it, especially at S5 which is when it's actually possible to utilise well. Cipher's EHR requirements are very low at only ~139%, but if you want to be consistent with Pearls, you need to bleed for that 167% EHR.

For her Eidolons, it's the usual spiel of them being entirely unnecessary but nice to have. Cipher's E1 is pretty noteworthy as it increases the recorded DMG of the Talent to 150% of the original damage recorded, so you can get more damage per damage. The ATK increase on Follow-ups is also quite nice. 

Cipher is just the GOAT (on manual play). She works excellently in every team for every character, but she may not be for every player. If you're fond of high-end optimisations and low-cycle clears, or if you're in need of another top-tier support character, do yourself a favour and get Cipher. She's truly built to last.

She is the fleet-Footed Thief Star, and she's the fastest car alive.