Honkai: Star RailGuinaifenBest build, teams and other guides

Guinaifen is an unexpectedly great support character. She afflicts enemies with a debuff that increases their total damage taken and can stack up to 3 times. She also deals a very impressive amount of damage over time (DoT) and can apply it very easily to many enemies at once. She can even be SP positive in 1 or 2 target scenarios, resulting in a near-universally applicable support character that also contributes very significant damage of her own. The cost of this is a very steep investment requirement, especially when compared to other support options.

Guinaifen, Guinevere, or just Gwen. However you choose to call her, her charm is infectious and fiery, and her gameplay is equally explosive. As a DoT-based character, you may be led to believe that Gwen is predominantly made for Kafka teams and that she may not see much use elsewhere, but you would be quite mistaken. 

Guinaifen’s Talent is the source of her powerful debuff. While she is still alive and on the field, there is a 100% base chance to apply the Firekiss debuff to an enemy after they sustain damage from a Burn DoT. Firekiss will increase the damage that the target takes by up to 7%, stacking up to 3 times for a total of 21%. 

Being able to inflict a 21% damage vulnerability is very strong. While damage taken is a slightly lesser debuff when compared to the likes of DEF Shred, it has the similar benefit of being very uncommon, meaning it often performs at its listed values due to not suffering from diminishing returns. Welt’s 12% damage vulnerability debuff already gets high praise, and Gwen comes in slamming with 21%. What’s more ridiculous is that Firekiss lasts for 3 turns, meaning this debuff is permanently active in practice. Even better is it’s completely unremovable, so there’s no possible way for enemies to get rid of it outside of its duration running out.

Since her Talent requires a Burn DoT, it’s only fitting that she can also apply one. Guinaifen’s Skill will deal damage in a Blast AoE, up to 120% ATK to the main target and up to 40% to adjacent foes. This Skill has a 100% base chance to Burn all targets hits for 2 turns. Oh and the Burn DoT itself deals up to 218% of Gwen’s ATK per tick. That is a very impressive damage multiplier to have in what is supposed to be a support character’s kit. Having a 100% base chance also means that it’s relatively easy to get enough Effect Hit Rate (EHR) to make this a guaranteed application on even the absolute pinnacle enemies you may encounter.

Guinaifen’s Ultimate deals damage to all enemies on the field, up to 120% ATK at max Trace level. If a target is afflicted with Burn, it will immediately deal damage equal to 92% of the Burn’s original damage. Yeah, the thing that Kafka does for all DoT effects, Gwen can do that for all Burns. This significantly improves her already quite impressive personal damage. With this Ultimate having an average Energy cost of 120, this is going to be up pretty often. This also has the added benefit of stacking Firekiss even faster, thus reducing the required ramp-up time. 

Guinaifen’s Bonus Ability Traces raise her efficacy quite substantially. Her A2 will grant her Basic ATK an 80% base chance to inflict the same Burn DoT as the one from her Skill. While the base chance is slightly lower than on her Skill, this is what allows Gwen to be SP flexible, as she can range from SP neutral to even SP positive in 1 or 2 target scenarios as the majority of her damage comes from DoT. With this Bonus Ability, Gwen is able to contribute very significant damage while still restoring SP.

Her A4 will Advance Forward Gwen’s action by 25% at the beginning of the fight, which with a good amount of SPD will usually mean Gwen is one of the first people to act in a fight, if not the first. It’s like having a weaker Vonwacq permanently without actually needing to use Vonwacq (this is the greatest trade deal in the history of trade deals).

Gwen’s A6 is particularly potent as it is exactly what Himeko has, causing Gwen to deal 20% increased damage to Burned enemies. This naturally also applies to the DoT effect she applies, and also stacks fully with her own damage vulnerability provided by Firekiss. Interesting to note as well is that Gwen is the first character to get Break Effect Minor Traces, getting a total of 24% Break Effect for free.

Guinaifen absolutely does not need Eidolons to be strong, but as a 4-star character it is entirely possible to eventually get Eidolons for her. Of particular note is E1 and E6. E1 grants Skill a 100% base chance to reduce the attacked enemies’ Effect RES by 10% for 2 turns, and E6 increases the maximum stacks of Firekiss to 4, meaning that by the time you get to this Eidolon level, Firekiss is going to be providing a 30.4% damage vulnerability.

This character is just kind of nuts. While her debuff of damage vulnerability is technically less potent than DEF Shred, the fact that it’s paired with exceptional personal damage more than offsets that difference. It’s even got full uptime and is laughably easy to maintain. In fact, Guinaifen’s personal damage output is arguably high enough that you could even reasonably put her into a hypercarry setup and see very impressive results.

However, the cost of this power is the need for investment, and it is a particularly great need for Guinaifen. Usually support options like Pela only really need a little bit of one important stat to get going, sometimes not even needing to be at max level. Guinaifen can get by with the bare minimum just like the aforementioned characters, but she won’t be able to compete with them at just that level, as she really wants to be built to deal damage as well. 

She reaches a whole new level when you actually invest into her fully, and while this is something that is ultimately a very good investment, it is also something that not everybody can immediately afford to do. In addition to this, since Guinaifen does deal damage and especially because she is likely to be using Basic ATK a lot, she also requires pretty much all of her Traces to be levelled up to the maximum, which is yet more investment compared to her fellow debuffer. 

Getting the required amount of EHR without sacrificing too much ATK% is actually quite difficult, and because of the need for such stats to begin with, Guinaifen can potentially be a little less safe when compared to support options that can afford to go for defensive stats. In practice, this should not be a particularly difficult thing to work around since Tingyun is one of the best supports already and has the same investment requirements and perceived squishiness, and Gwen has higher base stats than Tingyun does. If this is the supposed reason for your Gwen dying, that is most assuredly not the fault of Guinaifen. 

Think of her as a long-term investment that will only get better as you get more things for her. She’s worth the extra effort, even if it may not be immediately evident.