Honkai: Star RailHyacineBest build, teams and other guides

Hyacine is a Wind Remembrance healer that scales with HP. She is a peculiar but highly potent hybrid of healing sustain and damage dealer, with the ability to increase the Max HP of allies and provide fairly consistent debuff cleansing as well. Her memosprite Little Ica can deal damage based on a tally of the total healing done by Hyacine and Little Ica in the battle, resulting in staggering amounts of damage being dealt. She is an immaculate support option for any team, but especially for the many HP scaling units we now have available.

The Path of Remembrance clearly didn't get the memo about picking a lane and sticking to it, as with Hyacine's release, it now has DPS, support, and healer niches all available to the one Path. Not that I'm complaining, because Hyacine is pretty ridiculous all around, and has a very cute memosprite called Little Ica, who definitely hasn't overtaken the community with various memes, and is definitely not some all-devouring god... probably.

Hyacine is a sustain unit who is capable of dealing pretty remarkable damage as well. Little Ica has an initial Max HP equal to 50% of Hyacine's Max HP, and her Talent will also increase Little Ica's DMG dealt by 80% for 2 turns whenever either Hyacine or Little Ica provide healing to allies, stacking up to 3 times. This will make sense shortly.

Her Skill will summon Little Ica and restore 8% of Hyacine's Max HP plus 160 for all allies besides Little Ica. It will instead restore 10% Hyacine's Max HP plus 200 for Little Ica. Little Ica's healing is done by sacrificing some of their HP, so getting a little bit of extra healing from Hyacine's Skill is very nice.

Hyacine's Ultimate will also summon Little Ica if they are not present yet, and will restore 10% Hyacine's Max HP plus 200 for all allies besides Little Ica, who will receive 12% plus 240 instead. This Ultimate will put Hyacine into the After Rain state for 3 turns, and will be reduced by one at the start of Hyacine's turn. During After Rain, all allies have their Max HP increased by a ludicrous 30% plus 600, resulting in hilariously large HP values.

This bonus affects Hyacine herself, meaning that all of her healing is also greatly increased in the process, as well as the healing that Little Ica provides. Having a whopping 30% extra Max HP is a massive boost to survivability for the entire party by default, but when paired with other HP scalers this becomes a massive boost to overall damage dealt, especially for characters like Castorice.

So far, a fairly standard (though strong) kit, nothing really too outstanding, right? Ah, but we've yet to address the fluffy harbinger of doom Hyacine calls her memosprite yet.

Little Ica's Talent describes how they act. They have 0 SPD, are immune to all debuffs, and will not appear on the Action Order. This hasn't really happened before, even summons like Lightning-Lord and Numby appear on the Action Order even if they can't be hit. Despite not showing up on the Action Order, Little Ica CAN still get targeted and hit for various effects and damage.

Whenever allies other than Little Ica have their HP reduced for whatever reason, be it an enemy attack or self or ally consumption, Little Ica will consume 4% of their own Max HP to heal that ally by 2% of Hyacine's Max HP plus 20. This healing will occur at the start of any target's turn or after any target takes action. This is just a fancy way of saying it's ever so slightly delayed but not by enough to ever matter. This is quite useful for interactions where the amount of HP someone is missing is relevant for the turn in which they act.

When Hyacine is in the After Rain state, Little Ica's healing effect will restore HP for all ally targets instead of just the one that triggered the condition. This means Hyacine and Little Ica get to restore a tremendous amount of HP during Hyacine's Ultimate duration, making it particularly easy to maintain a team with characters that sacrifice their life.

This is where the damage now comes in. During the After Rain state, Little Ica will gain an Extra Turn whenever Hyacine uses an ability, and will automatically use 'Rainclouds, Time to Go!'. This is a fully AoE attack that has a unique multiplier.

Throughout the encounter, Hyacine is keeping a tally of the amount of healing done by herself and Little Ica for that specific encounter. This tally is then what is used to calculate the damage of Little Ica's giga drill breaker; 20% of the tally of healing done that encounter is converted to Wind DMG and dealt to all enemies on the field.

If you're looking at that and thinking 'oh that sounds like a lot of damage', congratulations, you are absolutely correct. More amusing is that this is a very consistent amount of damage to be doing as well, especially from the character occupying the sustain slot on the team.

It's not infinite damage, however. Every time Little Ica pierces the heavens, the healing tally will be reduced by 50%. But since it's not getting completely wiped every time, this means you will always be doing *some* damage, and with the healing throughput that Hyacine can have (especially on the teams that like to maim themselves to deal damage), it's going to be *good* damage.

Little Ica has a couple more passives as well. When summoned, Hyacine will restore an extra 15 Energy, increased to 30 Energy if it's the first time Little Ica is being summoned in the encounter. This means that Hyacine can very reasonably and consistently get a first turn Ultimate off in fights. Her Energy amount is only 140 which, while technically above average, is by no means so high that it's difficult to maintain most of the time. The last thing is that if Little Ica falls, Hyacine's action will be advanced by 30%, making it easier to resummon Little Ica quickly.

It's a lot, and we're still not done, because there's the Bonus Traces as well.

• A2 will increase Hyacine and Little Ica's CRIT Rates by 100%, meaning they are always guaranteed to crit. In addition, whenever healing is provided for a target whose HP is equal to or less than 50% of Hyacine's Max HP, both Hyacine and Little Ica will gain a 25% Outgoing Healing boost. For low HP teammates such as those that do not scale their damage off of HP, or for particularly aggressive HP consumers, this is going to be active very often.

• A4 will simply increase Hyacine's Effect RES by 50%, and will let Hyacine cleanse a debuff from every single ally whenever she uses her Skill or her Ultimate. Easy access to a teamwide cleanse is invaluable for quite a few fights where it is otherwise easy to get overwhelmed by debilitating debuffs, and being more resistant to crowd-control herself is also very valuable, especially as it makes reaching 100% Effect RES that much easier, should you choose to do so.

• Lastly, A6 is a stat conversion Trace. When Hyacine's SPD exceeds 200, Hyacine and Little Ica will increase their Max HP by 20%. Then, for every 1 excess SPD, Hyacine and Little Ica will gain 1% Outgoing Healing bonus, up to 200% Outgoing Healing at 400 SPD.

Now, obviously you are never hitting this number ever in regular gameplay, ever. However, the 200 SPD threshold is surprisingly easier to reach than you may expect; Hyacine's Base SPD is 110, and she gains 14 SPD through her Minor Traces, so with some guaranteed SPD bonuses from Relics and a little bit of luck on substats, and you could very easily surpass 200 SPD when in combat, and indeed you should aim for it as the extra HP is a massive boost to all of what Hyacine wants to be doing.

With all of that covered, it should be apparent that Hyacine's poised to be extremely useful for any team, as the healing output is phenomenal. As mentioned, her usefulness for Castorice is extremely high, and her use for other characters that scale around HP is similarly high.

This, however, does come with a catch, which is how it can become less efficient to utilise Hyacine in teams that are not so SP efficient. In order for Hyacine to maintain her Ultimate’s After Rain state and keep Little Ica moving and her huge HP buff active she needs to use a skill every action or gain a significant amount of energy through combat - failing to do this will lead to downtime. Because of this Hyacine is strongest in teams with skill points to spare, though she’s still good in tighter SP set-ups, just less potent.

Fortunately, Mydei and Castorice are incapable of consuming Skill Points, Blade uses very few, and each of their other team members generally restores more SP than they can consume anyway, so there is a surplus of Skill Points for Hyacine to use. Even outside HP scalers characters like Anaxa can be quite SP efficient if he needs to be and those who don’t require the HP% boost from Hyacine’s ultimate can manage a bit of downtime without much loss - meaning Hyacine can still be a top sustain choice across the board.

Hyacine can also work as a substitute sustain unit in Feixiao teams and The Herta teams. For Feixiao, because Little Ica's attacks count towards generating Flying Aureus stacks for Feixiao, you can get a consistent stream of charge for Feixiao's Ultimate. It's a little more consistent than Aventurine, but without all of the other benefits that Aventurine brings. For The Herta teams, Lingsha is still undeniably the best option, but Hyacine is not too far behind, so is a viable alternative.

With the inclusion of Hyacine's Signature Light Cone, she gains access to a debuff, meaning she is also now usable for Acheron to generate points of Slashed Dream for Acheron's Ultimate. This actually ends up being quite substantial and results in being the most consistent source of debuff generation from the sustain slot in an Acheron setup (excluding E2S1 Aventurine).

As alluded to earlier this Light Cone also allows her to turbo-charge Blade due to its ability to siphon a token amount of HP whenever Hyacine uses a Basic, Skill, or Ultimate. This leads to Blade getting substantially more Talent follow-ups off and greatly increasing both his total damage output as well as his survivability. This is maybe the least compelling option of the teams right now, but Blade is slated to receive buffs Soon™, and depending on how that goes, this might be a particular synergy worth keeping an eye out for.

Realistically, Hyacine is not that hard to use, so if you're paying even a small amount of attention, you'll probably be completely fine in whatever way you want to use her. There is actually a semi-cursed potential to use her as a hypercarry because of what Little Ica can do, pair her with Sunday and watch the sparks fly, but this is not her primary intended use case, so it's up to the individual if they want to go down this path. All we’ll say is that you may be surprised at the power of the portly Pegasus.

Now go, my little devourer of worlds, be free and fill thy belly!