Honkai: Star RailJing YuanBuild and Guide

The Dozing General of the Xianzhou Luofu is undeniably a very powerful and intimidating character. He’s a character who performs well in spite of him being on the Path of Erudition; Jing Yuan is able to dole out great single-target damage in addition to already impressive AoE damage, and has bonus Crit stats for free that turn his already impressive damage up a notch.

Interestingly enough, you wouldn’t be able to tell how strong he can be with just a glance at his overall multipliers—they look rather modest, and that’s putting it generously… right? You wouldn’t know it, but the vast majority of Jing Yuan’s damage in combat comes from his talent, potentially as much as 70%! Where on earth does that damage come from?

Well, this is unfortunately a failure on the part of the skill description of Jing Yuan’s talent mostly. See, Jing Yuan is always shadowed by an additional in-combat entity, his Lightning Lord. Lightning Lord has its own Speed value and will act independently of Jing Yuan, and if Jing Yuan is downed in combat, Lightning Lord will also peace out.

The talent description is quite verbose and is rather confusing, resulting in many people severely underrating Jing Yuan as a character. Let’s try and break it down.

Lightning Lord’s attacks target a random enemy, dealing 25% of its damage to adjacent targets. Its attacks are considered follow-ups, and Lightning Lord has the base values of 60 Speed, and an Attack Count of 3. One Attack Count equates to dealing up to 66% of Jing Yuan’s atk at max trace level, which means Lightning Lord’s base damage with its base 3 Attack Count is up to 198% of Jing Yuan’s atk. Any further increases to this Attack Count will add on the value of 1 Attack Count to the current total.

This means that you just take the base multiplier and multiply it by the current Attack Count to work out how much damage Lightning Lord’s attack will deal. Since the absolute maximum amount of Attack Count is 10, this means Lightning Lord’s attack can deal at most up to 660% of Jing Yuan’s attack, and that’s if it’s only on one target. If there are multiple enemies all taking splash damage from each hit, it skyrockets to a theoretical maximum of 990%. Yeah, now you see where the ridiculous damage comes from.

An important clarification is that each Attack Count introduces the increased damage as a whole new instance of damage. This means at 10 stacks, it deals that 660% multiplier as 10 separate hits of 66%, with each one targeting different enemies and splashing onto foes adjacent to them. This spreads the total damage out relatively evenly across all targets, with only some slight losses occurring if some of the damage targets corner targets (thus losing half of the splash damage), but overall is a quite consistent AoE damage tool. More obviously, in single-target scenarios, all of that damage gets concentrated on that one target, creating quite the damage nuke.

In addition to this, every time Lightning Lord’s Attack Count increases by 1, it will gain 10 extra Speed. This pushes its turn forward and allows Lightning Lord to get more attacks over the course of a fight. The reason this is important to facilitate is that as mentioned previously, the max Attack Count is 10, so if Jing Yuan is somehow able to act again before Lightning Lord attacks, you can end up losing out on damage due to overcapping the Attack Count. In practice, this is extremely unlikely unless you turbo-stack Speed onto Jing Yuan.

Because each Attack Count adds the same amount of damage to Lightning Lord’s next attack, the damage gains from each stack are entirely linear (with one caveat discussed later), but you ideally want to be getting stacks as high as possible for speed purposes. After Lightning Lord attacks, its Attack Count will return back to the base value of 3, and its speed will also return to the base value of 60.

The way Jing Yuan increases the Attack Count of Lightning Lord is through his Skill and his Ultimate, and getting more uses out of each will increase the rate at which Lightning Lord can slam its heavenly spear directly through your enemies.

Jing Yuan’s skill deals AoE damage to all foes on the field, up to 100% atk to all at max trace level. A very unimpressive multiplier, but as we now know, this is not the main source of Jing Yuan’s damage; using this skill will increase Lightning Lord’s Attack Count by 2.

Jing Yuan’s ultimate is also an AoE attack, cleaving all enemies for up to 200% atk at max trace level, and simultaneously increasing Lightning Lord’s Attack Count by 3. This is a great way of instantly increasing the Attack Count, but it comes at a steep above-average energy cost of 130.

Because these two attacks increase Lightning Lord’s Attack Count—and more importantly, because basic attack does NOT increase Attack Count at all—Jing Yuan always wants to be spending SP to use his skill, as this will increase Lightning Lord’s Count, and will also regenerate more energy for Jing Yuan to get more ultimates off.

His bonus traces are expertly tailored to improve his performance and serve to increase his scaling even further. Remember that one caveat that was alluded to earlier? Well, his A2 bonus trace is where this caveat is. I said earlier that each stack of Attack Count is a linear increase in damage, and that’s true… up until you unlock his A2.

A2 makes it so that if Lightning Lord’s Attack Count is at 6 or above when it next attacks, its Crit Damage will be increased by 25%. This is an absurd bonus that will basically always be active unless Jing Yuan has his turn delayed. With even a small amount of investment into speed, 6 stacks is hardly a challenge to obtain otherwise, and you should always strive to reach at least 6 before Lightning Lord’s next turn.

This synergizes very well with Jing Yuan’s A6, which increases his crit rate by 10% for 2 turns after using his skill, meaning Jing Yuan has easy access to free crit stats in his kit, something that is usually only seen on Hunt characters. A4 also gives Jing Yuan a bonus 15 energy at the start of a battle, giving him a head-start in reaching his ultimate and stacking Lightning Lord to the max.

I do need to point out that maximizing Jing Yuan’s effectiveness means you need to pay extra attention to your skill order and rotation; if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be using Jing Yuan’s skill when he’s already at full energy, just as an example, you may notice that you inevitably run into scenarios where Lightning Lord is attacking before at least 6 stacks.

You may also want to specifically try and concentrate all of Lightning Lord’s immense power onto a single target, and so you’d ideally want to focus-fire any surrounding lesser foes before Lightning Lord strikes to maximize the number of Attack Counts going onto the main foe. Either way, Jing Yuan benefits a lot from more attentive play, as even small overcaps on energy can add up a lot over the course of an entire encounter.

However, despite the huge multiplier that Lightning Lord provides, it, unfortunately, does not always benefit fully from outside buff sources, meaning Jing Yuan loses out on a lot of the usefulness of potentially powerful buffs. In particular, because Jing Yuan desperately wants to be fast enough to gain as many stacks as possible for his Lightning Lord, Bronya would seem like a great pairing, but her damage buff from her Skill will always be gone by the time Lightning Lord attacks, and Lightning Lord itself is not a targetable entity.

This means, rather unfortunately, that Jing Yuan cannot be pushed up the heights of other characters in a hypercarry setting, since buff alignment is difficult enough without needing to worry about Lightning Lord’s turn order as well. Additionally, because Jing Yuan can seldom afford to avoid using his Skill, he is not a great flex pick either, meaning he is still ideally used as a hypercarry even with these prior limitations. Tingyun is far and away his best buffing support option, and even then it can be quite finicky to maximize their potential together. Stacking defense-shredding supports like Pela or Silver Wolf is likely the easier, and arguably better, strategy.

Jing Yuan is a great character owing to his fantastic talent scaling and inherent crit buffs. He works well in almost all circumstances but requires extensive knowledge about buff timing and turn order to truly maximize. He is not a cheap unit and demands a lot, but he can definitely be worth your while.

He also has spectacular hair. Even a general needs to look his best~