Honkai: Star RailJingliuBest build, teams and other guides

Jingliu is a highly competitive damage dealer. She follows in the footsteps of Blade, and has many intrinsic ways to boost her damage output. She also naturally has Action Advance in her kit, granting her substantially more actions over time. These two things combined make her one of the most flexible units in the game, having a plethora of teammate options to choose from as well.

The mysterious moonlit woman formerly renowned as the Sword Champion of the Luofu, Jingliu repeatedly proves that she is deserving of that title, and her feats in game are no exception.

Jingliu’s kit revolves primarily around her Talent. Jingliu can accumulate stacks of Syzygy, up to 3 in total. Whenever she has at least 2 stacks of Syzygy, she enters the Spectral Transmigration state. Entering this Spectral state will immediately advance her action by 100%, meaning it is now her turn. Note that this is different from an Extra Action; any kind of buffs or debuffs will continue to tick down on this advanced action as normal. Under the Spectral state, Jingliu gains up to 50% CRIT Rate at max Trace level, and her Skill is replaced by a special Enhanced version.

Using attacks under Spectral Transmigration will siphon 4% Max HP from all other allies to increase Jingliu’s ATK for the current attack. This part is written confusingly but it takes the total HP it steals from allies and multiplies it by 540% to get the total ATK increase it provides to Jingliu, up to a cap of 180% base ATK at max Trace level. With well-built characters in your team, this cap is pretty much attainable each and every time you attack in the Spectral state, resulting in far greater damage values than you’d otherwise expect.

Ordinarily, Jingliu’s Skill is a single-target attack dealing up to 200% of her ATK. At the same time, it grants her 1 stack of Syzygy. This is her primary way of obtaining stacks of Syzygy for the purposes of her Talent. Under her Spectral state, this Skill becomes Enhanced, becoming a Blast AoE dealing 250% ATK to the primary target and 125% to adjacent foes. Most importantly, this Enhanced Skill does not cost a Skill Point, instead consuming 1 Stack of Syzygy. Her Spectral state will end upon reaching 0 stacks of Syzygy.

Jingliu’s Ultimate deals 300% ATK to a single enemy and 150% to adjacent foes. This will also grant 1 stack of Syzygy after the attack ends. While this can help her more quickly enter her Spectral state from base, it’s far more effective to use it while already within the Spectral Transmigration state, as this will allow her Ultimate to benefit from the ATK increase from the HP syphon, as well as the increased CRIT Rate. This has the additional benefit of extending Spectral Transmigration for an extra turn, meaning you can get a third Enhanced Skill in before you run out of Syzygy.

Usually, I don’t mention characters’ Techniques unless they’re of particular note, and Jingliu’s most definitely is. She creates a dimension around herself for 20s, freezing all enemies around you. Entering combat while the dimension is active will immediately regenerate 15 Energy for Jingliu and grant a stack of Syzygy. This head start is nothing particularly new since a lot of characters have something like this, but it also has a 100% base chance of Freezing all enemies for 1 turn. Because this is a dimension effect, this Freeze will also be reapplied at the start of every new enemy wave, which is exceptionally powerful, especially in Memory of Chaos.

Jingliu’s Bonus Traces are pretty impactful for her. A2 provides Jingliu a 35% increase to Effect RES during Spectral Transmigration, helping combat Crowd Control effects somewhat. A6 provides her Ultimate with 20% extra damage if used during Spectral Transmigration, further incentivizing using it during that state. A4 is potentially quite significant as well, offering a 10% Action Advance upon using her ordinary Skill, reducing the downtime between the end of the previous Spectral Transmigration and the beginning of her next one.

Jingliu also has the first instance of SPD Minor Traces, giving her an additional 9 SPD. Note that like all Minor Traces, this is not added to the base value and is instead additional. She’s also got an absurd 37% CRIT DMG from Traces, the highest of any character thus far. Coupled with her 50% CRIT Rate from Spectral Transmigration, she has a lot of free stats to work with.

This can create an interesting dilemma however. These stats encourage going for a CRIT DMG chest piece which is likely to be her best choice, but because of the free CRIT Rate she gets, it’s actually quite possible to reach 100% and reach the fabled realm of guaranteed crits. Attaining this with a CRIT DMG chest piece, so as to retain a high CRIT DMG stat along with the 100% CRIT Rate, can be quite challenging. However, while this can become a pretty big investment sink, the payoff if you actually achieve this is astonishing and well worth the effort. If that doesn’t sound like something you want to subject yourself to though, rest easy knowing that Jingliu really doesn’t require this to be spectacular.

Eidolons are not necessary at all, but E1 is potentially quite enticing; it gives Jingliu 24% extra CRIT DMG for 1 turn when using her Ultimate or Enhanced Skill, and if only a single target is attacked, the target will receive additional damage which drastically increases Jingliu's single target damage potential.

Just like Blade, Jingliu is very flexible in her team setups; because of Jingliu’s low and infrequent SP usage, she can take advantage of some quite SP-hungry supports like Yukong or Bronya. Bronya especially is a very potent pairing due to Jingliu’s kit revolving around total action count, and with both of them having a way to fully Turn Advance Jingliu to the front, Jingliu ends up having a ridiculous amount of turns over the course of a fight, leading to more damage and significantly more Toughness damage.

Additionally, because of the low SP expenditure, Jingliu is also highly capable of acting as a secondary damage dealer for a team. Similarly, she is also able to have a secondary damage dealer act alongside her, potentially even one that also occasionally enjoys using SP, provided you still generate enough through your other two party members. This makes Jingliu’s application near limitless, just like Blade.

Clearly, Jingliu and Blade have many similarities, as I’ve mentioned relentlessly by this point. Jingliu deals slightly more damage, but Blade is unkillable, and both of them perform exceptionally. But you know what’s better than using just one of the two? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

Yeah… Turns out that even though they hate each other in the lore, Jingliu and Blade have a particularly strong synergy with each other. Both are completely self-sufficient in their damage, and already highly competitive, but Jingliu can enhance Blade’s capabilities substantially. Blade’s Talent gains a stack whenever he takes damage, and Jingliu has a way of facilitating this through attacks during Spectral Transmigration. 3 Enhanced Skills and an Ultimate from Jingliu during Spectral will provide 4 separate instances of HP syphon, meaning she provides 4 stacks for Blade’s Talent every time she enters Spectral Transmigration. Combining this with Blade’s natural HP consumption and any potential incoming enemy damage makes for extremely frequent follow-ups from Blade.

Just these two together already make the team remarkably potent, and as soon as you start adding in other support options, it just gets more and more powerful and ridiculous. This may even potentially be Jingliu’s best team, and it ends up being pretty universally applicable too. Of course, it’s a tad expensive and relies on you having two limited rate-up characters, but even if you don’t have this exact setup, Jingliu is a more than capable damage dealer all on her own.

Imbibitor Lunae will likely always have the higher upfront damage numbers per turn because his multipliers are just too high, but over the course of a fight, Jingliu can do a substantial—and more importantly, comparable—amount of total damage as well. You just have to take your pick: death by a thousand cuts, or death by sledgehammer. Same same but different. She’s well worth your time, even if it’s just for the remarkable flexibility in her design. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to look up how to pronounce ‘Syzygy’.