Honkai: Star RailLynxBest build, teams and other guides

Lynx is an extremely competent healer. She combines the best aspects of Natasha and Bailu into one, providing healing over time from both her Skill and Ultimate, as well as being able to increase an ally’s Max HP by a significant amount with her Skill. She can even increase an ally’s aggro with her Skill if the ally is Destruction or Preservation, making her even better at mitigating damage for the team. Couple all of that with an AoE cleanse on her Ultimate and HP scaling Basic ATKs, and you’ve got an exceptional healer, especially for a 4*.

Many readily available defensive support options are insufficient on their own in difficult content like Memory of Chaos or Swarm Disaster, and all of the truly good options are 5*s, meaning they’re largely inaccessible unless you get really really lucky. Enter Lynx, resident canned fish enjoyer, another member of the Landau family, and, most importantly, a 4* healer.

An interesting thing to note right off the bat is that Lynx’ Basic ATK scales with her Max HP instead of her ATK. She deals up to 50% of her Max HP at max Trace level, and since the rest of her kit also scales with HP, it’s extremely likely that Lynx is going to be contributing surprisingly good amounts of damage as your dedicated healer, and this automatically puts her above the likes of Natasha and Bailu in terms of damage contribution—even though Natasha’s E6 adds a HP scaling to her Basic ATK, it’s still only 40% of Nat’s Max HP. Lynx gets to do it for free.

Lynx’ Skill targets a single ally and heals them for up to 12% of Lynx’ Max HP plus 320 at max Trace level. This already makes it directly superior to Natasha’s Skill, but it elevates it even further by also increasing the targeted ally’s Max HP by up to 7.5% of Lynx’ Max HP plus 200, meaning a well-invested Lynx can add a significant amount of HP to an ally. The added bonus is that if the targeted ally is on the Path of Destruction or Preservation, they are granted Survival Response, and have a vastly increased chance to be attacked, meaning that you can create a similar sort of effect as if you had Gepard in your team; pick a durable ally and turn them into the primary target for enemies to attack. These effects only last for 2 turns, however, so you need to be mindful of the SP you have available if you wish to maintain this playstyle.

Her Ultimate heals all allies for up to 13.5% of Lynx’ Max HP plus 360, putting it just barely below Natasha’s Ultimate, but it has the added benefit of also being an AoE cleanse, something we’ve not yet seen a character be capable of. This allows Lynx to essentially salvage the previously unsalvageable; if you had the other three members of your team Frozen or Imprisoned, you’d likely be in a losing situation, but with Lynx you can nullify that harsh Crowd Control and get back into the fight. The only thing to note is that this cleanse applies to all debuffs, meaning that you can run into the same issue as always with multiple debuffs, where you can end up cleansing the wrong debuff and still dying. While having this AoE cleanse tied to an Ultimate is handy in a pinch, Natasha and Luocha can at least use a Skill back-to-back to cleanse things if necessary, and Lynx does not have this luxury.

Lynx’ Talent makes an appearance whenever she heals an ally. Her Skill and Ultimate will apply a regen effect for 2 turns, restoring up to 3.6% of Lynx’ Max HP plus 96 at the start of the ally’s turn. It increases by an additional 4.5% plus 120 if the targeted ally is affected by Survival Response, making this a very noticeable heal over time for the units you designate as your tank. Since this is applied on all healing, including her Ultimate, it makes Lynx a very SP efficient healer.

With her Bonus Traces, Lynx’ performance notably improves. Her A2 provides Lynx with a bonus 2 Energy each time a unit with Survival Response is hit, lessening the burden of Energy requirements and potentially allowing for more Ultimates, though it does require SP to be used to apply Survival Response in the first place. Her A4 provides a 35% chance to resist Crowd Control, making it less likely that she’ll be taken out of the fight and allowing her to be ready to cleanse allies if necessary. Finally, her A6 extends the duration of her Talent’s regen effect by 1 turn, for a new total of 3 turns. This just makes Lynx better at what she was already doing, and also helps bridge the gap between Ultimate usages, potentially allowing for permanent uptime on the healing over time.

As a 4* character, it is entirely possible to get Eidolons for Lynx over time, but they’re actually not a necessity for Lynx to be an excellent healer. Particularly noteworthy is her E2, which allows an ally with Survival Response to resist debuff application one time, and her E6, which further increases the Max HP boost by 6% of Lynx’ Max HP and also increases the ally’s Effect RES by 30%.

Lynx is a simple but effective character, and one that players are going to want to get their hands on as soon as possible. While it is expected that Lynx is going to be compared to the other healers we have, currently it’s surprisingly one-sided; really only Luocha is better than Lynx and that’s because he monopolizes the hands-off healing approach and does it too well to ever be overtaken. The really impressive thing is that Lynx is next in the line, which is even more impressive seeing as she is a 4*. While Lynx lacks the Outgoing Healing boosts of Natasha and the reactive healing from Bailu’s Invigoration, she is much stronger than Natasha already at E0 and she has the potential to be better than Bailu (at higher Eidolons). If Lynx ever becomes a freely accessible unit, F2P players will finally have enough healers to tackle Memory of Chaos without fear.

Lynx is pretty phenomenal actually. She also appreciates the value of a Thermos, so you should definitely be able to appreciate her. Preparedness is a sign of great wisdom, you know.