Honkai: Star RailQingqueBuild and Guide

Qingque is an odd but endearing character. She’s a unit that makes a somewhat questionable first impression, but she blooms into one of the most formidable and self-sufficient damage dealers in the game.

Qingque has her primary source of damage come from a loose RNG mechanic. Her talent has her randomly draw tiles on each ally turn, 1 per turn, with 3 possible suits. At 4 perfectly matched tiles, her basic attack becomes enhanced, becoming a blast AoE and dealing vastly increased damage, while also getting an ATK% boost, up to a colossal 72% bonus ATK at max Trace level. If you are not matched, your basic attack will discard 1 tile with the lowest tile matches. This Enhanced Basic attack hits extremely hard, especially later on, but comes with the additional caveat that it will not recover a skill point like other Basic attacks.

Her Skill immediately draws 2 tiles and grants a damage increase until the end of the turn, and immediately grants an extra turn where you can choose to draw again, or exit with a Basic attack. Drawing again will stack the damage increase, up to 4 times in total. This is where the main gameplay loop comes in, you cycle tiles with her Skill until you’re matched, and then toss out your Enhanced Basic attack for massive damage.

Now, it’s entirely possible for you to use Qingque’s Skill 5 times in a row, thus using up literally all of your skill points in the process, and still not having 4 matching tiles. However, this is in practice really quite rare to see, and you should only ever use her Skill 4 times in a row since the DMG% only stacks up to 4 times anyway. You can also circumvent this bad luck through careful usage of her Ultimate, detailed a bit later.

Her ultimate guarantees an Enhanced Basic attack after using it, allowing you to strategically skip entire tile searches and get potentially back to back Enhanced Basics, but the Ultimate has an absurd energy cost, one of the absolute highest in the game. Worse still, using her Skill doesn’t recover any energy for Qingque, so her energy regeneration comes exclusively from her Basic attacks and Enhanced Basic attacks, meaning it takes a lot longer on average to get her Ultimate than for pretty much any other character.

Now, it’s important to mention that Qingque is a very late bloomer. Her scalings are very impressive but she requires a lot of investment to get to the stage where they start really having an impact, especially due to the stacking nature of her Skill. Because of this, Qingque is actually somewhat weak by comparison in the early game, and this can contribute to incorrectly assuming she’s not worth investing in. Her Talents need to be levelled up a lot to really bring out the best of her, and gaining access to her Bonus Traces provides noticeable performance spikes; for example, her first big spike in power comes at A4 when she can reach level 60, which is really quite late compared to many other damage dealers.

Her Bonus Traces do some good work to alleviate these early concerns. A2 refunds a Skill Point on the first Skill usage of a fight, meaning it’s a one-time benefit in an encounter. At first glance this doesn’t sound too impressive, and at second glance you’d realise your first glance was mostly correct, so really her A2 exists to give her more of a head start in an encounter and little else.

Her A4 is where the money is. It adds an extra 10% to the DMG% bonus of her Skill. This is per Skill usage, meaning at 4 stacks, it’s an extra 40% DMG boost on top of what she’s already getting. You can think of this Bonus Trace as injecting bonus levels into her Skill’s Trace. This means at max Trace level, 4 stacks of Qingque’s Skill will be giving her 152% bonus damage on her next attack. Coupled with the 72% bonus ATK from her Talent if you have 4 matching tiles, Qingque’s about to decimate whatever she’s looking at.

A6 increases Qingque’s speed for 1 turn after using her enhanced basic attack, which helps her get back in the fight sooner to start recovering more tiles and energy. It’s a nice bonus to have, but due to Qingque’s slightly below average speed stat, this isn’t that impactful on its own.

The ratio of skill points used to output value is exceedingly high with Qingque’s skill, because the potential damage bonuses she gets are astronomical. This is especially true since as mentioned earlier, you can use her Ultimate to circumvent bad luck and also take advantage of Qingque’s Skill’s damage bonuses. This is because Qingque’s Skill counts as an Extra Action, and all Ultimates also count as Extra Actions. 

So by using this knowledge, if you have Qingque’s Ultimate available, you can freely spend SP to draw tiles. If you’re lucky and get her Enhanced Basic, then you can throw it out and instantly use her Ultimate to take advantage of the stacked bonus damage from her Skill and carry it over onto her Ultimate, making it also hit significantly harder and guaranteeing the Enhanced Basic attack for her next turn. 

Now in this next example, you spend up to 4 SP drawing tiles and have yet to get her Enhanced Basic, so what you can do is use her Ultimate as soon as you realise this. Using the Extra Action that is her Ultimate means the damage boosts also affect the Ultimate, dealing increased damage, but because the Ultimate is an Extra Action, it is still Qingque’s turn, meaning you get to use the guaranteed Enhanced Basic from the Ultimate that also gets boosted by the Skill’s damage bonuses. This even has the added benefit of giving her a head start towards her next Ultimate.

This may seem complicated at first, but once you realise how this works and can recognise when this comes up, you’ll very quickly start to understand that Qingque’s “RNG issues” are completely overblown and exaggerated. She’s actually remarkably consistent when it counts, far more than anyone was really initially prepared for, especially myself. 

Qingque also has a different playstyle where you mostly focus on Basic attacking with her generating SP for a different dedicated damage dealer. This ends up working because her Talent draws tiles on its own on each Ally turn, so it’s still possible for her to get Enhanced Basics over time with no SP expenditure or from her Ultimate. It’s a viable alternative for if another character better matches an enemy weakness, or if you know you need that SP for other purposes.

These two playstyles are not mutually exclusive; you can very easily adjust and adapt on the fly based on your team’s SP needs, making Qingque actually quite the flexible unit as well. Just be aware that Qingque really pays more like a Destruction character than an Erudition one, in that she has phenomenal single-target damage but also has some more limited AoE damage as well. 

Qingque is already fantastic at base, but has two Eidolons that notably improve her performance. E4 gives a small chance for a phantom follow-up attack to occur after using a Basic Attack or Enhanced Basic attack, potentially allowing her to double-dip into the big damage bonuses she can accrue. E6 allows her to actually recover a skill point with her Enhanced Basic attack. The combination of these two Eidolons propel Qingque to a frightening height where she can do zero-cycle Memory of Chaos clears without really batting an eye.

As evidenced by the length of this review, Qingque is quite the complicated character. She is not meant to be left on Auto, and to do so is to squander her potential. If you find her play style is too frustrating or too complicated, or if you’re seeking characters that can be left on Auto, Qingque is probably not the character for you and I suggest looking elsewhere. Additionally, without her Ultimate, the chances of getting completely shafted by RNG are non-zero, meaning you need to be prepared to lose the dice roll on rare occasions. 

But because of everything discussed combined, Qingque is still quite the consistent and powerful character. If anything, she looks like she’s only going to continue to get better into the future.

She is absolutely worth your time.