Honkai: Star RailSeeleBest build, teams and other guides

[Overview]

Seele is a potent Hunt unit, specialising in gaining and abusing extra turns and manipulating her own AV to devastating effect. A high concept main DPS that performs better in AoE scenarios despite being a single-target unit. Defeating enemies with her will instantly grant an extra turn, during which buffs will not tick down and she gains a large boost to DMG and even RES PEN. Complementing this is her extremely high base SPD, the current highest in the game at 115, which she can further buff in combat, making her one of the fastest characters by default in the entire game. She is very difficult to play effectively, but can reward the accomplished player.

[Intro]

The prodigal daughter returns from her greatly exaggerated death.

I'll rip the band-aid off immediately, this Novaflare doesn't necessarily push Seele to the heights of the current top performers, but this was kinda expected as she's an old character without a dedicated team archetype, and we are of course playing Archetype Rail these days, so you know how it is.

Despite this, Seele's unique mechanics that have not been replicated since the very start of the game allow her to actually still remain surprisingly competitive... at a cost, and that cost is either your skill or your sanity. Possibly both.

Much like Bronya, Seele's just really good friend and roommate, Seele is another highly complex character under the surface; that accursed plane beneath the waves that is SPD theory and AV abuse. I'd like to say it's not that difficult to comprehend, but I already know how it works, and have two separate high level degrees, so maybe I'm the wrong person to convey the difficulty of this.

Unwarranted self-aggrandising aside, this facet of Seele means that she's not going to be rated as highly as her potential would suggest she should be. For all you Knowers™, please try not to be too upset by this, you should already be accustomed to getting downplayed, but hey, it's not easy at all, and investing in an older character is not something everyone always wants to do, especially if they're kinda homeless as far as team archetypes go.

Even still, Seele got some really great buffs overall, so she's worth picking up if you like her, and if you already had her well built from back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, maybe it's time to give her a good dusting, eh?

[Abilities]

God bless, a character who doesn't have entire paragraphs for simple Abilities. But it's not so simple.

This is a kit.

Seele's Skill deals 360% ATK to a target enemy, and also increases her SPD by 25% for 3 turns. As mentioned in the overview, Seele has the highest Base SPD in the game at 115, and all percentage based increases go off of the base value, so this is providing her with 28.75 SPD for free, just for hitting her Skill.

'Why'd you list a decimal, there's no decimals in-game' Oh my sweet summer child. The things you've yet to see. So much jank to explore.

The actual DMG multiplier is fairly underwhelming on its own, especially compared to modern units, but it'll start to add up later on, and especially due to Seele's SPD, you can be using this way more than other characters can use their own Skills. If you hyperinvest into SPD, this is one of the extremely few characters where reaching 200 SPD in combat is actually somewhat of a cakewalk.

There's a second part to this Skill that's completely new. After any ally (including you) attacks an enemy, if their HP goes to 50% of their Max or below, Seele will automatically use her Skill on that enemy once for free. This Skill doesn't consume Skill Points! ... But also doesn't gain any Energy directly. Kills still grant Energy, but the actual free Skill doesn't. This effect can trigger once per Seele's turn. This automatically targets the next lowest HP enemy if the first one died prior to the free Skill.

Seele's Ultimate puts her into her Amplification state and then deals 720% ATK to a single enemy. Costs 120 Energy. It's actually jarring to see such short ability descriptions again.

But what is Amplification? It's from her Talent. Amplification grants Seele 80% DMG for 3 turns when she enters it. Using her Ultimate gives it to her automatically, but if you score a kill with any of her Basic, Skill, or Ultimate, then she will enter her Amplification state and immediately get an extra turn.

This is her Resurgence passive, and it'll be referred to as such moving forward. Resurgence is a true extra turn, letting Seele do either her Basic or Skill on whichever foe she chooses. Do note that because it's an extra turn, and Ultimates and Follow-ups and things of that nature are also extra turns, they will NOT be activated until after the Resurgence turn is over.

Unless you queued those things before Seele goes into Resurgence. Yeah it gets really messy, and the order of operations can be very important for your actual in-combat performance.

Example: You kill an enemy with Seele's Skill and get to full Energy, allowing you to use her Ultimate. You enter Resurgence, but now you can't use her Ultimate before doing a Skill or Basic, thereby wasting 30 Energy towards your next Ultimate (even more if you're about to kill something).

But if you queue the Ultimate immediately after killing the enemy on that first Skill, you will enter the Ultimate preparation and see that you have your Resurgence extra turn lined up to be AFTER the Ultimate in the Action Order. This way you prevent yourself from losing any Energy.

Finnicky isn't it? Now imagine having to time every other ally's Ultimates to ensure a proper order of operations. Headache central. For a simpler analogy, you wouldn't want to butter the countertop and then put your bread on top would you? That would just be silly~

Also the free Skill from her Skill passive counts as a separate instance that is also eligible to proc Resurgence, so if you go on a big tear, you could have a whole lot of extra turns lined up and ready, since Resurgence procs from each individual kill you make... Except itself.

Yeah, sadly, Resurgence can't proc from Resurgence turns, but that's not really that hard to account for, and she's plenty strong without the absolute meme nonsense that infinite Resurgence procs would allow for (though it is funny to dream about it).

So unfortunately short Ability descriptions do not a simple character make. It only gets worse when Action Advances and dynamic SPD boosts are taken into account, so it's really not for the faint of heart.

[Bonus Traces]

There's more.

A2 will increase Seele's DMG by 50% for 3 turns whenever she kills an enemy, and this can stack up to 3 times. This is... a lot of DMG% to be getting. Combined with the 80% she's getting from Amplification, she can potentially be sitting at 230% DMG for pretty much most of the fight as long as she can kill something every 3 turns (which is not hard, trust me).

A4 will grant Seele a massively impressive 25% Quantum RES PEN when she's in the Amplification state. Anything that gives RES PEN is an automatic winner, there's very little else to say about this. If you're doing your job well, you are benefitting from this permanently.

Lastly, and most intriguing, the A6. After using a Basic ATK, Seele's next action Advances by 20%.

Why is this the most interesting? Because this works from her extra turns. Oh yeah. If you're carefully balancing your actions and making the most of Resurgence, you could have a lot of extra turns stacked, especially if that free Skill per turn on low hp enemies gets a kill. You'll notice that Seele's icon in the action order is already at where her next real turn would be, but if you one of your many extra turns on a Basic ATK, it's gonna jump up, and it can keep jumping up.

This is even better because you're going to run out of SP at some point, and it's probably going to be midway through Seele's Resurgence procs. You're gonna have to Basic ATK with Seele in those cases because nothing else can intervene until that extra turn is over anyway, so not even Sparkle can always save you (though she does help a lot).

It can also quite often be more effective to finish off a low HP enemy with a Basic ATK, both to preserve the Skill Point and also to advance your next real action. If this happens on your actual real turn anyway and then you go back into Resurgence, you can keep this going for a while as long as you're actively killing things.

With specific setups (and a lot of careful planning and playing), Seele can end  up in situations where you're actively killing off the enemies before you, and almost no AV is being spent on this. It almost looks like you're cheating, and is very satisfying but comes with a 'do not try this at home' advisory warning because of the razor thin margin for error.

[Eidolons]

The usual disclaimer, but with the twist that this is a unit that's in the 50/50 pool and has been for a while, so it is actually somewhat possible to get her Eidolons passively over time.

E1 lets Seele have increased effectiveness against enemies at or below 80% of their Max HP; her CRIT Rate increases by 15% and all damage she deals with ignore 20% of the target's DEF. DEF ignore is always strong, and some free CRIT stats are also appreciated, but the conditional of needing the enemy to be below 80% is sometimes annoying, and it can be hard to get the ball rolling before you've ramped up the Resurgence procs. Still very good for an E1 though.

E2 lets the SPD boost from Seele's Skill stack up to 2 times. An absolutely absurd amount of SPD to be getting from just the base kit, and with even just a little SPD investment, you can start to reach values that make other characters weep. Definitely still on the much weaker side for an E2 by modern day standards.

E4 gives Seele 15 Energy back when she defeats an enemy. This is the Pure Fiction Eidolon. With this, you can be Ulting things very very frequently, and it's at this stage that it becomes significantly easier to go for those low AV strats I mentioned before. It's still hard though.

Finally the E6. After using her Ultimate, Seele inflicts Butterfly Flurry on the target for 3 turns. Whenever this enemy takes an attack, they will take 30% of Seele's Ultimate DMG dealt as True DMG, and when this enemy is defeated by any unit, Seele's Resurgence will also be triggered. Pretty good capstone that skyrockets her damage dealt and can result in even more Resurgence procs if you coordinate across the whole team.

[The Rest]

Surprisingly there's not much left to say I feel. She's an 'old but gold' unit and her strength is tied to her very unique mechanics.

Like I've been saying throughout the review, Seele is one of the hardest units in the game to actually play well, and that's stayed exactly the same even with all the buffs she's received in this Novaflare.

Teams are relatively unchanged, whatever you were doing before will still work, and modern supports for hypercarry teams will do very well with Seele.

I want to make particular mention for Cerydra, because there's an interesting interaction with her Peerage buff: the Peerage copied Skill does not have any of the regular imposed restrictions that Seele has during Resurgence. This means that if you proc Cerydra's Peerage midway through your daisy-chain of many Resurgence extra turns, you can actually end up getting an extra Resurgence if it's Cerydra's copied Skill that gets the final blow on an enemy.

Add in that Seele is doing all the attacks ever, and stacking Cerydra's Military Merit is also not particularly difficult, and I highly recommend you try this combo out.

Because of the way Seele's Resurgence is, it's actually kinda hard to NOT make use of someone — Resurgence is an extra turn, so buffs applied to Seele won't tick down, meaning even one turn buffs like Bronya's Skill can be taken to the Moon and back as long as you can kill things.

Aaand there's the issue isn't it. Have you been keeping track of how many times I've mentioned that one phrase, hm? 'As long as you're killing things'? Bit of an odd requirement for a Hunt unit of all things, isn't it?

Well that's how it is. Seele, despite being a unit on The Hunt, is actually stronger in AoE scenarios than she is in pure single-target. She gets utterly destroyed in single-target combat because the entire focal point of her kit can't be activated at all.

This of course counts for Bosses that have periodic summons or persistent adds that Seele can feed off of, but it can be tricky depending on what kind of summons those are, and even then you still have a fairly large reliance on your Ultimate, as it's pretty much the only way for you to get a Resurgence during another Resurgence.

This puts Seele as a bit of a 'threshold character'; if she's able to kill things without too much effort to keep proccing Resurgence, then she's within the threshold; but if that stops being the case and she can no longer guarantee easy Resurgence procs, her damage and subsequently her performance both drop off a cliff.

This is another aspect of her difficulty. Apart from just the mental hassle of target selection and Energy management, AND Resurgence and AV management, you also benefit a lot from putting forth the same effort for the rest of the team. If teammates can help Seele kill things, either through personal damage control or through careful buff application, then you can more easily set yourself up for a devastating one-turn-kill (I mean, it's technically all in one turn so it fits).

Tremendous effort. Potentially tremendous reward.

[Wrap up]

The Elation you feel by actually piloting Seele well is almost unmatched, and it genuinely feels like you turn the enemies into spectators, but the price is steep, and the knowledge and understanding you need to pull it off is... arguably not worth learning at this point.

It really sucks to say but like, look at Seele's kit. Look at Welt's kit. Or Bronya's. Look at any of the characters from 1.X, and you'll see a lot of concepts and ideas that have simply not been explored since that time — and for good reason. A character who can gain extra turns in a game like this is a balancing nightmare, even if it is only unlocked with time and skill investment.

We get some quirky or semi-interesting characters these days, and they're cool, and you read through their paragraphs upon paragraphs of text and think 'damn they're really cool'. And they are! Just not in the same way. You play them in-game and realise they're actually not all that different from characters we've already had.

Definitely less of a problem than it used to be, but the scars are still there. You may be wondering about the characters I chose as examples, and it's very simple why. They all manipulate AV, either their own, or the enemies'. Simple fact of the matter is that we cannot be trusted with things that interface with such impactful and core mechanics, and that's why we've not seen characters with these kinds of kits since that time.

But we still have these characters at least, and that's good enough for me. Take the plunge, I say. Discover another aspect to this game that's been here all along, but that only a privileged few characters get to tap into.

Who knows, you may just have some fun.