When it comes to marketing their characters,Honkai: Star Railnever misses the mark since they know exactly how to build hype. Some characters like Acheron already have a lot of anticipation surrounding them due to their role in the main story and their connections with previous games from HoYoverse.
However, this is topped off with the developers giving her an entirely new mechanic for the Ultimate. This makes her overall kit quite complicated to understand and use, so here are a few tips to get you going.
6Manage Your Crimson Knot Stacks Well
While playing Acheron, the most important and the easiest to overlook aspect of your combat will likely be the Crimson Knot management. Whenever you use your Skill on an enemy or they get applied with a debuff, Acheron gains one stack of Slashed Dream while the enemy gains a stack of Crimson Knot.
If multiple enemies are debuffed at the same time, the Crimson Knot stackgoes to the one with the highest amount of stacks.
When you start your Ultimate, the first three damage instances take away three Crimson Knot stacks from the target enemy each. If you successfully remove nine stacks in this manner,you can get a whopping 60 percent DMG bonus to this Ultimate. This makes it quite important to stack the knots according to the multiples of three.
For example, to get the most value out of her Ultimate, you’re able to have one of the following scenarios:
However, you’lllose a bit of value if you end up having anything but three, six, or nine stackson enemies when your Ultimate is ready.
5Don’t Use Her Ultimate Too Fast
Once you get a total of nine stacks of Slashed Dreams on Acheron, you’re able to instantly trigger her Ultimate and consume all the stacks. However, this might not always be the best option,especially when you’reusing debuffers on your team. This is due to the existence of Quadrivalent Ascendance stacks.
It’s quite common to encounter situations where your Acheron’s Ultimate is ready butyour debuffer’s Ultimate is also very close to being ready. These Ultimates usually apply a massive DEF shred on the enemies, and you’ll lose the damage bonus from it if you trigger Acheron’s Ultimate too early.
Quadrivalent Ascendance lets you apply a few more debuffseven after your Ultimate is readywithout having to lose the Slashed Dreams or Crimson Knot stacks.
During combat, you can see the Quadrivalent Ascendance stacks below Acheron’s icon on the HUD. When your Ultimate is ready,every debuff applied to the enemy will increase this stack, to a maximum of three. After you use your Ultimate, these three stacks will instantly give you the Slashed Dreams and Crimson Knot stacks back.
Ideally, it’s recommended to make use of these and wait until you may use your debuffer’s Ultimate before triggering Acheron’s. This might even let you trigger two Acheron Ultimates in quick succession.
4Acheron’s Team Choices Are Quite Strict
One glance at Acheron’s traces and you’ll realize that it’s not easy to build a team around Acheron. This is mainly because ofhow she gets her Ultimate stacks and The Abyss Bonus Ability. The best way to use her is by having two other Nihility characters on the team to make use of both the mentioned abilities.
However, there aren’t a lot of goodNihility debuffers to fill this positionwhile giving you the best value. The main choices you have are Silver Wolf, Pela, Black Swan, and Guinaifen, but thelast two won’t increase Acheron’s damage nearly as much as the former.
This problem can be solved once you get Acheron’s second Eidolon since itreduces the requirement of Nihility charactersto one.
This issue will also get much smaller as more characters get released in the game.
3Learn How Debuffs Work Properly
This tip is mainly for the people who’ve already reached endgame content since every little boost you can get matters here. The best in slot relic set for Acheron is the Pioneer set, but this set needs the wearer toapply a debuff on the enemy every turnto enjoy the double Crit Rate and DMG boost.
Unfortunately, Acheron doesn’t do this on base kit since Crimson Knot doesn’t count as a debuff. you may see this when you check out the enemy detailssince Crimson Knot is mentioned under “Other Effects” and not “Debuffs”. The only way to solve this is by having a Light Cone that can apply the debuff for you.
In the current game,Acheron’s signature Light Cone and Resolution Shines As Pearls of Sweatare the only viable ones to fill this role.
It’s important to keep all of this in mind when you’re using Acheron since it can easily be the reason for defeat in battle.
2Acheron Is Future Proof
Power creep can be quite a major problem in live-service gacha games since newer characters with the same combat type and path as older characters tend to be better. However, Acheron is somewhat resistant to this mechanic due to her unique kit and her ability to synergize quite well with her team members.
This aspect becomes even stronger when you realize that future Nihility characters will indirectly buff this character, similar to what happens with Kafka or Black Swan. No matter how old Honkai: Star Rail becomes, it’ll be quite hard to directly power creep Acheron unless a second character with the exact same mechanics is introduced.
1Don’t Build Too Much DMG On Acheron
The final tip is something that won’t make much difference for a normal player, but it can be important if you want to get the absolute maximum value from Acheron. When you think about a character getting a DMG bonus, this percent boostdirectly scales based on the overall ATK you haveon the unit.
Because of this, too much DMG bonus can start giving you diminishing returns since you’d getmore overall damage if you increased your ATK and reduced the DMG bonuses. The only way for you to mess around with this is by switching your Lightning DMG Planar Sphere with an ATK one.
In most situations, it’s still better to use a Lightning DMG Bonus Sphere,especially if you’re using an ATK Percent boots.
The main situation where you’d want to go for an ATK Percent sphere is when you have Acheron on the second Eidolon and are using aHarmony character that gives her a staggering DMG boostlike Ruan Mei or Sparkle.
