Thanks to the latest update of the popular Honkai: Star Rail database HonkaiLab, Luocha’s banner has emerged as the least popular among iOS users in China. This news arrived as quite a surprise given the Abundance maestro’s incredible skillset.
An initial look over the ever-expanding graph offers two early impressions. The first is simply how much revenue the game is generating from this individual market alone. By Oct. 10, a truly mind-numbing $173,434,206 had been collected across eight character banners. That’s almost $30,000,000 every month since the game was released.
Our second major takeaway is the two evident outliers, one of them being Luocha. As one of only two five-star Abundance characters in a total pool of three healers at the time, it seems quite incredible to think that the income generated by this banner ended some $4,000,000 short of its closest competitor.
In a Reddit thread created by user TaiYongMedical, a discussion broke out as to why this was the case. Whether an isolated case or a global trend, justifying the contextual low return was difficult. One suggestion, posited by vven294, was that players paying more money for Eidolon hunts led to a natural inflation for damage-based characters. Also, Abundance characters are rarely important for farming items outside of bosses. “Most people will have a Natasha/Lynx,” they surmised.
Play_more_FFS went for a different angle, offering examples of characters who could do what Luocha does. “Already have Bailu? Got Pela to remove enemy debuffs? Don’t care about Imaginary typicing because of Silver Wolf? Made it easy to skip him without any regrets,” they confidently said. Zimbledwarf was quick to turn this argument on its head, saying that they went for Luocha specifically because he could do all of these things. They also came to the conclusion that there was no need to reach for any Eidolons as he excelled without them.
This appears to be the common consensus. Not that Luocha’s Eidolons aren’t worth having by any stretch of the imagination. Even just one sees all allies in his healing field increase their ATK stats by 20 percent. The man is simply too good at his job without such luxuries.
Also of interest was the other aforementioned outlier, Seele. As one of the best damage dealers to this day—and indeed the launch banner character—it is no shock to see revenue earned almost double that of the next in line. That number is set to increase with the Quantum scythe-wielder returning for the second half of Version 1.4 in the first re-run of Star Rail’s short history.
