Building a powerful team in Honkai: Star Rail is never an easy task, but the dedicated path system breaks down the process to make it easier. Or, it’s supposed to. This system seems to have been thrown to the side with recent updates, and now nothing makes sense anymore.
Paths are meant to be simple and straightforward
Paths are an easy way for any player to quickly understand what a character is supposed to be capable of. Those who join The Hunt, for example, are meant to be dedicated single-target damage dealers, while recruits who align with The Preservation should possess strong defensive abilities to provide protection in battle.
But lately, these paths are nowhere near as straightforward as they’re supposed to be, and it kind of seems like miHoYo has forgotten how its own path system works.
Jingliu is an unnecessary rulebreaker
The latest character to become playable was Jingliu, an Ice character who aligns with The Destruction. She should have been an immensely tanky damage dealer with high survivability. Instead, everything about Jingliu’s skillset screams The Hunt.
Most of Jingliu’s damage-dealing abilities are single-target focused, which is the basis of what characters who align with The Hunt are capable of. She also doesn’t have strong survivability to last through battles, one of my favorite parts of other Destruction units like Blade.
Jingliu could swap to The Hunt, and she would fit far better there than she does on the path she’s currently aligned with. The choice to make her Destruction seems especially weird since there’s another existing path that fits her skillset much better.
If I’m pulling for a Destruction character, I’m expecting to get a mighty damage dealer with incredible survivability, not a single-target damage dealer with fairly low health and abilities that suggest they’re a Hunt character in disguise. Jingliu is one of Honkai: Star Rail’s best, but I’m holding a grudge against her because she’s been placed on the wrong path.
The devs committed to sharing descriptions of each distinctive path from the very beginning. It’s fine to expand upon what these paths look like, but it becomes quite confusing and contradictory when playable characters align with one path, but function like another one entirely.
Destruction characters are by far the most guilty of this issue, as all of the exclusive five-star characters on this path have somewhat dipped into The Hunt and The Erudition paths. Both Blade and Dan Heng Imbibitor Lunae stick enough to what Destruction is supposed to be that I can overlook their path-crossing, but I firmly believe Jingliu is just a Hunt character with the wrong path listed.
Fu Xuan is an OP path-crossing mess
If it was just Destruction units, I might be able to look past this issue. After all, The Destruction version of the Trailblazer all of us started off with did warn us, with the signature voice line from their brutal bat Ultimate move that “Rules are made to be broken.”
But this issue persists across other paths, too. Although Jingliu is by far the worst culprit, right before her came Fu Xuan, a Quantum Preservation character also guilty of path-crossing.
Preservation characters are meant to focus on supplying the team with strong protection abilities. While Fu Xuan certainly does this, she also has an AoE-focused Ultimate and randomly buffs the party with a critical rate boost through her skill.
The standard character, Gepard, lines up far more closely with what a Preservation character should be able to do, because all of his abilities are dedicated to protecting his team—although I’m not necessarily mad about Fu Xuan’s skillset, since she’s an OP all-in-one support unit.
Honkai: Star Rail needs to rethink and rework paths
Nihility characters are also quite confusing as they should focus solely on debuffing, yet characters like Kafka and Silver Wolf excel at damage-dealing and rank among the strongest DPS units in the game. It seems like most standard characters stick to what they’re supposed to do, while many of the exclusive five-stars stray heavily from their paths.
With more confusing characters set to arrive in the future—like Hanya on The Harmony path, who dips into Nihility, and Huohuo with The Abundance, who crosses into Harmony territory—the path system doesn’t seem to be getting less confusing and contradictory anytime soon.
But I do hope the devs figure a fix out, whether this means updating the descriptions of each path or working to better align characters with their chosen path in the future.
Paths are one of my favorite aspects of Honkai: Star Rail, and they used to be a feature I really appreciated for understanding what different characters were supposed to do. I’m holding out hope there’s still a chance they can be fixed.
I’ll continue to love Honkai: Star Rail no matter what—but I’d love it a bit more if it could get the path system back in order.
