Honkai: Star Rail Version 1.6 has finally arrived since late December 2023 with new features and missions, and the fanbase cannot become more happy about it.
After months of journey across Xianzhou Luofu and occasional trips to Belobog and Herta Space Station following the Luofu arc, old and new faces have come in the 1.6 update.
While players must wait until the 2.0 update to visit Penacony, the Astral Express’ next destination, the 1.6 update has not disappointed players with its sheer amounts of new endgame content and characters.
Character banners in the 1.6 update
HoYoverse returns to spoil the fanbase with three new characters – Ruan Mei, Dr. Ratio, and Xueyi, while old-timer banners like Blade and Kafka also returned in the 1.6 update.
Upon her premier banner in the 1.6 update, the 5-star Ruan Mei has settled herself as one of the best damage buffers in the game. Ruan Mei’s skills revolve around boosting her allies’ Weakness Break Efficiency to a ludicrous degree.
Furthermore, her Ultimate grants her allies the ability to ignore a significant portion of the enemy’s resistance to all elemental types.
Xueyi arrives as a 4-star Quantum-type character in the path of Destruction, with a gimmick of automatically launching three random strikes after gathering Karma stacks. Kind of like Ruan Mei, her Ultimate can ignore her target’s Toughness regardless of their type resistances and her second Eidolon Resonance allows her to ignore enemy resistance and restore some HP to allies.
After making a bombastic entrance in the 1.6 update livestream, Dr. Ratio will become available in the second half of the update. As an upcoming free 5-star Imaginary-type character, his Skill has a base 40% chance of a follow-up attack that increases by 20% per debuff on his target.
New events in 1.6 update
The 1.6 update also arrived with many new events. The first one is Critter Pick, where players cultivate and take care of adorable cupcake-looking cat creatures after finishing the “The Blue – When the Stars of Ingenuity Shine” Trailblaze Continuance Mission.
An upcoming event in the update is Virtual Scentventure, where players use “Scent Plugins” to get buffs against illusionary enemies. While the event presents familiar faces like Kafka and Cocolia, their attacks and buffs are different from their previous appearances. After completing the Normal Mode, Despair Mode is available with presumably highly beefed-up enemies.
Finally, players impatient for another endgame content can be satisfied with the arrival of Pure Fiction, a new permanent addition to the game. This event rotates every two weeks with the Memory of Chaos, although each Pure Fiction and Memory of Chaos update lasts six weeks. The event’s gimmick is the endless waves of enemies, so players must clear them all until the cycles end to get the highest scores.
Self-control during events and banners
With the arrival of the 1.6 update character banners and the upcoming 2.0 Penacony update, it is common for players to stack up Stellar Jades as much as possible. Considering Penacony will present the long-anticipated character Black Swan, players swooning for her will become more likely to make financial spending for her upcoming banner.
But, players looking forward to whaling in the current event and upcoming banners must always know how to have self-control. In a December 2023 development by the Chinese government, they proposed video game laws focused on regulating gameplay time and financial spending by children.
Although the Chinese government eventually withdrew the proposal after massive backlash, the proposal brought the need to play games with responsible financial spending in mind. Considering the RNG nature of character banners is similar to luck-based mechanics in other games like casino games return rate (RTP), Honkai: Star Rail players must always know when to hold back during ongoing events and character banners.
