How Pure Fiction Upends Forgotten Hall: The Erudition Revolution Rewriting AOE Rules

Have you ever had this happen? You bring your T0 Jing Liu or Kafka team that dominates Forgotten Hall (Chaos Memory), confident you’ll crush Pure Fiction. You unleash a devastating ultimate on a screen full of enemies, one-shot a single target, and deal 500k of completely wasted overkill damage. The next second, five new small enemies flood the field, and you end up with a shockingly low final score.

This is just old meta thinking. You’re using the boss-killing logic of Forgotten Hall to solve a crowd-clearing challenge. It’s like treating a calculus final like a 100-meter sprint: you’re playing by the wrong rules from the start.

But meanwhile, another Trailblazer brings out their underleveled, bench-warming Himeko and Herta. You watch in surprise as Herta loops infinite AOE follow-up attacks every time an enemy drops to low health, and Himeko’s satellite barrage follow-ups rain down nonstop every time toughness breaks. This creates an endless chain of AOE damage that easily pushes their score over 60,000 points without breaking a sweat.

The gap here isn’t about character strength—it’s a complete reversal of how the battlefield works. Pure Fiction isn’t just an extension of Forgotten Hall, it’s an entirely new game mode. This high-score guide fully breaks down this crowd-clearing revolution led by AOE and Erudition path characters.

Why Pure Fiction Punishes Single-Target Burst Meta

Pure Fiction was intentionally designed to reward AOE characters that were completely overlooked in Forgotten Hall. If you stick to the old single-target burst mindset, you’ll immediately hit a scoring brick wall, which is exactly why meta T0 teams struggle so much here.

The Overkill Paradox: One-Shot Builds For Weak Trash Mobs

In Forgotten Hall (Chaos Memory), your only goal is to defeat 1-2 high-health, high-defense bosses. Every tactic centers on focusing damage to a single target, which is why Hunt (single-target) and Destruction (splash damage) paths dominate that mode. But in Pure Fiction, your enemies are endlessly spawning low-health trash mobs.

Case Study: One player brought a fully built, top-tier Jing Liu into Pure Fiction. She activates her Transmigration state, hits with a splash skill that deals 300k damage. 90% of that 300k is wasted overkill, because every trash mob on the field only has around 50k health. She kills 3 mobs, but five more instantly spawn to refill the field. Her single-target/splash burst gets completely diluted into nothing by the endless wave mechanic.

The Turn Count Trap: Shifting From Speedrunning To Timed Scoring

Forgotten Hall grades you based on how many cycles (turns) it takes you to clear. You just need to clear within 10 cycles to get all three stars, it’s a straight speedrun. Pure Fiction grades you entirely on points, and you only get 4 full cycles to kill as many enemies as possible to maximize your score.

Case Study: A Dan Heng • Imbibitor Lunae team has incredibly high burst damage, but he needs supports like Tingyun and Sparkle to save up 3 skill points (SP) to unleash his big hit. That setup works perfectly fine in Forgotten Hall, but in Pure Fiction, while he’s still saving up points, Himeko and Herta have already triggered 5-6 follow-up attacks off enemy actions, and their score is already way out of reach. This mode doesn’t care how high your single hit damage is—it only cares about how often you deal damage, and how wide your AOE coverage is.

How Pure Fiction Rewrites The Rules: Endless Spawning Favors Erudition

To master Pure Fiction, you have to throw out all the old rules and embrace the new meta. The core of this new meta is the endless enemy spawn mechanic, which has made the Erudition path the undisputed top tier for this mode.

Core New Mechanic: The Endless Wave Scoring System

The core mechanic of Pure Fiction is endless waves of enemies. Every time you kill one, the game instantly spawns a new one to replace it, until the total number of enemies for the wave is exhausted. This completely rewrites how we value damage output:

• AOE is non-negotiable: Your attacks must be able to hit 3-5 enemies at the same time. Any single-target skill (like basic attacks or Hunt path skills) just wastes a turn in this mode.
• Overkill damage doesn’t exist here: You don’t have to worry about wasting damage. The faster you kill enemies, the more new enemies spawn, and the higher your final score will be.
• Toughness breaking is key: All enemies in Pure Fiction have very low toughness. This isn’t just to make it easier to break them for extra damage—it’s to let you trigger more follow-up attacks from characters like Himeko and Herta.

Core New Meta: The Rise Of Erudition, The Perfect AOE Battlefield

This entire game mode was built from the ground up for the Erudition path. Erudition characters are designed around full-party AOE damage, meaning all the characters that sat on your bench because they spread damage too thin and struggled against single bosses are now full-blown T0 powerhouses here.

Common Q&A: Why Did Himeko and Herta Suddenly Get So Strong?

Their follow-up attack mechanics are perfectly triggered by Pure Fiction’s design, making these two the undisputed best picks for the mode right now:

• Herta: Her talent triggers a full-party follow-up attack any time an allied attack drops an enemy below 50% health. In Pure Fiction’s trash-clearing environment, this talent can trigger almost infinitely.
• Himeko: Her talent charges up every time an ally breaks an enemy’s weakness, and triggers a full-party follow-up attack after 3 charges. The low toughness of all trash mobs in Pure Fiction lets Himeko fire off her cannon nonstop.

When you pair Himeko and Herta on the same team, you get one of the most satisfying combos in the entire game: Herta spins -> Himeko fires -> Herta spins again -> Himeko fires again. This infinite Himeko-Herta loop is the easiest way for free-to-play and casual players to hit the max 60,000 score.

Beyond Single-Target DPS: 4 Key Metrics For High Pure Fiction Scores

Team building for Pure Fiction uses an entirely new set of metrics to judge characters. You don’t look at crit stats anymore—you look at how efficiently you can clear crowds of enemies.

Pure Fiction AOE Character Dashboard (V1.0)

• Character: Himeko
  Core Metric: Follow-up Attack
  AOE Coverage: Skill (Splash) / Ultimate (Full AOE) / Follow-up (Full AOE)
  How It Works: Toughness break trigger. Every time teammates break 3 enemy toughness bars, she unleashes a full AOE attack.
• Character: Herta
  Core Metric: Follow-up Attack
  AOE Coverage: Skill (Full AOE) / Ultimate (Full AOE) / Follow-up (Full AOE)
  How It Works: Half-health harvester. Any time an enemy drops below 50% health, she unleashes a full AOE attack.
• Character: Argenti
  Core Metric: Ultimate Cycle
  AOE Coverage: Skill (Full AOE) / Ultimate (Full AOE)
  How It Works: Ultimate spamming god. Killing trash mobs gives massive energy refunds, letting him fire off an ultimate every single turn.
• Character: Jing Yuan
  Core Metric: Follow-up Attack
  AOE Coverage: Skill (Full AOE) / Ultimate (Full AOE) / Lord Retinue (Bouncing)
  How It Works: Lord Retinue’s bouncing attack clears multiple enemies very efficiently, but has a slower startup time.
• Character: Serval
  Core Metric: DoT / Toughness Breaking
  AOE Coverage: Skill (Full AOE) / Ultimate (Full AOE)
  How It Works: Top free-to-play pick. Her cheap full AOE skill breaks toughness efficiently and easily triggers Himeko’s follow-up attacks.

Key Metric 1: AOE Coverage

Does every single turn your main DPS take deal full-party AOE damage? If your main DPS is still using basic attacks or single-target skills, you’ve already lost before you start. This is why Erudition path characters, and specifically the Himeko-Herta combo, are the meta for this mode.

Key Metric 2: Follow-Up Attack Frequency

Pure Fiction is the perfect playground for follow-up attack focused builds. You can’t just rely on damage from your own turns to score high. You need to sneak in extra AOE damage via follow-up attacks during enemy turns and your teammates’ turns, and that’s the main way to pull ahead of the pack in score.

Key Metric 3: Ultimate Cycle Consistency

Since enemies keep spawning nonstop, the energy you get from killing enemies also keeps coming nonstop. This turns characters like Argenti, who have multi-charge, high-damage AOE ultimates, into T0 picks for the mode. Your goal should be to get to the point where you can fire off an ultimate every single cycle.

The Future of Pure Fiction: It’s All About Roster Depth

The addition of Pure Fiction alongside Forgotten Hall is a clear signal from Honkai: Star Rail’s developers. Endgame content for this game isn’t about building one overpowered T0 team—it’s about building a deep, versatile roster of characters.

This ultimately boils down to a fundamental choice for how you plan your resource investment: Do you want to be a single-core specialist, dump all your resources into one 5-star powerhouse to dominate Forgotten Hall? Or do you want to be a versatile player, adapt to each mode’s unique rules, and invest some resources into your bench-warming Himeko and Herta to grab all the rewards from both endgame modes?

The launch of Pure Fiction marks the full comeback of AOE characters. The characters you once left sitting on the bench are now the true rulers of this brand new Erudition battlefield.