Complete breakdown of Honkai Star Rail’s relic system: How do you choose the right main and sub stats? We’re sharing a simple formula to filter top-tier perfect relics
Have you ever stared at a backpack full of hundreds of relics, frustrated that you can’t put together a usable endgame set for your best characters? You spend tons of stamina every day farming relic domains, only to get hit with frustrating defense percent roll after defense percent roll. Watching your main character’s stats stall out leaves you feeling defeated and confused. Many players think relic progression is all luck, just a constant gamble—but there’s actually a clear, logical filtering system behind good relic farming. This guide will completely change how you upgrade relics, giving you a simple, repeatable filtering formula that helps you scientifically identify, filter, and upgrade perfect relics from scratch. You’ll stop wasting resources, put every point of stamina to good use, and efficiently build an impressive top-tier character stat sheet.
Main Stats Make Or Break Your Build: The First Rule Of Relic Progression
Before we dive into the complicated world of sub stats, we need to lock in one absolute core rule: Main stats are the foundation of any relic. If you get the main stat wrong, even the best sub stats in the world are useless. The stat boost from a main stat is far higher than any single sub stat, and it directly determines whether the relic fits your character’s core role. No matter how amazing a relic’s sub stats are, if the main stat is wrong, it’s not even worth considering. For example, a body piece relic with four perfect sub stats—crit rate, crit damage, attack, and speed—is completely useless for a pure damage dealer if its main stat is outgoing healing boost.
Of the six relic slots, the head slot always has a fixed main stat of HP, and the hands slot always has a fixed main stat of attack. You don’t have any choice for these two slots. The real decision-making happens with the other four slots: Body, Feet, Planar Sphere, and Link Rope. For damage dealers (our first example), Body pieces almost always go for either crit rate or crit damage to hit the ideal stat ratio. Feet prioritize speed to let you attack more often, though some damage dealers that stack tons of attack can go for attack percent instead. Planar Spheres almost always give the highest damage bonus when you pick the matching elemental damage boost for your character. Link Ropes come down to a choice between attack percent and energy regeneration rate, depending on how much your character relies on their Ultimate ability.
For support or tank characters (our second example), the ideal main stats look totally different. They’ll usually prioritize HP percent or defense percent to boost their survivability, or pick energy regeneration rate on their Link Rope to speed up the team’s Ultimate rotation. That means the first thing you should always do when evaluating a new relic is check if its main stat is the optimal pick for the character you’re building it for. Only after it passes this first check is it worth spending more time looking into its potential. To put it simply: A relic only deserves further consideration if it has the right main stat.
Understanding Sub Stats: How Do You Define A Truly Useful Roll?
Once a relic passes the main stat check, we turn our attention to its highly random sub stats, what players commonly call “rolls”. A common mistake many players make is assuming any stat that sounds offensive is automatically a good roll. The real key is defining what counts as a “useful stat” for your specific character. A useful stat is any stat that gives a direct, noticeable boost to your character’s performance. What counts as useful changes a lot based on the character’s role, so you need to create a priority list of useful stats for every character you build before you start filtering relics.
We can break characters down into three general categories to talk about this. First, we have damage dealers, whose whole job is dealing damage to enemies. For these characters, the top-tier useful stats are without a doubt crit rate and crit damage (what players call “double crit”), followed by attack percent and speed. These four stats are the core of raising your damage ceiling and smoothing out your rotation. Next in line are break effect and, for specific characters, effect hit rate. Stats like flat HP and defense percent are useless “off-rolls” for damage dealers, and you should avoid them as much as possible.
The second category is support characters, whose core value comes from buffing your team, debuffing enemies, and generating energy. For supports, speed is almost always the number one priority, because faster speed means higher up-time for your skills and buffs. Next, effect resistance keeps you from getting crowd controlled, so you can do your job consistently. HP percent and defense percent give you the necessary survivability to stay alive through fights. Finally, energy regeneration rate is an amazing stat—while it can’t appear as a sub stat, it’s critical to consider when building your full set. The third category, sustain characters (like healers or shielders), have similar useful stats to supports, but they need even more HP and defense than standard supports. As you can see, being able to identify useful stats for your character is the first step to getting rid of relic farming anxiety.
Three Step Filtering Formula: Stop Gambling Your Relic Resources
Once you understand main stats and useful stats, we can finally share this simple but powerful three-step filtering formula. It helps you judge if a relic has the potential to be perfect early on, so you don’t waste tons of resources on a relic that’s never going to turn out good. The core idea behind this formula is “initial scoring” and “early stop-loss”.
Step one: Initial scoring. When you get a new +0 five-star relic with the correct main stat, start by looking at its initial sub stats. Five-star relics can start with either 3 or 4 sub stats. Using your pre-made list of useful stats for your character, count how many useful sub stats the relic comes with when you get it. Our scoring standard is: If the relic starts with 3 or 4 useful sub stats, it’s a perfect base with tons of potential, and it’s worth investing heavily into. If it starts with 2 useful sub stats, it has decent potential and you can invest resources cautiously. If it only starts with 0 or 1 useful sub stats, you can basically write it off as enhancement fodder and abandon it, unless the main stat is extremely rare (like a specific elemental damage sphere or energy regeneration rope).
Step two: +3 validation. For bases that pass the initial scoring check, you do your first upgrade by leveling the relic to +3. If it was a relic that started with 3 sub stats, it will unlock a fourth new sub stat at this point. Check the result of this level up: did the new roll or upgrade land on a useful stat? If yes, congratulations, you can keep investing resources. If the upgrade landed on a useless stat (what players call “off-rolled”), that’s a red flag. Step three: +6 stop-loss point. If you passed the +3 check, keep upgrading to +6. Check again: did this upgrade also off-roll? If two consecutive upgrades (at +3 and +6) both landed on useless stats, the chance of this relic becoming perfect is almost zero. Cutting your losses and turning it into fodder for other relics right here is the most logical move. With this initial filter and stop-loss system, you can focus all your resources on the relics with the most potential.
Endgame Builds Aren’t About Perfection: Shift From Single Pieces To Overall Stat Sheets
Once you use the formula above to put together a usable set with correct main stats and decent sub stats, the game enters a deeper progression stage: optimizing your character’s overall stat sheet. Many players fall into the trap of constantly chasing a perfect single relic, like a 5-time crit damage rolled “god relic”. But real strength comes from balanced, hit target stats across the board, not one absurdly high single stat. At this stage, you need to shift your thinking from “this single relic is good” to “does this improve my overall sheet”.
Let’s use a concrete example: Suppose your damage dealer currently has 50% crit rate and 200% crit damage. While 200% crit damage looks really impressive, 50% crit rate means almost half of your attacks don’t crit at all, which drastically cuts the value of that high crit damage. In this case, swapping to a body piece with a crit rate main stat—even if its sub stats are a little worse—will adjust your sheet to a much healthier 75% crit rate / 150% crit damage (the ideal 1:2 golden ratio), and your expected overall damage will actually be higher. The same logic applies to speed: To get a support character to hit a key speed threshold (like 134 or 161, which lets them act twice in one cycle), you might need to trade some defense or HP rolls on other pieces for more speed rolls. This trade-off is completely worth it in the late game.
That means when you’re filtering late game relics, the question isn’t “is this better than what I have right now?” It’s “will swapping to this make my overall sheet more balanced and closer to my endgame goal?” Sometimes, a relic that doesn’t have “perfect” looking sub stats fills a gap in your stat sheet that you’ve been missing, making it the perfect relic for you right now. Remember: Relics are tools to build your character’s sheet, not works of art you collect for single-piece perfection. A true endgame completed set is the combination that gets your character’s full stat sheet to hit all your target balances and benchmarks.
To wrap up, relic progression isn’t just a pure luck gamble—it’s a long-term marathon of strategy, planning, and resource management. From strictly filtering main stats, to clearly defining useful sub stats, to using the scientific “initial scoring” and “+3/+6 stop-loss” upgrade process, every step saves you valuable time and resources. Once you have a usable set, you need to move past single-relic thinking and adjust your build with your character’s final stat sheet as your goal. This systematic method helps you get rid of relic anxiety completely and take back control of your progression. Go give it a try right now!
- Audit your main characters right now: Make a list of useful sub stats for your main damage dealer, supports, and sustain character to clearly define your upgrade goals.
- Clean up your relic backpack: Using the standards from this guide, turn any five-star relic with the wrong main stat or only 0-1 initial useful sub stats into enhancement fodder without hesitation.
- Practice the stop-loss rule: Next time you get a new relic base, strictly follow the “+3/+6 level up validation” rule. If it off-rolls twice in a row, cut your losses immediately and feel the joy of saving your hard-earned resources.