Honkai: Star Rail has its fair share of combat mechanics whose inner workings aren't quite made apparent by the game itself. It's easy to just press buttons and win most of the battles that the Astral Express crew runs into, but players who really want to dive deep into the game's nitty-gritty details will have to be familiar with all the important effects that come into play with every attack their characters make.
Effect Hit Rate is a stat that seems simple at a glance, but it actually involves a bit more nuance. Incidentally, this is an important part of Honkai: Star Rail's turn-based combat, especially for characters who rely on inflicting status effects. This guide covers everything players need to know about this character stat.
How Does Effect Hit Rate Work in Honkai Star Rail?
First of all, Effect Hit Rate determines whether an attack inflicts a negative effect or not. Such effects include Freeze, Slow, Shock, Entanglement, Imprisonment, and more. The elemental affinity of a character determines what type of debuff they inflict. A higher Effect Hit Rate stat results in a better chance of debuffing targets.
Most skills, such as March 7th's Glacial Cascade and Serval's Lightning Flash, have a base chance to cause their respective elemental debuffs whenever they hit an enemy. Effect Hit Rate improves these base chances, making the abilities more reliable against all targets.
Effect Hit Rate only matters to abilities that explicitly say they can apply debuffs. Asta, Sampo, and Welt are other good examples of characters with innate debuffing abilities. This doesn't mean that other characters cannot cause negative status effects, however, as breaking an opponent's Toughness bar will always cause a debuff that matches the element of the attack that inflicted the hit.
Having 100% Effect Hit Rate does not mean that every skill cast will inflict a debuff due to the innate effect resistance stats in all enemies. It's possible to go beyond 100% Effect Hit Rate, and the excess points will serve as a counter against effect-resistant targets.
What's the Difference Between CRIT Rate and Effect Hit Rate?
As explained above, Effect Hit Rate is only for applying debuffs. CRIT Rate is a completely different effect—it refers to the chance that an attack will do more damage depending on the character's CRIT DMG stat. CRIT Rate is better used on characters like Seele, Physical Trailblazer, and other units who rely on dealing raw damage.
Critical strikes do not inflict debuffs. One exception to this is Dan Heng since he can apply the Slow debuff to targets that get critically struck by his Cloudlancer Art: Torrent skill. In this case, Dan Heng relies more on CRIT Rate instead of Effect Hit Rate, and players must invest in the former if they want to keep pushing enemies down to the bottom of the turn order with this character.
Honkai: Star Rail is now available on Android, iOS, and PC. A PlayStation version is in development.