Optimizing Relics and Planar Ornaments

If you’re familiar with gacha games, you may be familiar with how frustrating the gear system can be at times. Hoyoverse games share similar gear systems to each other, and they can all be approached in the same manner as well. While a lot of people may think it just comes down to purely RNG, which is somewhat true, there are ways to mitigate this. You can be smart about how you approach gearing your characters, or you can just try to roll everything and hope for the best, which I wouldn’t recommend. That wastes a lot of resources and leads to frustration.

In this section of my site, I plan on outlining the way to approach relics and planar ornaments to give you best chances at making your favorite characters be able to crush content. I’ll go over the general approach, as well as give you some examples to go off of. So with that out of the way, let’s start crafting some gear!

Knowing Which Relics Have Potential

It’s important to know which relics and planar ornaments to put resources into. There isn’t really a way to farm relic experience material consistently other than farming more relics. This can lead to running out of experience material faster than you think. With that said, knowing which relics to roll can save you a bit of headache. For the most part, it isn’t too complicated, but for certain characters, it may be a bit harder.

The general rule of thumb to follow is for main damage dealing characters to have critical rate and critical damage on most, if not all, of their gear pieces. Supports usually want speed and survivability. Of course, depending on the character, this can change. Kafka and Black Swam for instance don’t care for critical stats since their damage comes from their damage over time, which only scales with Attack. Some relic sets and character abilities also require you to reach a certain breakpoint. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll go over the easier relics.

Criteria For Good Relics

Try to set a bar for which relics you should have characters use. This makes it easier to filter out bad relics to salvage for relic experience material for later use. Consider these general rules that I use for determining good relics.

  • Critical Stats – For most traditional main damage dealers, having both on all your pieces is ideal.
  • Speed – A universally useful stat can be used with damage dealers and supports.
  • Break Effect and Speed – If you plan on using Break based teams, having both of these stats on all your gear is ideal.
  • 3 Substat Rolls Minimum – This is the bar I set for myself when rolling relics. If it doesn’t roll 3 times into the stats I want, I trash it.

There’s a bit more nuance to this, but this is the general premise. Now let’s actually start rolling relics.

Gear Rolling Process

So you’ve farmed a lot of gear and need to actually roll them now. To be able to know if you should keep gear or not, let’s go over the process I myself use to get gear like this.

Step 1:

Check to see if the relic can roll a good fourth stat. Relics can start with either 3 or 4 stats, so if a relic has potential to roll into something good for the fourth stat, give it a try. Something like this is a good example.

This can potentially get Critical Rate as the fourth line, so leveling it to +3 would be a good idea. It uses up little experience material, and you can potentially get a really good piece of gear.

Step 2:

Level the relic to either +3 (if it already started with 4 stats) or +6 (if you rolled into a good fourth stat). If it doesn’t go into a desirable stat, then it’s your call to either trash it or try again on the next roll. But if it doesn’t roll into a desirable stat again, definitely trash it.

Step 3:

That’s really pretty much all there is. Remember the 3 Substat Rolls Minimum rule. Honkai: Star Rail now tells you how many rolls a relic has and where they went when you look at relics. At this point, you can just trash all the duds that you gathered and try crafting relics of your own. Thanks to the 3.0 update, getting good gear is easier than ever. Self modeling resin and wishful resin can get you the gear you always wanted, and you can even reroll bad ones that could’ve been amazing.

Step 4:

Just remember to not rush the process. It takes a good amount of time to get characters to a level like this. The process can be short if you’re lucky, of you can be stuck in the relic mines for a couple of months. It’s a casual gacha game at the end of the day, it shouldn’t be stressful and you should have fun. You’ll get good gear eventually, and you can force the process if you really want with crafting. There’s RNG involved, but it’s RNG that you can have a bit of influence in.

Here is a video by another content creator named Braxophone. The video is a bit old, but the concepts are still the same to this day. If you’d prefer a video format, I do recommend watching this video.