Should you pull Jing Yuan? | Honkai: Star Rail | Prydwen Institute (2023)

Jing Yuan's banner was released on 17.05.2023 and it will be available for 3 weeks, until 07.06.2023. Please keep in mind that some regions will get the banner earlier - Asia being the first, followed by Europe and NA being last.

Sorry NA players, I just had to do it!

We already updated his profile with release information, so you can visit it to learn about his skills, traces and Eidolons. The rest of the guide will focus on reviewing the release version of Jing and giving tips about how you should use him - if you decide to pull him obviously.

There wasn't that many changes to Jing Yuan's kit compared to the final beta. Most of it was just wording improvements (like Attack Count was replaced with Hits Per Action when it comes to Lightning-Lord).

The only change in his kit affected the Technique:

The other thing that had changed are his Minor Traces:

Overall ATK% in the early game has a way bigger impact on the damage, but once you reach mid and end-game type of gear and also include the buffers into the equation, DMG% stats (elemental damage is part of it) become a bit more important. So this change is a bit so so.

The data for this section were provided by Grimro. To learn more about his simulations, check out his YouTube or theorycrafting Discord.

We already updated our DPS Ranking to include some small improvements to Jing Yuan's kit and you can see his placement there:

The sections below instead will focus on comparing various builds and Light Cones you can use on Jing Yuan and how they affect his damage. The numbers and simulations were provided by Grimro and he actually shared the sheet where he did all the math and you can check it out here:

Grimro Jing Yuan sheet

The first thing you need to understand about Jing Yuan is that the majority of his damage comes from the Lightning-Lord. This makes the stack management for it crucial as it can heavily impact his damage output.

Single target damage

• Skill - 16%
• Ultimate - 9.7%
• Talent (Lightning-Lord) - 74.3%

AoE (3 targets) damage

• Skill - 27.4%
• Ultimate - 16.5%
• Talent (Lightning-Lord) - 56.1%

This section compares Jing Yuan's single target and AoE damage output in a 8 cycle battle - the rules of the simulation are exactly the same as in our DPS Ranking, so if you want to learn more about them, head there.

Best Light Cones - Single target at Eidolon 0

Best Light Cones - AoE at Eidolon 0

Overall you can easily see that Before Dawn has a massive advantage over any other Erudition Cone available in the game currently - even at S1 Before Dawn beats any other fully superimposed Light Cone.

Relic Sets

Band of Sizzling Thunder

Relic Set

(2)

Increases Lightning DMG by 10%.

(4)

When the wearer uses Skill, increases the wearer's ATK by 20% for 1 turn(s).

Inert Salsotto

Planetary Ornament Set

(2)

Increases the wearer's CRIT Rate by 8%. When the wearer's current CRIT Rate reaches 50% or higher, the wearer's Ultimate and follow-up attack DMG increases by 15%.

For the Relic Set, Band of Sizzling Thunder is the best one for Jing Yuan - the set is perfect for him. As for the Planetary Sets, while Inert Salsotto wins in a lot of scenarios, the Space Sealing Station set isn't that far behind (check the section below for detailed comparison).

Main Stats

When it comes to the Main Stats, here's what Jing prefers:

• Body - Crit Rate
• Feet - ATK% or Speed
• Planar Sphere - Lightning DMG
• Link Rope - ATK%

Important! For the Feet slot, don't blindly go for Speed! While it's great to have Speed Boots in the Memory of Chaos as this will make Jing Yuan (and any other character) cycle faster, there are some breakpoints that can cause a lot of harm. First of all, if you want to run Speed boots, you need to make sure Jing's total Speed is equal or above 134. But you also need to make sure your supports are as fast (or even faster), otherwise they won't be able to generate enough Skill Points for him.

For general gameplay and if you don't care about min-maxing, going with ATK% boots is the safe way that's not much worse than Speed ones. You can check the numbers in the section below.

Sub Stats Priority

Crit DMG = Crit Rate > ATK% > Speed

You build Jing like any other damage dealer in the game, so the holy trinity of Crit DMG, Crit Rate and ATK% is important for him.

Skill Priority

Talent > Skill > Ultimate > Basic

The order is pretty obvious considering the majority of Jing's damage comes from the Lightning-Lord.

Major Traces Priority

War Marshal > Battalia Crush > Man With a Plan

The simulations below were ran on Jing Yuan E0 + Before Dawn S1.

This section is targeted toward spenders to help them pick the sweet spot for their Jing pulls.

Please keep in mind that currently E4 Energy bonus isn't included in our Simulations as it massively changes the rotation and we will calculate it at a later date. This means that in the game, Jing at E4 and higher will perform better than the simulations below are showing.

As you can see, having Jing Yuan at E0 with his cone gives you more damage than Jing Yuan at E3 without his cone. So if you're a spender getting his cone - even the base version - is something you don't really want to skip.

Warning! A wall of text below, but I promise it's worth reading!

The Dozing General of the Xianzhou Luofu is undeniably a very powerful and intimidating character. He’s a character who performs exceptionally well in spite of him being on the Path of Erudition; Jing Yuan is able to dole out great single-target damage in addition to already absurd AoE damage and has bonus crit stats for free that turn his already impressive damage up a notch, giving him a lot of staying power and impeccable scaling into the late-game.

Interestingly enough, you wouldn’t be able to tell how strong he actually is with just a glance at his overall multipliers—they look rather modest, and that’s putting it generously… right? You wouldn’t know it, but the vast majority of Jing Yuan’s damage in combat comes from his talent, potentially as much as 70%! Where on earth does that damage come from?

Well, this is unfortunately a failure on the part of the skill description of Jing Yuan’s talent mostly. See, Jing Yuan is always shadowed by an additional in-combat entity, his Lightning Lord. Lightning Lord has its own speed value and will act independently of Jing Yuan, and if Jing Yuan is downed in combat, Lightning Lord will also peace out.

The talent description is quite verbose and rather confusing, resulting in many people severely underrating Jing Yuan as a character. Let’s try and break it down.

Lightning Lord’s attacks target a random enemy, dealing 25% of its damage to adjacent targets. Its attacks are considered follow-ups, and Lightning Lord has the base values of 60 speed, and 3 Hits Per Action. One Hit Per Action equates to dealing up to 66% of Jing Yuan’s ATK at max trace level, which means Lightning Lord’s base damage with its base 3 Hits per action is up to 198% of Jing Yuan’s ATK. Any further increases to the Hits Per Action will add on the value of 1 Hit Per Action to the current total.

This means that you just take the base multiplier and multiply it by the current Hit Per Action to work out how much damage Lightning Lord’s attack will deal. Since the absolute maximum amount of Hit Per Action is 10, this means Lightning Lord’s attack can deal at most up to 660% of Jing Yuan’s attack, and that’s if it’s only on one target. If there are multiple enemies all taking splash damage from each hit, it skyrockets to a theoretical maximum of 990%. Yeah, now you see where the ridiculous damage comes from.

An important clarification is that each Hit Per Action introduces the increased damage as a whole new instance of damage. This means at 10 stacks, it deals that 660% multiplier as 10 separate hits of 66%, with each one targeting different enemies and splashing onto foes adjacent to them. This spreads the total damage out relatively evenly across all targets, with only some slight losses occurring if some of the damage targets corner targets (thus losing half of the splash damage), but overall is a quite consistent AoE damage tool. More obviously, in single-target scenarios, all of that damage gets concentrated on that one target, creating quite the damage nuke.

In addition to this, every time Lightning Lord’s Hit Per Action increases by 1, it will gain 10 extra Speed. This pushes its turn forward and allows Lightning Lord to get more attacks over the course of a fight. The reason this is important to facilitate is because as mentioned previously, the max Hits Per Action is 10, so if Jing Yuan is somehow able to act again before Lightning Lord attacks, you can end up losing out on damage due to overcapping the Hits Per Action. In practice, this is extremely unlikely unless you turbo-stack Speed onto Jing Yuan and have outside speed boosts.

Because each Hit Per Action adds the same amount of damage to Lightning Lord’s next attack, the damage gains from each stack are entirely linear (with one caveat discussed later), but you ideally want to be getting stacks as high as possible for speed purposes.After Lightning Lord attacks, its Hit Per Action will return back to the base value of 3, and its speed will also return to the base value of 60.

The way Jing Yuan increases the Hit Per Action of Lightning Lord is through his skill and his ultimate, and getting more uses out of each will increase the rate at which Lightning Lord can slam its heavenly spear directly through your enemies.

Jing Yuan’s skill deals AoE damage to all foes on the field, up to 100% atk to all at max trace level. A very unimpressive multiplier, but as we now know, this is not the main source of Jing Yuan’s damage; using this skill will increase Lightning Lord’s Hit Per Action by 2.

Jing Yuan’s ultimate is also an AoE attack, cleaving all enemies for up to 200% atk at max trace level, and simultaneously increasing Lightning Lord’s Hit Per Action by 3. This is a great way of instantly increasing the Hits Per Action, but it comes at a steep above-average energy cost of 130.

Because these two attacks increase Lightning Lord’s Hits Per Action —and more importantly, because Basic Attack does NOT increase Attack Count at all—Jing Yuan always wants to be spending SP to use his skill, as this will increase Lightning Lord’s Hits Per Action, and will also regenerate more energy for Jing Yuan to get more ultimates off.

As you can imagine, because the potential maximum multiplier that Lightning Lord can gain is so exceedingly high, Jing Yuan also benefits hugely from all types of buffs. And is one of the reasons he scales so very well into late-game content. He especially enjoys the benefits that the Harmony characters (Asta, Tingyun, Bronya) can bring, as he makes more use of their buffs than most other units typically can.

It gets even better for Jing Yuan, though, because his bonus traces are expertly tailored to improve his performance and serve to increase his scaling even further. Remember that one caveat that was alluded to earlier? Well, his A2 bonus trace is where this caveat is. I said earlier that each stack of Hit Per Action is a linear increase in damage, and that’s true… up until you unlock his A2.

A2 makes it so that if Lightning Lord’s Hits Per Action is at 6 or above when it next attacks, its Crit Damage will be increased by 20%. This is an absurd bonus that will basically always be active unless Jing Yuan has his turn delayed. With even a small amount of investment into speed, 6 stacks is hardly a challenge to obtain otherwise, and you should always strive to reach at least 6 before Lightning Lord’s next turn.

This synergizes very well with Jing Yuan’s A6, which increases his crit rate by 10% for 2 turns after using his skill, meaning Jing Yuan has easy access to free crit stats in his kit, something that is usually only seen on Hunt characters. A4 also gives Jing Yuan a bonus of 15 energy at the start of a battle, giving him a head-start in reaching his ultimate and stacking Lightning Lord to the max.

I do need to point out that maximizing Jing Yuan’s effectiveness means you need to pay extra attention to your skill order and rotation; if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be using Jing Yuan’s skill when he’s already at full energy, just as an example, you may notice that you inevitably run into scenarios where Lightning Lord is attacking before at least 6 stacks.

You may also want to specifically try and concentrate all of Lightning Lord’s immense power onto a single target, and so you’d ideally want to focus-fire any surrounding lesser foes before Lightning Lord strikes to maximize the number of Hits Per Action going onto the main foe. Either way, Jing Yuan benefits a lot from more attentive play, as even small overcaps on energy can add up a lot over the course of an entire encounter.

Jing Yuan is truly a phenomenal unit that is likely to remain relevant for quite some time to come, owing to his fantastic talent scaling and inherent crit buffs. He works in all circumstances and takes to outside buffs extremely well, raising his already absurd damage even further.

The only thing better than his overall performance is his spectacular hair-care routine. Even a general needs to look his best~

Please keep in mind that the ratings are tailored toward Memory of Chaos - for generic content you can use anything. Our Tier List and ratings focus only on Memory of Chaos.

While his single target damage output is pretty great sadly it's not on the same level as Seele - you can compare him more to YQ. Jing Yuan shines more in AoE scenarios and compared to Clara, doesn't need to fulfill multiple conditions to reach his damage potential - also there's a lot of Lightning-weak enemies in the current MoC, so he is perfect fit there.

Ratings

• General - S
• Single target - S
• AoE - S+

Is Jing Yuan a must pull?

He is great damage dealer that performs exceptionally well in AoE scenarios, while still being great when there's just one enemy left. He instantly jumped to the top 3 DPS in the game, alongside Seele and Yanqing, pushing Clara a bit down (but in the current MoC she's used more as a Tank either way).

Still, keep in mind that we already know who is coming in 1.1 version and that's Silver Wolf and Luocha. SW is a great debuffer who can potentially have a huge impact on the meta and how we build teams and Luocha will be the saving grace for people that don't have Bailu or Gepard. While we think that at level 80 cap you will be able to delve deep into MoC with F2P damage dealers, if you lack the defensive pillars for the team, you're in trouble. Big trouble.

Also, Kafka could potentially be released soon after the two characters above and since she is also an AoE DPS from the Lightning element, it's best to pick only one of them - at this point in the game, you don't need multiple DPS of the same element with the current meta being 1 DPS + 3 Supports.

So, should you pull for Jing? You will have to answer the question yourself, but we hope after reading this guide you will know if he's worth it!

If you want to hear some different opinions or learn more about Jing Yuan, check the videos below: