When you start playing Honkai Impact 3^rd, you’ll fall in love with the game’s extraordinary combat system. It’s something that no other mobile game has managed to do quite so well. Naturally, you’ll also feel some affection for your first squad of Valkyries since, after all, they introduce you to the game. But did you know that White Comet, for example, is one of the worst characters in the game?

If you don’t know how to evaluate your Valkyries from the get-go, you might dump a ton of resources into upgrading the wrong gal. Sure enough, you need to give WC and the rest of your team a little boost to be able to go through enough campaign levels to summon better Valkyries. However, you should keep upgrades on bad characters to a minimum and, to do this, you need to be able to tell bad characters from good ones.

The Importance of Rank for Core Valkyries

Some Valkyries are unlocked during the campaign, but most of them are terrible. Good Valkyries join your team when you’ve accumulated enough fragments for them. You can get these fragments through events, supply crates, or the shop, although most of the times you won’t have a say in which specific fragments you receive. In other words, the best Valkyries in the game can be costly to obtain and that’s an understatement.

Furthermore, once you do have a Valkyrie, you have to rank her up if she’s going to continue to be useful. This requires even more fragments. If, for example, you want to upgrade a rank A character to rank SSS, you need to fork out no less than 350 fragments. The result is worthwhile. For each new rank, your Valkyrie’s stats are enhanced and her basic damage output is increased. Furthermore, each character gains new abilities when ranked, some of which are more important than others. When you decide which Valkyrie to farm for, choose the one whose ranked abilities are most impactful.

How to Evaluate Skills

Once you’ve come across a Valkyrie that you can rank up, it’s time to take a look at her different skills and whether or not these are useful for your existing team. Although combat might look simple, to begin with, there are actually a number of things a Valkyrie can do that can significantly increase your success rate. The following are her most important skills:

The Evasion Skill

As we mentioned in our guide to combat strategies, evasion is an essential skill in Honkai Impact 3^rd. In addition to helping you avoid painful hits, it triggers a special skill for each Valkyrie, which can give you a significant advantage. For example, White Comet uses Time Fracture, which slows down enemies for 3 seconds after a successful ultimate evasion. This is fairly weak compared to other characters who can deal damage, self-heal, or CC enemies for longer durations upon successful evasion.

Basic Attacks

You’ll spend most of your combat time performing these attacks, so it’s important to learn the patterns for each Valkyrie you use. Not all basic attack chains are the same, which means that in order to be effective, you need to learn where the hard-hitting attacks are in each chain. That way, you’ll know whether it’s worth interrupting a chain at any given moment. In addition, it matters whether these attacks are Melee, Ranged, or both. The gear and stigmata you put on a Valkyrie will always enhance a specific type of attack and you don’t want to add Ranged damage to a Melee character, for example.

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Special Attacks

These include Combo or Charged attacks, depending on each Valkyrie. Combo attacks are activated with different sequences for each character, so it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with a Valkyrie’s unique combos before you use her in battle. In addition, some Combo attacks can trigger other character’s QTE skill, which you can use to deal massive damage very quickly. White Comet, for example, sets enemies floating with her Combo, which triggers the QTE skill of Crimson Impulse (Mei).

The Ultimate

Each Valkyrie can spend a set number of SP to activate a powerful Ultimate. Some – like White Comet, for example – enter a burst mode where their attacks are more powerful and have a higher range. However, these no longer count as Basic Attacks, which should impact the way you choose the right gear for these characters. In other words, gear that increases the damage of attacks, rather than the damage of basic attacks is preferable for Valkyries with Burst. The same kind of correlations can be made for other Ultimate abilities and the right items to buff them.

The Leader Skill and Passives

Each Valkyrie has a Leader Skill that is activated if she is the first character slotted in a team. Generally speaking, defensive skills might be better for beginners who are still learning the ropes, but offensive skills are significantly more impactful overall. Finally, a Valkyrie’s passives can guide their respective playstyles just as much as their active abilities. In most cases, these passives help a character deal more damage when certain conditions are met, such as, for example, having over 80% HP or hitting paralyzed targets.

How to Evaluate Roles

Each time you assess a new Valkyrie, you have to consider her combination of skills and gear against your existing core team. Will there be room for this addition or would she detract more than she would add to the mix? There are a few more specific questions you can ask yourself in order to determine the usefulness of a particular character.

Is the Valkyrie’s Leader Skill good enough to make her the leader? If you intend to play a Valkyrie as the main or secondary DPS, are her skills good enough to warrant a place on your core team? In other words, does she have enough multipliers and, if so, are they more likely to apply than in the case of your current characters? As a support, does the Valkyrie bring any impressive buffs to the table? And finally, is there any gear this Valkyrie can equip that will make her exceptional? If the answer is yes to most of these questions, then you may have found yourself a fantastic fit.

Unfortunately, the Valkyries that you are given during the tutorial phase of Honkai Impact 3^rd tend to fail in most of the evaluations described above. Their main flaw is that their damage and modifiers are extremely weak compared to other characters, which can make it difficult to clear levels in a timely manner. Even as an F2P player, though, there are some accessible and decent Valkyries you might want to prioritize during the early-game. We talk about them in this guide, which we recommend to you if you haven’t had the chance to read it already.

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