Seele, the strongest DPS character on our Honkai Star Rail tier list, is the focus of a strange adjustment coming to the RPG in a future update because her ultimate hits so hard that it’s doing damage to unprepared eyeballs.
As developer Hoyoverse explained in a “developer radio” blog post, players have apparently complained that “Seele’s ultimate has too many flashy effects. It hurts my eyes after seeing it lots of times.” Funnily enough, Seele is about the worst character to have this problem because her entire gimmick is taking extra turns and therefore using her ultimate a lot more frequently.
As someone who’s used her ultimate approximately 10,000 times already, I can’t say I’ve ever been physically pained by the animation, but that might be because I play at 2X speed. Even then, I can at least see where people are coming from here; it’s a lot of flashes.
Good news, then. “After receiving feedback from Trailblazers about this issue, the crew is actively working on finding the best solution to optimize this,” Hoyoverse says. “We plan to add the relevant options into game settings for Trailblazers to personalize this parameter.” Whatever this setting is, it won’t be ready for update 1.1 because it “requires extra development and testing,” so it’s at least seven or eight weeks away at the time of writing.
It sounds like this will be a whole graphics option rather than a targeted animation tweak just for Seele, which means we might end up getting the blanket “skip ultimates” toggle that I know many Honkai Star Rail players have been asking for. We could also see a less drastic way to shorten or streamline skill and/or ultimate animations, which should prevent this problem from coming up again with future characters.
Honkai Star Rail’s new banner has one of its strongest characters, and no it’s not just Jing Yuan.