Honkai Star Rail players crown the game's best standard character, and you can get her for free

Honkai Star Rail is finally live, and in less than a day – on top of some prior beta experience – many players have declared Bronya as the game's first must-have meta character.

Bronya is a Harmony-type Wind character who specializes in support. Her skill lets one teammate take their next turn sooner and with a significant one-time damage bonus, while her ultimate increases the attack and critical damage of the team. Her damage bonuses and turn order manipulation make her valuable in virtually every situation, giving her an edge over the rest of the standard character lineup and arguably even Honkai Star Rail's launch rate-up character, Seele.

Seele is the first limited five-star in Honkai Star Rail, and she's great at what she does, which is single-target Quantum damage. Seele's skill and burst both hit hard, and she gets to take one extra turn whenever she lands a kill. This lets her pick off multiple enemies at once despite her single-target focus, and the nature of her kit also makes her strong in boss fights.

Seele is generally the strongest DPS character available right now, but as is often the case with party-based games, including developer Hoyoverse's own Genshin Impact, versatile support characters are often more valuable than pure damage dealers. More to the point, Seele is considerably stronger if you also have Bronya, which goes to show how powerful the latter can be.

Trusted Genshin Impact resource Keqing Mains, which is already spinning up a Star Rail wiki, agrees that "Bronya is the clear best of the standard units, and should be your highest priority if you're going to reroll for meta." Plenty of other players agree, with many previous beta testers reporting that Bronya hard carried them through a lot of content.

The good news is that Bronya is one of the seven characters available through the game's standard Stellar Warp banner, which also shares a pool with the beginner Departure Warp banner. You're guaranteed to receive one of these seven characters from the 50 pulls you can spend on the Departure Warp (technically 40 pulls, as there's a 20% discount). Additionally, once you reach 300 pulls on the Stellar Warp, you can select a standard five-star of your choice. This ensures that everyone can eventually guarantee Bronya or another standard character of their choosing, which is a nice feature.

All that being said, Honkai Star Rail is balanced in a way so that no one character is genuinely needed to clear any content. Don't feel pressured to get Bronya, especially if you don't like her, and don't spend any resources on standard pulls. Save your Stellar Jades for Special Passes to spend on limited-time banners, as Star Rail regularly gives out standard pulls. It'll take several months to reach the 300 standard pity, but you'll get plenty of other characters in the meantime.

Here's how to increase your Trailblaze level in Honkai Star Rail to unlock those free pulls.