Many people don’t seem to understand how Break Effect and Toughness Break work in Honkai Star Rail, so I decided to focus here on how they work and how it calculates damage.

Break Effect

I’ve seen countless people everywhere think that Break Effect scales the damage you do on Toughness bars. So they build Break Effect Relic sets to help their team break Shields faster. Their theory makes sense, because Break Effect is not well explained.

Toughness Break

Toughness is the white Shield displayed above the enemy’s health bar. When an enemy attacks a weak character, it depletes these Toughness bars. How you break it depends on the attack used, the level difference between the character and the target, and Weakness Break Efficiency. This is a rare buff you can find in Simulated Universe buffs.

From what we know of the game, Toughness is a scale ranging from 30 to 540, and its nodes are all multiples of 30. In my guide, you may have heard of Break Units, each Break Unit has 30 Toughness.

Depending on the skill, the character can deal 0.5, 1, 2 and 3 Break Units, thus dealing 15, 30, 60 or 90 Toughness damage.

These values are halved if you are more than 10 levels lower than the enemy. Although the calculation formula is not fully known, it may depend more on the level difference. This is why in Simulated Universe, enemy Toughness bars take longer to defeat.

When an enemy’s tenacity is broken, a few things happen. First, the enemy will get an instance of Break DMG. Second, enemies receive a debuff corresponding to the element that caused the Weakness Break. Third, 25% will delay enemy actions.

Let’s start with Break DMG. Break DMG cannot be a crit, its only scaling properties are level and damage effect. Next, let’s look at debuffs. Physical damage applies Bleed effect, a damage-over-time effect based on the enemy’s maximum health for two turns. Ice applies Freeze, a standard 100% damage multiplier over time effect, and a 50% action delay on enemies after thawing.

General Rules

If you are within the same level range as the enemy, giving or receiving 10 damage, these general rules will apply. We’ll discuss the general rules now to avoid complications, and will update in the future once we understand how it fully works.

So the general rule is: if you do a basic attack, you will do 30 Toughness damage to an enemy. If it is an enhanced basic attack, you will cause 60 points of Toughness damage. Additionally, any Splash deals 30 Toughness damage to adjacent enemies.

In terms of skills, Single Target skill can cause 60 Toughness damage. AOE skills cause 30 Toughness damage to all members. Blast skill causes 60 Toughness damage to the primary target and 30 Toughness damage to adjacent targets. Bounce skill deals 30 Toughness damage, and then each bounce deals 15 damage to enemies hit.

On Ultimates, Single Target Ultimate does 90 Toughness damage. AOE Ultimate does 60 Toughness damage to all, and Blast does 60 Toughness damage to the target and adjacent targets. Impair skills will be the same as Ultimates, depending on who it attacks.

Finally, Imaginary doesn’t apply any damage over time, but delays enemy actions by 30%, proportional to Break Effect. It also reduces the speed of enemies by 10%, with very strong utility and speed manipulation.

All in all, if you have a detailed understanding of mechanisms such as Break Effect and Toughness Break, it will definitely help you make better choices in the game. If you haven’t tried it yet, you might as well get a brand new Honkai Star Rail Account. I believe it will bring you an uncommon experience.