Summary
The turn-based nature ofHonkai: Star Railmakes the combat in the game significantly harder. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that the enemy can attack any of your characters at any point since they’re all on the field, making it important to protect them as much as possible.
The best way to do this is by putting a shield on your allies or by reducing the damage they take, which is where the Preservation path comes in. There aren’t a lot of characters from this path in the game, but it’s still the most valuable one you’ll find.
Combat Type
Fire
Even though Trailblazer’s Preservation path lies at the bottom of this list, it’s still quite a viable option. Not only do they provide a consistent shield to the entire party, but also have a chance of taunting the enemy and forcing all the attacks on themselves while they take over 50 percent reduced DMG.
Whenever you use any of the Fire Trailblazer’s abilities including the Ultimate, they provide a small shield to all allies based on their DEF. This gives you the ability to time these shields just before a heavy attack since you can use their Ultimate at any point without caring about the turn order on the top left of your screen.
Ice
Trailblazer’s best friend, March 7th, is the first playable character that you get for free in Honkai: Star Rail. If you’ve been playing the game for a while, it’s likely that you already have her with six Eidolons, which makes her quite a phenomenal sustainer if you don’t have any other characters ranked higher on this list.
Using her Skill, she can provide a massive shield to any one ally. If you use the Skill again to provide this shield to a different ally, both the shields can co-exist until their respective turns run out or they get destroyed by the enemies. Apart from all that, she can also freeze the enemies for one turn whenever her Ultimate is used, but you’ll need quite a lot of Effect Hit Rate to make this work in the late game.
Apart from the two free characters mentioned above, Gepard was the only Preservation character present in the game on release. This shot up his position in the meta since it wasvital to shield your allies during battle, especially when most players were attempting content with a recommended level way above their current level.
He can essentially be considered a five-star March 7th with a bit of reverse abilities. Instead of his Skill, Gepard provides all allies on the field with a shield whenever his Ultimate is used. On the other hand, he can freeze one enemy with his Skill. The requirement to have his Ultimate ready if you want to get shields is his only downside, but it can be fixed quite easily with some Energy Regeneration.
Quantum
Fu Xuan’s initial release in the game dealt a huge blow to Gepard’s position in the meta, and rightfully so. Her kit has a different approach to protecting her allies compared to all other Preservation characters, and she also scales on HP. Instead of providing her allies with a shield, she deploys a special field whenever her Skill is used for three turns.
This field massively reduces the overall damage taken by the allies, and then transfers some of the leftover damage to herself. While this is great against most enemies in the game, it does have a small flaw. If you’re up against an enemy that dealsheavy AoE damage like the Aventurine boss, she’s likely to get one-shotted because of all the extra damage she receives.
However, as long as you can protect her from the one-shot, Fu Xuan has the ability to heal herself whenever she goes below 50 percent while also healing her allies a little when her Ultimate is used.
Imaginary
Finally, it’s no surprise that the first prominent shielder released in the game easily takes the crown of, not only the best Preservation character, but also the best sustainer overall. Aventurine can provide a hefty shield to all his allies whenever his Skill or follow-up attack triggers, and he can also start the battle with this shield if you use his Technique.
Similarly to March, he can also trigger a follow-up attack once the team members with his shield get attacked enough times. Apart from all these abilities thatalready make him top tier, he also increases the Crit DMG taken by a single enemy when his Ultimate is used.
