The best Honkai Star Rail Dan Heng build

What is the best build for Dan Heng in Honkai: Star Rail? Dan Heng is one of the starter characters the game hands out to you for free during the prologue of Honkai: Star Rail. Along with his fellow Astral Express crew member March 7th, he quickly joins the Trailblazer's party in-story, and also becomes a permanent fixture of your playable character roster.

This brooding bookworm isn't the strongest character in the game, being a freebie, but he'll be with you at least for the game's opening sections, and potentially a lot longer if you're an F2P player who won't be pulling from the gacha all that often. A good build to make the most of his kit is therefore essential. So read on for our best Honkai: Star Rail Dan Heng build advice, including relics, light cones, and more.

Honkai: Star Rail best Dan Heng build

Dan Heng path and element

Dan Heng follows the path of The Hunt. This is a sub-type of DPS character in Honkai: Star Rail who specialises in single-target attacks. This means that while Dan Heng can never deliver the sort of sweeping blows to every enemy on the field that other DPS specialists rely on, he can single-mindedly pursue one enemy at a time to deal a significant amount of damage. This makes him an excellent choice to take into boss fights.

His elemental affiliation is Wind. His attacks apply the Wind Shear debuff on enemies, who will continue to take elemental damage over time even after he's stopped hitting them while the debuff is active. He fights with a spear or polearm-type weapon, meaning that in exploration situations he's best suited to initiating combat encounters at close-range.

Best light cone for Dan Heng: In the Night

• 4-star alternative: Only Silence Remains

When building Dan Heng as a boss killer, you might want to go all-in with a 5-star light cone. In the Night will do the job nicely: it increases Dan Heng's CRIT rate by a minimum of 12%, with additional bonuses to attack, skill damage, and crit damage stacking up when SPD exceeds 100.

But if you don't fancy equipping Dan Heng with a 5-star light cone, there's good news. The 4-star Only Silence Remains is just as good a choice for his build, and indeed is his canonical light cone. It increases his ATK stat by a minimum 16% and — in an ideal boost for boss fights — grants an additional 12% (min.) to his CRIT rate whenever there are two or fewer enemies on the field.

Best relics for Dan Heng: Eagle of Twilight Line

• 2-piece bonus: Increases Wind DMG by 10%
• 4-piece bonus: After the wearer uses their ultimate, their action is advanced forward by 25%

While it's possible to build Dan Heng using more generic ATK-boosting relics (a good example is the Musketeer of Wild Wheat set), it makes sense to take advantage of his rare status as a DPS-focussed Wind-aligned character and go for the Eagle of Twilight Line as your first choice. Dan Heng's powerful ult is a particular highlight of his kit, so making the most of it with this set's four-piece bonus is well worth the effort of collecting all the pieces.

Now that you know how to put together a solid build for Dan Heng, don't miss out on our build guides for his fellow starter characters The Trailblazer and March 7th.