Honkai: Star Rail 4.4 tier list: the Chinese community ranking, transcribed
By DayOneFix Editorial · August 15, 2026
Below is the Chinese community’s version 4.4 Star Rail ranking, transcribed from @绝不是dd’s tier-list rundown and mapped to HoYoverse’s official English names.
Version 4.4 is, in the creator’s own words, “the biggest single update this list has ever had” — the Fate collaboration cast landed, Himeko • Nova released, and the follow-up archetype was rebuilt around a new unit.
| Tier | Characters |
|---|---|
| T0 |  Feixiaoat E1S1 Hyacine Sparxie Yao Guang Silver Wolf LV.999 Mortenax Blade Evernight |
| T0.5 |  Himeko • Nova Rin Tohsaka Gilgamesh Archer Ashveil The Dahlia Phainon Cyrene Firefly Castorice Hysilens Trailblazer: Elation Dan Heng • Permansor Terrae Tribbie |
| T1 |  Saber Huohuo WeltE4+ The Herta Anaxa Mydei AcheronE2S1, with Mortenax Blade Black Swan Kafka Seele Fugue Sunday Sparkle Robin Trailblazer - Remembrance Cerydra |
| T2 |  Aventurine Boothill Silver Wolf Ruan Mei Yunli Cipher Luocha Rappa Moze Jingliu Aglaea Jing Yuan |
| T3–T5 | Not itemised — see below |
T3 and below are deliberately left blank, and that is the source’s own decision. He stops naming characters after T2 and describes the rest in two sentences: T3 units are for “veteran players with heavy investment who can still scrape through the Abyss”, and T4–T5 are “for players who genuinely love them — if you are chasing power, they are obsolete.” We have not invented names to fill those rows.
How this was read. The chart in the video shows portraits only, with no name labels. Every tier above comes from the creator stating the character’s tier out loud as he reaches it; Chinese names are then mapped against HoYoverse’s official published English roster. A small number of portraits in the bottom rows are never named on stream and are therefore absent here.
A few placements worth flagging
- Feixiao’s T0 is conditional on E1S1. The T0 grade is stated at that investment level, not at E0S0 — which is exactly the kind of condition the rest of this page is about.
- Acheron appears at T1, not higher, and specifically at E2S1 paired with Mortenax Blade, described as “the second-best option if you do not have Ashveil.”
- Welt reaches T1 only at E4 or above. Below that he is described as a support piece for Himeko teams rather than a tier-carrying unit.
- Aventurine drops to T2 — “the shield units outclassed him, and follow-up teams no longer need him.” A T2 for a unit who spent a year near the top is the clearest illustration on the chart that grades describe an environment, not a kit.
Every Star Rail tier list gives you a letter. Almost none of them tell you what the letter is conditional on — and in Chinese community discussion, that conditionality is the entire argument.
The comment tracks on the big ranking videos are people disputing individual placements as the video plays. Those disputes are more useful than the rankings, because they name the things a grade cannot hold.
1. A character’s tier is capped by who else exists
The most-contested placement in recent memory is Himeko SP, and the objection is not about her kit:
“Her only available teammates are launch-era characters. Her being T0 would be a miracle.”
That is a roster argument, not a power argument. A character who needs support that has not been released yet — or that only exists in a form several years old — is rated on the team you can actually field today. Her grade will move when her partners arrive, with nothing about her changing.
Watch for this whenever a new character sits oddly low. Sometimes the list is telling you “not yet” rather than “not good”.
2. The community uses banner revenue as a reality check
A recurring rebuttal, and one English lists never make:
“Why is she T0.5 when her banner revenue is that low?”
Chinese players treat sales as a crowd-sourced verdict on a character. It is not a rigorous measure — revenue tracks popularity, story presence and design as much as power — but it functions as a check on ranking inflation, and a grade wildly out of line with how people actually spent gets challenged.
Treat it as one signal among several. A character can be genuinely strong and unpopular; the point is that the Chinese discussion notices the gap, and a list that hides it is less informative.
3. Low Eidolon gains are good news, not bad
This inversion is worth internalising, from the discussion around Rin Tohsaka:
“Low gains mean the power difference between Eidolon levels is small — you don’t have to force high Eidolons. That’s a good thing.”
Tier lists routinely mark a character down when duplicates add little. Read that the other way: a character who performs near her ceiling at Eidolon 0 is the one a free-to-play account can actually use. The character whose grade assumes heavy investment is the expensive one, whatever letter she carries.
The same discussion carries the reverse compliment — that pulling one such character can be worth several on another team — which is a value claim, not a power claim, and the two get conflated constantly.
4. Sometimes the intuitive placement is simply wrong
The clearest case, from a video with over 1.6 million views: Himeko is best played off-field, and the reason is an interaction rather than her damage.
“Himeko has to go to the back. With her on-field, Phainon can’t get his ultimate off — don’t ask how I know, I tested it.”
A comment underneath notes the obvious problem: “There’s a guide putting Himeko in the front row that’s got me completely confused.” Two guides, opposite instructions, and the tier grade is identical in both — because a letter grade describes a character, not a rotation.
This is the failure mode to watch for. When a character’s correct usage is counterintuitive, the tier list is the last place you will learn it.
The structural complaint underneath all of it
One comment sums up a frustration that recurs across these threads:
“Universality is worth nothing in this game. Only dedicated supports break through — so it’s one team a year, one dedicated support a year, and this year, last year and next year don’t interact at all.”
Whether or not you agree, it explains why Chinese tier lists increasingly rank characters within a team archetype rather than globally. A single global ordering assumes characters compete with each other; if the game is built around dedicated pairings, they mostly do not.
How we cover this
We do not publish our own S/A/B rankings. Ranking characters requires playing them, building them and running endgame with them, and a list assembled by reading other lists is the thing this page is warning you about.
What we can do is report the arguments with their sources, so a list you find elsewhere becomes readable — and flag when a placement is contested, because the disagreement usually carries more information than either grade.
Related
- 4.5 banners: what’s confirmed and when
- Aventurine • Waveflair: Quantum, Elation, and not a sustain
- Robin • Summeretto, explained
- HSR codes and the redemption rules
- Wuthering Waves tier lists: the same problem, different axes
- Genshin tier lists: the community keeps score
- ZZZ tier lists: when the archetype sinks the character
- NTE tier lists: the low-investment one is a different list
Sources
The tier table is transcribed from @绝不是dd’s version 4.4 tier-list rundown on Bilibili, captured 16 August 2026, using the spoken tier call for each character rather than the unlabelled chart. Quoted arguments are from viewer comment tracks on high-view Chinese ranking and character-review videos for versions 4.4–4.5, collected 15 August 2026, translated rather than paraphrased where quoted. Chinese character names are mapped to English against HoYoverse’s own published bilingual character index, not by transliteration.