Since her debut in Version 1.1 of Honkai: Star Rail, there has not been another playable character quite like Silver Wolf. Even after multiple patches, her ability to boost the party’s damage potential and implant a weakness remains invaluable.
Let’s start with a reminder of Silver Wolf’s kit. Her Skill can implant a weakness matching an on-field character into a single enemy. It also reduces the enemy’s DMG RES (only if she implanted the weakness). Her Ultimate can decrease the enemy’s DEF while dealing Quantum DMG. Finally, her Talent has a chance to either reduce ATK, DEF, or SPD randomly whenever she attacks an enemy target. In other words, while her ability to implant weaknesses is incredibly useful, the meat of her usage in battle will come from her ability to debuff enemies.
The main reason that you should pull for Silver Wolf is, of course, her Skill. Silver Wolf will likely be the only character in Honkai: Star Rail who will be able to implant a Weakness into an enemy. This makes her a highly unique character with no replacement other than re-organizing your team in order to Break enemies. Silver Wolf helps to make mono element teams perform more consistently. As well, having her as your debuffer will allow you more freedom when coming up with team compositions. You won’t need to worry about whether you can hit the enemy’s weakness or not if you can simply give them that specific weakness, after all.
Another reason is because of Silver Wolf’s ability as a supporter. So far the only other Nihility character who specifically focuses debuffing the enemy, rather than inflicting a Break Effect or DoT, is Pela. However, Pela can only lower the enemy’s DEF. In contrast, Silver Wolf has the chance to lower three different stats. Granted, the debuff is quite slight, even after leveling up Traces. Her Skill also makes it easier for other characters to Break enemies, as well as gives more options depending on what kind of Break Effect you want.
Just like how no one is perfect, no single character is without their disadvantages. In Silver Wolf’s case, one of the biggest disadvantages in using her is that everything is single target. This makes her difficult to use in places like Swarm Disaster, where there are a lot of enemies. Her kit also relies on luck. The ATK, DEF, or SPD debuff from her Talent is random, as is the weakness she implants. She can potentially eat through your SP if your luck is bad and you can’t implant the weakness you want. However, you can mitigate this issue with a mono element team.
Finally, another disadvantage Silver Wolf has is that the threshold she needs to reliably land a hit is incredibly high. You need almost 100% Effect Hit Rate in order for her debuff to go through. Since Silver Wolf needs to reliably land her debuffs, you have to either pull for her Eidolons (which is not an easy feat for F2P players unless you decide beforehand to go all in with her) or compromise on some of her Relics in order to improve her Effect Hit Rate. Without Eidolons, Silver Wolf can only be a debuffer and not a sub-DPS.
Silver Wolf’s advantages far outweigh her disadvantages though, and she is definitely a character you want on your team. If you’re F2P, I highly suggest using your Stellar Jades on her because of her Skill and general usefulness when it comes to increasing how much damage your party can do. Once upon a time, we all thought Luocha was irreplaceable as a healer. “Pull for Luocha,” we said. “You won’t regret it,” we promised. Well, you still won’t regret getting Luocha. But with Huohuo in the first part of Version 1.5, we now have a very strong contender for a Luocha equivalent. On that day, humanity received a grim reminder: power creep in a gacha game is a very real threat. Fortunately, with her unique kit, Silver Wolf will remain a strong contender in the game’s meta.
Honkai: Star Rail is readily available on the PS5, Windows PC, and mobile devices. The Silver Wolf re-run is part of the second phase of Honkai: Star Rail Version 1.5, and she’ll run alongside the new Physical Erudition 5-star character Argenti.
