Fans want Honkai: Star Rail to make this Jing Yuan bug a feature

Get in there, Lightning Lord

HoYoverse

It sometimes happens that bugs in video games can actually benefit players and such a case is currently making its rounds in Honkai: Star Rail – or so it appeared. Some players have noticed that Jing Yuan’s summon, the mighty Lightning Lord, is immediately attacking for an additional time if it wipes out the entire enemy line-up in the Pure Fiction game mode.

They initially thought that the Lightning Lord, which can have up to ten charges to attack with, only consumed as many charges as it needed to wipe out the current enemy wave and then used the remaining charges against the new enemies, instead of expending all charges in the first attack and wasting damage by overkilling the foes.

This would be a massive quality-of-life improvement and a strong buff for Jing Yuan, making his Lightning Lord much more efficient in battle.

However, this is not what's happening here. When you replicate the conditions, you’ll notice that Lightning Lord still consumes all of its charges when attacking, but for some unknown reason – and that’s likely the bug – it gets an immediate attack action against the next wave of enemies. This attack uses the standard three charges Lightning Lord always starts with. This was making it seem in the initial example like it used seven of the maximum ten charges and then had three left over.

Other users have chimed in since then and reported that a similar bug has affected Lightning Lord since last year in specific game modes with a similar structure as Pure Fiction.

Even though the discovered bug isn’t actually doing what users initially thought it did, it managed to kick off another debate about older characters getting such quality-of-life improvements: Many players believe that Lightning Lord should be made smarter and stop overkilling enemies, instead carrying over unused charges. Other characters with charges that can be wasted, like Himeko and Blade, would massively benefit from similar changes.

Newer characters with similar charge counters do actually have mechanics that account for such overflows, preventing charges from going to waste, making it feel doubly unfair for those with older units.

However, it’s unlikely that such adjustments will be made: HoYoverse is extremely careful about changing characters post-release. Recently, it had to roll back a Neuvillette bug fix in Genshin Impact, because the fix essentially nerfed the character and prompted massive criticism from fans – including the threat of a lawsuit in China. While buffing characters post-release would probably go over better with players, the topic remains a slippery slope for the developer.