Guide: How to quickly defeat Nikador in Honkai Star Rail

The specter of HP inflation has been haunting the Honkai: Star Rail community recently. Many bosses appearing in the turn-based RPG’s endgame modes seem to possess such deep pools of HP lately that achieving the maximum amount of stars – and thus earning all rewards – lies out of reach for a large group of players. The current boss found in Memory of Chaos, Nikador, has two combat phases with around 3.7 million HP each, giving him a total of about 7.4 million.

Compare that to the previous Memory of Chaos boss, which had a total HP of 3.2 million, and you’d be forgiven for letting out a cry of despair. Before you do so, though, and go off accusing HoYoverse of making the game unplayable for anyone but whales, it may be wise to familiarize yourself with Nikador’s battle mechanics — taking these into consideration changes the story.

Destroying Nikador’s War Armor Reduces His HP

War Armor is a mechanic that all enemies from Amphoreus share, reducing the damage they take by 10% as long as they have at least a stack of the effect. In Memory of Chaos, Nikador possesses seven War Armor stacks and one of those is depleted each time he takes a hit.

Crucially, reducing Nikador’s War Armor stacks to zero will result in him losing 10% of his Max HP in addition to having his next action delayed and the ally destroying the final stack of War Armor regenerating Energy. In addition to that immediate burst of damage, Nikador takes 1% of his Max HP as bonus damage whenever he’s attacked as long as he’s unarmored. War Armor regenerates at the end of Nikador’s next turn, giving you another chance to remove it.

The vital element here is that any attack whatsoever will destroy War Armor stacks, allowing you to trigger that extra bit of damage when depleting it fully. Naturally, this is great for follow-up and summon characters or teams that can grant extra turns to allies.

Destroying Nikador’s Titanic Corpus Reduces His HP

Titanic Corpus is Nikador’s unique mechanic, but it works similarly to War Armor. Nikador’ll have twelve stacks of Titanic Corpus, which buffs his own damage output and can delay the actions of your characters. However, reducing those stacks to zero will have the same effect as doing that to War Armor, namely deal 10% of his Max HP as damage to Nikador, delay his action, and give Energy to whichever ally dealt the final blow to the effect.

Landing a dozen hits is obviously a much taller order than seven, but there is another mechanic to help you in this regard: Glory. Your characters can reduce up to two stacks of Titanic Corpus with a single attack, if they have two stacks of Glory. How do you get two stacks of Glory? You simply use your characters’ Skill or Ultimate. Maximizing this buff on your entire team will allow you to deplete Titanic Corpus with a mere six attacks, making it even more efficient than getting rid of War Armor.

Once again, any character can contribute to achieving this goal, though of course those being able to use abilities like Enhanced Skills that follow up on their Ultimate have an advantage.

Glory has an additional advantage for your characters: Every stack increases their damage by 30% and their Energy Regeneration Rate by 10%, helping you chip away at Nikador’s HP.

Destroying Nikador’s Spears Reduces His HP

There is a third mechanic that can help you defeat Nikador more quickly, namely his Bearing All Wounds ability — that’s the attack that impales mirror images of your characters on spears and reduces their Maximum HP by 50%. You should not only target these spears to get your health bars back up, though. Whenever one of these spears is destroyed, Nikador takes 13.5% of his Max HP as damage, giving you the potential to annihilate half of his health during this phase.

Granted, taking them all down without excessive area-of-effect attacks is a difficult feat. If you’re running single-target characters, it’s best to focus down one or two spears, which will still delete about a fourth of Nikador’s HP.

As always with endgame modes, it’s important to pay attention to the actual combat mechanics of a stage and actively engage with them, as this will make your life much easier. In this case, a clever player can easily shave off about half of Nikador’s health pool, potentially a lot more. This means that his “actual” HP is still quite a bit higher than that of his predecessor, but it’s far away from being an impossible obstacle.

HoYoverse recently announced that it plans on buffing older Honkai: Star Rail characters, which is going to be another boon for players struggling with endgame content these days.