Bailu Guide and Build | Honkai: Star Rail | Prydwen (2024)

Bailu is a competent healing sustain unit on the Path of Abundance. She focuses on automatic reactive healing upon sustaining damage with her Ultimate, providing damage reduction and a maximum health increase for all allies. She is also in possession of a 1-time ally revive, immediately restoring them to life. She has consistent healing for both single-target and AoE, but she crucially has no way of cleansing debuffs at all, setting her apart from other Abundance characters.

Despite popular opinion, Bailu is still a very decent healer. Similarly to Gepard, her value has ebbed and flowed over time, with now her method of healing being actually quite favourable against the powerful onslaught that enemies throw your way. She is by no means a standout healer, mostly because the competition in terms of sustain units is frighteningly high, but she'll carry your sorry butt through the end game no problem.

Bailu's Talent is the focal point. Whenever an ally with Invigoration gets hit, their HP will immediately be restored by up to 5.4% of Bailu's Max HP plus 144, and this can trigger 2 times every time Invigoration is applied. This Invigoration buff comes from her Ultimate, but the healing values are dependent on her Talent levels. Her Talent also has a 1 time ally revive, being able to restore their HP by up to 18% of Bailu's Max HP plus 480 upon receiving a fatal blow.

This Invigoration buff heals in a very peculiar way compared to other Abundance units, as it provides its healing immediately upon getting hit by an enemy attack. This means you can actually survive an enemy onslaught that would ordinarily completely kill you; if a Boss acts twice against a single character and deals 5000 damage across those two hits, and your character only has 4000 HP, the healing that occurs after the first hit will actually allow this character to survive with a sliver of health remaining, so while Bailu cannot prevent literal one shots from occurring, any faux-oneshots spread over a couple of actions can be largely mitigated.

Bailu's Ultimate immediately heals all allies for up to 13.5% of Bailu's Max HP plus 360 and applies Invigoration to any allies that do not yet have it. Allies that already have Invigoration will have its duration extended by 1 turn. Invigoration lasts for 2 turns. This essentially means that regardless of anything else, using Bailu's Ultimate will guarantee that all allies have at least 2 turns of Invigoration.

This Ultimate is actually pretty good as it only costs a measly 100 Energy while also being incredibly potent emergency healing, and this then of course translates to higher Invigoration uptime leading to greater and more consistent passive healing output.

Bailu's Skill is not particularly noteworthy, as the healing from her Ultimate and Invigoration should be enough to cover the party's needs. She targets a single ally and heals them for up to 11.7% of Bailu's Max HP plpus 312. Then this heal will Bounce to a random ally 2 times, with each Bounce reducing the heal amount by 15%. This is somewhat unreliable as an AoE heal as it could very easily just heal the target ally 3 times in a row, or go to heal an ally that doesn't need it, but if you're really in dire straits, this can be an effective way to top off characters in need.

Bailu's Bonus Traces further amplify her defensive utility. A2 allows any healing in excess of 100% of a character's Max HP to increase that ally's Max HP by 10% for 2 turns. A4 allows Invigoration to trigger an extra time, leading to 3 total activations between reapplications of Invigoration, and A6 will provide a 10% damage reduction to characters with Invigoration. A6 in particular is a vastly underestimated boost — damage reduction is pretty cracked, yo, and having it up permanently vastly reduces the amount of overall damage that comes your way, especially over the course of a single fight.

As a standard character, you could very well get Eidolons for Bailu over time. While she's far from the best standard character to get Eidolons for, they still provide nice bonuses to an already competent unit. E1 has good value and will restore 8 Energy for a character if their HP is fully topped off when Invigoration ends. By no means game-changing but a nice boost.

Bailu's days as the only other healer are long long behind us, and she has very steep competition as a sustain unit. Luocha was the first to run away with the crown, providing outstanding passive healing as well while also being effortless to maintain. Luocha also has a cleanse on his Skill and an AoE dispel on his Ultimate, and manages to be one of the absolute most SP-positive units in the game, still being used in the most meta teams to this day.

Then came Fu Xuan and took the damage reduction niche to such an extreme that future sustain characters have their work cut out for them if they want to compete with that level of power. Not only that, but Fu Xuan outright prevents a single teamwide application of crowd control while also having damage redirection allowing her to circumvent true oneshots. Then Huohuo showed up and changed the game forever by being a Harmony and Abundance in one, while also having a ridiculous amount of passive healing and cleansing.

Bailu doesn't have a cleanse. She doesn't increase CRIT rate, and doesn't increase ATK or give Energy. She is a healer and that is all that she is. Frankly she's been left behind, and the reasons to use her keep disappearing one by one as more and more people have access to stronger and newer sustain options. Not having a cleanse in this day and age of the game is just asking for trouble.

Bailu is not bad as a standalone character, but any comparisons are very much not in her favour. The unfortunate reality is that this will continue to be the case, as future sustain units will continue upping the ante thanks to the ridiculousness of the sustain units that came before. If you do not have a competent second sustain unit, or want to replace Natasha as soon as possible, Bailu will do that for you. But the second you get a limited 5-star sustain, Bailu may well be warming that bench for the rest of her Vidyadhara life cycle.

'The moment a healer with more utility gets released, Bailu will likely be superseded by them.' What a terrible day to have been correct.