For those of us who have been around since the beginning, we’ve seen Luocha fall from his once held crown as the preeminent sustain unit. At the time of his release, most sustain units were either 4-stars units such as Natasha or 5-star units like Bailu that hadn’t reached the power levels of more contemporary sustain units. Luocha’s design focused largely on pumping out large heals to the entire party with ease, placing him on top. However, as time has passed, the value of his kit has waned as newer Abundance units and non-Abundance healers such as Hyacine have been released. With the advent of these new and more powerful designs, it has become abundantly clear that sustain units are no longer sufficient providing sustain to the team. More contemporary sustain units bring additional team-based synergies that help boost their longevity within the meta to maintain their pull value. And hence why Luocha seems to have fallen to the relative bottom in terms of relevancy, despite being a perfectly serviceable sustaining unit. 

In Luocha’s current form, he brings the strong and reliable healing as expected of an Abundance unit. The bulk of his healing is done through this talent, Cycle of Life, and his skill, Prayer of Abyss Flower.

Using his skill, Luocha is able to restore a large amount of health to a single ally while also cleansing them of a debuff condition. Additionally, Prayer of Abyss Flower triggers automatically when a team member’s health drops to 50% or below, serving as an emergency get-out-of-death tool to prevent a unit from dying.

His talent on the other hand, deploys a healing Field, restoring health to the entire party whenever an enemy is dealt damage by your team. This field deploys at the start of a fight when you use his technique, or is activated by accumulating two stacks of Abyss Flower (which is gained from a use of his skill or from his Ultimate). With both the skill and the Field, the vast majority of Luocha’s healing is able to be performed without draining skill points, allowing for that valuable SP to be used for damage by your other units.   

In addition to this strong healing kit, Luocha’s ultimate ability, Death Wish, deals a small amount of damage while removing a buff on all enemies hit, dispelling annoying or powerful buffs that could extend the time it takes to clear content. 

On paper, these strengths appear respectable for an Abundance unit, owing to the fact that he does everything that you would want from a simple healer. However, Luocha currently doesn’t have a means of increasing your team’s damage from his base kit. And with newer units having been designed with specific niches in mind, such as Lingsha for Break teams and Huohuo for teams that seek energy regeneration, Luocha has struggled to call a proper niche his home. Even when it comes to SP generation, an area that Luocha once used to lead, Gallagher, a 4-star unit released during the 2.x series of patches, is capable of generating more skill points, firmly snatching the crown away from the blond healer. And to make matters worse, current enemy and boss designs now prevent units from removing buffs and positive status conditions from them, rendering an entire part of Luocha’s kit completely inconsequential and pointedly incompatible with the direction that the game’s devs have chosen to go with their fight design. 

But all hope is not lost for the blond swordsman as being mediocre could be just a momentary thing. With the recent wave of updated designs to older units, Star Rail has opened the door to implementing potential changes that could uplift Luocha’s current position and carve out a proper niche for the senior healer of the game.

Luocha’s kit shows the wear and tear of units that rolled out at the beginning of the game’s life cycle. Namely, how the descriptions of skills and abilities were much shorter back then, and how often parts of individual skills sectioned off to be used as major traces, which could have been used instead to introduce new powers or abilities. Our initial changes for Luocha can focus on consolidating these individual parts together, creating more room to expand this unit’s power budget.

The first change would be adding his A2, Cleansing Revival, into the text box of his skill. The cleansing power of his skill shouldn’t have to consume the entirety of an entire Major Trace that could be used to give Luocha a proper tool.  

We can follow suit by making alterations to his A4 passive, Sanctified, as well. His talent already provides healing to a unit that deals damage to an enemy. Sanctified is what allows the rest of the team to be healed by the Field when an enemy takes damage, albeit recovering  smaller amount. This is precious real estate that has been dedicated to an effect that already exists in the base kit under the talent, but just applies the effect to the entire team. We can  update the talent to read “when any enemy in the Field is attacked by an ally, all allies HP is immediately restored” rather than what it currently reads as “the attacking ally”. This creates space in his kit for the addition of a new tool while also making it so that all allies heal for the same amount when an attack is performed, rather than healing the attacking unit for an additional amount bringing even and consistent healing across the board And for the final touch , we’ll have his field last three turns rather than two, bringing his Field duration in line with other units  such as Jiaoqu’s field. We’ll have his talent also require 3 stacks of Abyss Flower rather than two in order to be deployed to match the change in Field duration.  

And last but not least, let’s change Luocha’s A6 trace, Through the Valley. Interestingly, this trace provide  Effect Res similarly to other more contemporary healers. Instead, it exists separately in a magical land that provides crowd control resistance  that no other unit mirrors . Let’s modernize this trace and  make Luocha easier to build for the Broken Keel planar set or if we must, we can simply round out the Major trace to resist crowd control effects 100% of the time as 70% is just not good enough to be consistent. 

Part of Luocha’s inherent weakness is the fact that Luocha doesn’t do much for the party outside of healing. We can address this by freshening up his Talent, Cycle of Life, and his Ultimate, Death Wish, by adding some spice. 

Using the real estate freed up by the A4 Major Trace, Sanctified, let’s add a little extra kick to Luocha’s talent, Cycle of Life. When his Field is active, allies now gain a 10% increase to their Attack, Defense, and HP. This allows for them to deal a little bit more damage, while granting a small boost to their survivability as well. This also avoids stepping into Hyacine’s territory at E0, allowing for Hyacine to remain the de facto HP buffer. Additionally, while the Field is active, any healing or cleansing provided by Luocha’s skill, Prayer of the Abyss Flower, is applied to the entirety of the party rather than just a single unit, addressing some of Luocha’s difficulty in cleansing the entire party.

Now we can also put in some work to make his Ultimate have more use than just providing a stack of Abyss Flower. Death Wish’s intended purpose was to remove buffs off of enemies while also aiding in deploying Luocha’s Field. However, it’s evident that developers don’t want their bosses to have all their cool effects and buffs removed as that would make those fights less fun and interactive, and they’ve made this clear by having made buffs unable to be removed by Luocha’s ultimate or similar skills, rendering a key part of his kit rather moot. In that case, we can make up for this by adding a simple application of a debuff to Death Wish, applying either Vulnerability or a Defense-down to the enemies hit in addition to removing any buffs that may exist on the enemies. This would allow Luocha to gain the ability to allow his team members to deal more damage to enemies hit by his ultimate, while still keeping the majority of his kit focused on survival of the party. 

And as a finishing touch, we can help carve out Luocha’s once held crown as the most SP (skill point) positive Abundance unit, a crown now in the possession of a 4-star, Gallagher. Using his new real estate from liberating his A2 passive, Cleansing Revival, we can add a few additions to his basic attacks. As of now, Luocha often uses his basic attacks during his turn as his automatic skill trigger and his Field are able to cover the vast majority of healing situations. When using his basic attack while his Field is deployed, we can have Luocha generate an additional skill point, netting two for every basic attack. This should help him keep up with Gallagher and even propel him forward in skill point generation in longer more drawn out fights. When his Field is down, to help Luocha redeploy it , his basic attack can generate for him 1 Abyss Flower stack (it generates zero stacks as of now).   

With these changes, Luocha at E0 should find himself being able to keep up with his contemporaries by healing and the cleansing the party consistently, while carving out a niche for himself as a healer that can: generate skill points for the party, apply vulnerability to enemy units, and slightly buff his fellow team members without encroaching on his fellow sustaining units’ territories.

If we want to better streamline higher levels of investments in Luocha, we can then follow suit by updating his E1, Ablution of the Quick, to also provide an additional 20% buff to Attack , Defense, and HP, making Lucoa at E1 comparable to E0 Hyacine but more well-rounded. His E2 would follow suit by creating a shield on your entire party when being used on an ally with his field active.

It’s rare to see Hoyoverse gacha games give second chances in such a direct manner, often preferring instead to churn out more profit by sunsetting older units or reviving them by adding new units that directly interact with them. Given this unique situation, it seems there is a real possibility for Honkai Star Rail devs to regulate their game and to ensure the longevity of its units and renew interest in their older products. Whether that would be enough to maintain the game’s position as a top tier gacha game is up for discussion, but it’s a good direction for the game to go in. I hope the devs continue to revisit their older characters throughout the game’s life cycle, and that Luocha is a potential candidate for a nice boost in quality.