You've been there. It’s 2:00 AM. You’ve just dumped 2,400 Trailblaze Power into the Cavern of Corrosion. Your goal? A simple Crit Damage body piece for your Jingliu. Instead, the game hands you a literal mountain of Outgoing Healing Boost and Defense main stats. When you finally see that purple-and-gold glint of a Double Crit piece, you hold your breath, click enhance, and watch in horror as every single roll lands squarely on Flat HP.
Bad luck with relics hsr isn't just a meme; it's a statistically calculated nightmare that defines the endgame experience for every player from casuals to whales.
The math is brutal. It’s actually rigged—not in a "the devs hate you" way, but in a "weighted probability" way. If you feel like you're losing, it's because the house always wins. Getting a usable piece is hard, but getting a "god roll" is statistically similar to winning a small-town lottery.
The Math Behind Your Misery
Why does it feel so bad? Because the game doesn't treat all stats equally.
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If you look at the raw data provided by community researchers like those on the Honkai Star Rail Wiki or the massive crowdsourced sheets from the KQM (Keqing Mains) theorycrafting groups, the weightings are clear. Speed and Crit stats have significantly lower drop rates than HP% or DEF%.
When a relic drops, the game rolls for the Main Stat first. For a Body piece, you have a much higher chance of seeing HP%, DEF%, or ATK% than you do Crit Rate or Crit Damage. According to data mining, Crit stats often have a weighting of around 10%, while "junk" stats can be double that.
Then comes the sub-stat lottery.
You need four "good" lines. But the game loves Flat stats. Flat ATK, Flat DEF, and Flat HP are the padding that keeps you in the domains. They exist to dilute the pool. When you're rolling for bad luck with relics hsr mitigation, you're fighting against a system where the "best" stats are intentionally the rarest.
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It sucks. Honestly, it’s the most exhausting part of the game. You spend weeks building a character only for their performance to be gated by a RNG roll that happened while you weren't even looking at the screen.
The "Enhancement Trap" and Why Level 15 Hurts
We have all had that Level 0 piece that looks like a masterpiece.
- Crit Rate
- Crit Damage
- Speed
- Effect Hit Rate
It’s perfect. You feed it a gold relic or some Lost Gold Fragments. By Level 9, you realize something is wrong. By Level 15, you’ve hit Effect Hit Rate four times. The piece is ruined. Or, at the very least, it's mediocre.
This happens because of the way "rolls" function. Every three levels, one of those four sub-stats gets a bump. It’s a 25% chance for each. But human psychology makes us feel the "low rolls" and the "wrong hits" much more intensely than the wins. This is known as negativity bias, but in HSR, the bias is backed by the fact that you might not see another piece with those specific sub-stats for another three weeks.
The scarcity of Self-Modeling Resin makes this even more painful. You save that rare resource for an Energy Regeneration Rate rope, only for it to roll into double Defense. It feels like a wasted month of progress.
How to Actually Fight Back Against RNG
Stop looking for perfection. Seriously.
The biggest mistake players make when dealing with bad luck with relics hsr is chasing the "CV 40" (Crit Value) pieces they see on Reddit or Twitter. Those are outliers. They are the 0.1%.
If you want to keep your sanity, you have to redefine what a "good" relic is.
- The 2-Roll Rule: If a relic hits the "wrong" stat twice by level 9, stop. Don't throw good XP after bad. Save it as fodder for the next piece.
- Main Stat is King: A correct main stat with terrible sub-stats is almost always better than a perfect sub-stat piece with the wrong main stat. Don't let your DPS run an HP body just because it has 10 Speed.
- The "Good Enough" Threshold: For most endgame content like Memory of Chaos (MoC) or Pure Fiction, you don't need "god" relics. You need "correct" relics. Most characters perform at 80-90% of their potential with just the right main stats and maybe two or three useful sub-stat rolls.
The Synthesis Secret
Don't forget the Relic Remains system. It’s easy to ignore, but it's your only true pity system. Salvage every 5-star relic that has a flat main stat (unless it's a Head or Hands piece, obviously).
Use the synthesis to target specific pieces in sets that are "stamina inefficient" to farm. For example, if you only need one piece from the Eagle of Longevous Disciple set, don't farm the domain. Farm the Messenger Traversing Hackerspace domain instead—since almost every support needs it—and use the junk to craft the specific piece you need for your niche character.
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Break the Cycle of Infinite Farming
There comes a point where farming more relics gives you diminishing returns. If your Jing Liu already has 3000 ATK and a decent Crit ratio, spending 30 more days in a domain to get an extra 2% Crit Damage won't change your clear time in MoC 12.
Level your traces.
Guarantee your guaranteed gains.
Traces are a 100% return on investment. Relics are a gamble.
If you're spiraling because of bad luck with relics hsr, take a week off from the caverns. Farm stagnant shadows. Build a niche support like Pela or Asta who functions perfectly well on "garbage" gear.
The game is a marathon, not a sprint. The RNG is designed to slow you down so you don't "finish" the game in a month. Once you accept that most of your drops will be literal trash, the occasional good piece feels like a genuine win rather than just the end of a frustration cycle.
Actionable Steps to Improve Your Gear Today
- Audit your inventory for "Rainbow Sets": Don't force a 4-piece set bonus if the sub-stats are terrible. Two pieces of a matching set combined with two "off-set" pieces with amazing sub-stats is often mathematically superior.
- Focus on Speed Breakpoints: Instead of chasing Crit, aim for specific Speed numbers (like 134 or 143). These are fixed targets that significantly change how a character plays, regardless of how much "bad luck" you have with damage rolls.
- Lock pieces with 2+ Tier 1 Sub-stats: Even if the main stat is weird, keep them. Future characters might scale off HP or DEF (like Fu Xuan or Aventurine), making your "bad" luck today a "god" roll tomorrow.
- Use your Resin for Ropes and Orbs: These are the hardest pieces to get with the right elemental damage or energy regen. Don't waste Self-Modeling Resin on Hats or Gloves.