incoming yap with a copious amount of honkai star rail gameplay terminology.
sunday is one of my all-time favorite hsr characters and i only got him and his lightcone on his third rerun right before the new patch update (4.0). what that means is he's going to be powercrept to levels never seen before. he's a support action advancer that buffs the damage of units that summon. nearly all 3.0 amphoreus characters are summoners and do not consume skill points. the next patch's characters and buffs will likely center around skill point usage. me pulling sunday and his lightcone now is like pulling yoimiya right before sumeru came out with the new dendro element.
i didn't watch the 4.0 patch livestream, but later seeing screenshots of sunday get slapped in the face with a mask was the highlight of my life. we get close to zero content of him after he joins the astral express at the end of penacony (2.0) and then the moment he gets involved in the story an entire year later they drag him through the dirt and humiliate him. he's purposefully left out of promotional art for "lore" reasons. in hoyofair animations and side-content he's framed as the silly boyfailure despite being the major villain in penacony. when they released his new playable design i thought it was the ugliest outfit ever. he cries in his lightcone and burst animation. he's got angel imagery. he's the perfect character for me.
^ do they hate him?
i pulled sunday because i like sunday. i didn't realize all his best teams were with phainon (i don't have nor like phainon). his next best team is hypercarry anaxa. i love anaxa, but i've only ever played/built him sub-dps with The Herta (capitalized, to not be confused with 4* herta). hypercarry anaxa vs. any The Herta team is like coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb. still, i love anaxa the same way i like sunday, so foaming at the mouth i had to put them in the same team.
that's when i realized the hell that is speed tuning. anaxa has a speed breakpoint of 133.34 which means any more speed doesn't matter unless i get him to 142.86 speed (mind you i don't see decimal points in game). my sunday was at 147 speed when i first built him. with most action advancers, the ideal rotation should be as follows:
let anaxa go first (left), then skill on sunday to action advance anaxa (right), then double skill on anaxa. to pull this off, sunday needs to be n-0.1 speed. in this case, 133.33 speed. i currently have my sunday at 131, so that's why he moves after the boss (kafka) and not right before anaxa but it really doesn't matter. i'm far from pulling off an optimized rotation.
now he can attack a second time in a row plus he's got a bunch of buffs and can hit for 346% crit dmg guaranteed. ooooouhh he looks so beautiful with sunday's halo.
speed tuning aside, sunday is easy to build. speed is only relevant for acting right before anaxa. then, max out on crit dmg since his buff transfers a percentage of his crit dmg to anaxa. simply put: n-1 (or 0.1 if you're sweaty) speed, and as much crit dmg as humanly possible.
to address the elephant in the room. despite being an amphoreus character, anaxa is not a summoner, so sunday's summoner-exclusive buffs would go to waste. thankfully we have the new dan heng pt, which can attach a summon to a unit with his skill (it's the dragon you see in the line-up). so dh pt needs to act way before both anaxa and sunday. i reluctantly learned how to play dh pt. i never was the biggest fan of dh, but they made him such a good support unit and he's given out for free.
so if dh pt can grant a summon to a dps, wouldn't that keep sunday in the meta? yes and no, really it depends when the next skill point-centered sustain/healer comes out. another annoying thing about sunday team building is that he came out right before amphoreus (aka the summoner patch) meaning the most popular guide videos became outdated in a week's time. no man, i am not playing patch 1.0 jing yuan with sunday in the big year 2026.
side note. i know close to nothing about good hsr gameplay and strategy. i mean, i sorta know the ideal rotations. i definitely do not know boss mechanics, i brute force that shit. i have the most mid understanding of hsr meta, and it's not good enough for me to confidently speak on it. still, i wish zy0x picked up hsr again so i could dog on his rotations.
i joke about how you can auto your way through hsr endgame modes but this team is the least-autoable team i've ever played. every support has a timed buff countdown, and two of them have action advancing skills/bursts that can be completely wasted if used at the wrong time.
despite this, it's a super fun team to play. i cleared 2/3 endgame modes using my sunaxa team, but only after i realized i could use The Herta's lightcone on anaxa. felt like i was committing a sin by borrowing it for this self-indulgent team. anaxa never feels like he's doing enough dmg. i see the 6-digit numbers on my screen (my castorice does millions) and somehow i clear a stage with 3 stars. he works in mysterious ways. thanks sunday for making this possible.