This is a general tier list for most content, with more weight given to end-game content such as Formidable Assault and Illusory Realm (weekly boss) performance.

Apex characters are very strong in almost all teams and content. These are the best characters in each class.

T0 characters are very strong in specific teams and content, and are good in all teams and content.

T1 characters can be very strong in specific teams or content, but otherwise not as good as T0 and Apex units.

T2 characters require specific teams or content to be strong, are good for filling out your team when starting the game, or building a second or third team.

Elpis: Fallen Star is a game where the majority of content can be completed with the majority of characters, as long as you are building your teams correctly. A roster full of Apex and T0 characters is only required for those who wish to be competitive in high ranking PVP, Formidable Assault, Illusory Realm, and clear the last stage of events.

For example, I sometimes use Haidee, a 2-star voidblade that doesn't even show up on this tier list. Why do I use her then? For some events, having another lumin type voidblade that reduces enemy defense can be useful. Sometimes I use her in a 3rd team on a boss when multiple teams can be deployed.

5-star units are evaluated at awakening 0 (no duplicates), and all other units are evaluated at max awakening.

This tier list represents my own experience with these units, comparisons with other tier lists (linked below), and discussions with others.

Last updated: January 10, 2026

AoE Area of effect or multi-target focused

Backrow Attacks enemy backline

Buff Provides beneficial effects to team

Cooldown Total Assault cooldown reduction or modification

Debuff Applies negative effects to enemies

DMG Share Damage to teammates is partially redirected to this unit

DoT Applies damage over time to enemies

DPS High damage output characters

DPS (DoT) Primary damage dealer specializing in damage over time

Healer Healing and recovery specialist

Leader Notable team leader effect

Pure Tank Skills dedicated to absorbing damage, does little to no damage to enemies

PVP Excels in player versus player content

Revive Can resurrect fallen team members

Self Heal Restores own health

Shield Provides protective barrier to self

Shield (Team) Provides shields for entire team

Stun Disables or immobilizes enemies temporarily (Stun, Time Stop, etc.)

Sub-DPS Secondary damage dealer

Taunt Forces enemies to target this character

Is Kaguya Bad?

On some tier lists, Kaguya is listed as a T2 or "EX" character despite being a 5-star rarity. Guides also frequently advise new players against selecting her or rerolling their account if they get her early. This has lead some to believe that she is a bad unit.

Kaguya is a strong unit, but she is not a great character at the beginning of the game. Why?

1. She is a pure tank. Her combat skill is passive self healing. Her TA skill makes her stop attacking (does no damage during TA phase), significantly buffs her defense, and also nullifies negative status effects.
2. Early in the game you don't need this much defense from a single character in most battles. You need healing for team members, which is what makes Ghostsamurai so elite. You also benefit more from units like Aria that apply debuffs or Jessica that buffs your voidblade units.

Once you advance farther into the game, there are many situations where Kaguya makes sense to use over another Ironclad. She is a great candidate for the Crimson Pact, Ruinous Blaze, or Guiding Beacon emblem sets, which increase team member damage. While the game recommends that Kaguya use the Terra Blessing set (which increases health and damage reduction), I find that these benefits are overkill most of the time. For most bosses, Kaguya should use the Crimson Pact set, because she will still have enough defensive capabilities to tank and survive, and it will give all Ghosthunter units on your team a 10% damage boost for the entire battle.

In short: Kaguya is not bad, she just isn't Ghostsamurai. She is situationally good and won't help you in the early game nearly as much as in the end game. If what you need is a front row tank, she does that job perfectly.

Nikita

Nikita is a decent tank with situational DPS ability. At higher awakening, she can actually provide a debuff to enemies and significant buffs to your team (especially fire element members), but without any awakening, she is very situational. She performs similarly to Falcon in terms of tanking ability. Her gameplay loop relies on being near multiple enemies and taking damage to activate her combat skill, which deals AoE damage, provides stacks of shields, and increases her TA skill damage.

Nikita's problem is that she wants to be a sub-DPS type character, but since Ironclads will always have lower DPS than other classes, it's better to pick an Ironclad that benefits your other DPS units as opposed to trying to do damage with that Ironclad. Roya, for example, does 1/10 to 1/20 of Nikita's damage output, but Roya helps the rest of your team survive direct damage. Aria applies a 10% debuff to enemy defense with her TA skill and heals other Ironclads. GhostSamurai gives everyone shields and heals. Jessica heals voidblades, buffs voidblades, and stuns enemies (petrify). All of these benefits come without any additional awakening required, except for Aria, who is a four-star character and can reasonably be awakened over time.

Nikita, on the other hand, just tries to do a lot of damage. She does damage over time with her Total Assault skill, but it is not through applying a stack of DoT status. Enemies who stand in her radius take ticks of damage instead of getting a stack of DoT. This means that she doesn't combo with Souffle in a DoT team.

She has a good shield and good survivability comparable to Falcon on the latest boss, even though Falcon is a water type and so gets a damage reduction bonus, so she is a good tank. Her DPS can be decent, at times as much as Darkwing if you are hitting enough enemies, but it's very niche since you have to make sure you are consistently hitting several enemies with her combat skill and her TA skill. If the enemies die, then you aren't doing damage anymore. In a boss fight, it's hard to position her since Ironclads just charge straight at the nearest frontline unit.

If I have one complaint about Nikita, it's that her kit feels like you need A1 and really A3 to see her working as intended, because this is when she gets all the extra buffs and debuffs from her shield stacking that helps her teammates. I haven't tested her at A3, but I suspect she will be a great sub-DPS and buffer at A3, especially in a team with many fire units.

Philia

Philia's kit is tough to figure out. I think her designers were trying to make a unit that is strong in fights with multiple ironclads or a boss ironclad. She has three main components to her kit: dealing single-target damage, providing healing, and reducing enemy defense.

Her combat skill spawns an orb that bounces back and forth between enemy units and allied units. When it hits an enemy, it deals damage. When it hits an ally, it heals them. The orb always alternates between enemy and ally units, so the cadence is enemy, ally, enemy, ally, etc. The orb moves at a constant speed, so if it ping-pongs back and forth between two units that are close to each other, it will hit more frequently than if it has to travel to an enemy ghosthunter on the backline and an allied ghosthunter on the frontline. Through some basic testing, I find that she can double or even triple her damage and healing if you can get her orb to bounce back and forth between frontline units (Voidblades or Ironclads).

This is where Philia's problems start. The orb will randomly choose its next target from among those who have health below 100%. In most fights where we care about high performance, almost every unit on the map will have health below 100% after a few seconds, especially your units. Since it's random and doesn't seek out the unit with the lowest health, you can't guarantee that the units that need healing will get healing. Additionally, you lose out on healing and damage per second if the orb has to travel long distances between your Ghosthunters and enemies.

The orb's damage and healing are based on Philia's attack and health stats. The orb also cannot crit. Thus, you want to build her with lots of attack and health, and avoid crit rate and crit damage. This also means that her feather emblem is in a weird place. Attack speed doesn't seem to affect the orb's travel speed, and crit rate and crit damage both don't boost her orb's attack damage, so they don't benefit you nearly as much as most offensive-minded units. Ultimately, a healing feather seems to be the best way to go. The game recommends the Fervent Faith set, which boosts skill attack and skill damage, and, through testing, I agree this is probably her best option.

To maximize the orb's damage, she needs to be on a team that favors ironclads and voidblades, and she should be used in fights where enemies are collected in the frontline as well. Even under ideal circumstances, putting her on a team with 5-6 Voidblades and fighting an enemy with only frontline enemies clumped together, I have only ever seen her get at most 600,000 damage in a test dummy fight, while Lingyao, Inellis, and other top damage dealers can reach 800,000 to 1,300,000 damage. In more realistic and meta teams, she is most likely doing 200,000 to 300,000 damage.

At this point, you should be saying, "She isn't supposed to be a pure DPS, because she has healing and defense reduction abilities, so of course her DPS is lower". Let's talk about her other abilities then.

Whenever the orb hits an ally, it heals them 2% of Philia's max health. As we have already discussed, the orb moves randomly, so it's difficult to contrive a situation where the orb is hitting allies frequently enough to be consequential. Even if you can get it to hit allies regularly, its random target selection means that an ally who really needs that healing might not get it. Most healers will target multiple allies at once with their healing (Arlen, Saico, etc.) and/or prioritize healing members at low health. So not only is Philia's healing output worse than most healers', but it's also only targets one ally at a time and doesn't prioritize those who need it most. You could give her the healing emblem set to boost her healing, but then you are giving up her damage-dealing capabilities, and she is a worse healer than someone in a strict healing role.

Now let's talk about her defense shred ability. This is probably the most important and useful part of her kit. When you enter the Total Assault stage, the closest enemy to her will get a 150-radius field placed on it, and any enemies in the field will have their defense reduced by 5% for five seconds. The key here is that this field will activate EVERY TA phase, EVEN WHEN HER TA SKILL IS ON COOLDOWN. This means that you can stick her in a team as a third Spellweaver, and even if she never uses her TA skill, she will still apply the defense shred for five seconds every single TA phase. It also activates at the beginning of the TA phase, so all allies can take advantage of it with their TA skill damage.

This is very good. However, it has a few problems preventing it from reaching greatness. It only lasts for five seconds. Compare that to Nebula, whose skill reduces enemy defense by 20%, and it lasts for 14 seconds when awakened (A3), which is feasible for most players since she is a four-star character. Aria, a four-star Ironclad, provides 15% base defense reduction to enemies for 10 seconds. The two only activate their defense reduction when they use their TA skill, but the amount of defense reduction and the length of the period your team can take advantage of it make their defense shred better.

The five-second length also means that for your allies to take full advantage of it, they need to do burst damage, similar to Inellis or Lingyao. Since the defense reduction begins at the start of the TA phase, your Spellweavers and Ghosthunters will only have two to three seconds to take advantage of it, since they have to wait for the Ironclads and Voidblades to activate their TA skills first. Miam and Freya, for example, get almost no benefit because by the time they activate their skills and start shooting rapidly, the defense reduction has only about one second of uptime left before disappearing.

Philia's defense shred is an area-of-effect skill rather than a single-target skill, but that makes her much more situational than other units with defense shred. To take full advantage, she needs to be in a fight with a lot of front-line enemies all clumped together, preferably that don't die quickly before the fight ends (like in boss fights).

The last part of her kit is her TA skill, which deals 1800% of attack as single-target damage. For comparison, GhostQueen does 1840% to two different targets (3680% total), Nebula does 2800% to a single target (she has lower base stats as a four-star), and Hymnkeeper does 2130% to two targets (4260% total). Philia has high base attack, so her TA damage isn't completely terrible, but it's not anything noteworthy.

Let's compare her to another five-star spellweaver, The Solace.

The Solace provides better passive healing than Philia (3.2%+320 max health to four members with the lowest current health percentage every six seconds). The Solace has a higher damage on her TA skill (2400% atttack single damage target), AND the buff she provides is more universally powerful (+18% base attack speed and +18% base crit damage to whole team for entire TA phase, so happens even when she doesn't attack, similar to Philia), AND it provides extra healing (16% + 1600 max health four members with the lowest health. Basic attacks also have a 30% chance to deal 120% of base attack as extra damage. In nine out of ten situations, The Solace is going to do Philias job better (more damage, better passive healing, huge team buffs that last the whole TA phase). I think, if I were the developers, a tweak to Philia's kit that would make her more competitive would be to extend her defense reduction during the TA phase to the duration of the phase rather than just five seconds.

Philia's problem is that she is a jack of all trades, who seems otherwise specialized for a scenario that rarely happens (your team and the enemy team have a lot of frontline units, and you need AoE defense shred). If you try to build her as a healer, she loses out on significant damage, and her healing doesn't get much better compared to other healers. She doesn't do nearly as much damage as other spellweavers focused on DPS, and her orb is very situational and difficult to set up so that it's hitting frequently. She can't benefit from crit rate and crit damage stats as much as other units since most of her damage comes from her orb skill, which doesn't crit.

If you are going to use Philia, use her in battles with many enemy frontline units that can get caught in her defense-reduction zone. Place her as a 3rd Spellweaver for passive healing, damage, and defense reduction. Her defense shred is good, but needs units to clump together on the frontline to be better than other defense shred abilities. You need to put her in a team with units that use burst TA skills (Lingyao, Ghostqueen), not consistent damage dealers (Miam, Freya), since the defense shred only lasts for five seconds.

Key Units: Souffle, Ethel, Other DoT units (Asteria, Falcon, Absolver, Gima, Timmy, Skylark)

• 

  Souffle

  DPS DoT
  Souffle's TA skill does extra damage for each stack of DoT (max ten stacks), and hits three targets (or the same target three times). To maximize her DPS, we want to apply as much DoT as possible so that when she pops her TA skill, her targets have as close to ten stacks as possible.
• 

  Ethel

  DPS (DoT)
  Ethel's TA skill does extra damage (ignores enemy defense) for each stack of DoT (max 16 stacks, 26 stacks at A3+ awakening), and hits up top three targets with DoT stacks. She also gets a barrier that causes enemies with DoT stacks to do less damage to her. Her TA skill has a 20-second cooldown TA, so you don't need a second Voidblade for this team (unless desired), since you want her using her TA every round.
• 

  Falcon

  DoT Shield
  Falcon applies DoT as long as she is shielded, Asteria will buff both Ethel and Souffle TA damage, and she also provides DoT. Timmy, Absolver, Gima, and Skylark can also be good DoT applicators.
• Notice that many of these units are Hydro-type units, so they can be useful against Pyro-type bosses.

• 

  Ivorywing

  Sub-DPS Revive Buff
  Ivorywing TA skill creates an AoE damage zone around herself and one other nearby unit with a defense buff (Jessica, Kaguya, or other Ironclad or Voidblade). Her TA skill applies a stack of a status called Judgement to the enemies in the AoE zone.
• 

  Inellis

  DPS
  Inellis' combat skill and TA skill do additional damage for each stack of judgement. Her leader skill boosts Ivorywing TA skill damage, but it's usually not worth it unless you build the team around maximizing Inellis' and Ivorywing's DPS, and have Ivorywing at awakening 3+.
• Make sure Ivorywing uses her TA skill the same round as Inellis for max damage, and that you have another character in the frontline with a defense buff.

• 

  GhostSamurai

  Healer Shield (Team)
  Ghostsamurai is an amazing Ironclad because, in addition to tanking and doing okay damage (for an Ironclad), she creates shields for every member of the team with her TA skill, and she also heals allied units passively. Her healing can be strong enough in some fights that you don't need a dedicated healer, and when you need a lot of healing, she is a great secondary healer. This is especially amazing since she doesn't take up a Spellweaver spot, which is better reserved for a DPS or sub-DPS+buffer/debuffer.
• 

  Freya

  DPS Stun
  To trigger Ghostsamurai's healing as often as possible, you need to apply time stop to an enemy. Freya applies time stop while attacking with her TA skill and occasionally with basic attacks at awakening A3+, making her a good partner for Ghostsamurai.

Key Units: Lingyao, 2 other ghosthunters, Leticia, Eclipse

• 

  Leticia

  DPS Debuff Cooldown
  Leticia reduces TA cooldowns by 25 seconds for all other units, which is enough to enable those with a 45-second cooldown to use TA skill twice in a row. Her TA skill also does very high damage and reduces the base defense of all enemies by 10% (20% at A1+ awakening).
• 

  Lingyao

  DPS Cooldown
  Lingyao's TA skill allows a second ghosthunter to use their TA skill in the same TA phase.
• This means that every three TA phases proceed as follows:
  1. TA phase one: Leticia → Lingyao → 2nd Ghosthunter
  2. TA phase two: Eclipse → Lingyao → 2nd Ghosthunter
  3. TA phase three: other units use TA skill
• 

  Eclipse

  Buff Sub-DPS
  Eclipse buffs Ghosthunter damage significantly with her TA skill (+40% base attack to all Ghosthunters for 15 seconds at max awakening).
• The end result is that Lingyao and your second-best Ghosthunter will get to go 2 out of 3 TA phases, instead of every other TA phase, and they will have significant damage buffs or enemy debuffs for those phases.
• 

  Miam

  DPS AoE
  I often use Innelis, Freya, Miam, Kuki, or Timmy as my 2nd ghosthunter.
• 

  Ciel

  Leader Sub-DPS
  I usually run Ciel or Delis as the third ghosthunter for their leader skill, which provides +15% crit rate and +30% crit damage to the entire team for the duration of the battle.

Key Units: Freya, Delis, Solace, Teostra, Jessica

This team is built around Estella and activating her Noble Honor skill. Without Estella, the team can do some nice damage and apply a lot of stun, helping survivability and preventing debuffs. If you have Estella, you get all the previous benefits plus significant boosts to Estella's damage.

• 

  Estella

  DPS Debuff Self Heal
  Estella's Noble Honor skill deals additional damage (50% of current attack) whenever a control effect is applied to an enemy. Time stop and stun status are considered control effects, so anytime Freya applies Time Stop or Delis/Teostra stun an enemy, the skill triggers. Putting her in a team with many characters that cause control effects means the skill is triggering all the time, which really increases her DPS.
• 

  Freya

  DPS Stun
  Freya applies Time Stop with her TA skill, and also with basic attacks at A3+ awakening.
• 

  Delis

  Stun Leader Sub-DPS
  Delis occasionally applies stun with basic attacks (every 4th basic attack has a chance to apply stun).
• 

  Teostra

  DPS Stun
  Teostra applies stun with his TA skill, and reduces his target's attack speed every 5th basic attack.
• 

  Jessica

  Buff Healer Stun PVP
  Jessica stuns enemies with her petrify ability, which activates when her health drops low enough.
• 

  The Solace

  Healer Buff Sub-DPS
  The Solace is an incredible unit that can be slotted into almost any team to make it immediately better. I list her here because her TA skill provides an attack speed buff to allies, which makes Freya and Delis stun and apply time stop more frequently.

• 

  Nikita

  Sub-DPS AoE Shield
  Nikita's entire kit revolves around getting hit by an enemy and then dealing AoE damage to all enemies around her, stacking shields, and then unleashing an AoE damage over time field (ticks of damage, not DoT status application) with her TA skill. Her damage can be considerable if there is a large group of enemies clumped around her, and at higher awakening she buffs team attack and debuffs enemy attack speed.
• 

  Rann

  DPS AoE
  To fully take advantage of Rann's combat skill, you need Nikita on the field. Every basic attack has a 25% chance to trigger Inspiration Burst, which deals damage to all enemies in a straight line from Nikita toward the Basic Attack target. It's like a mini-Timmi TA skill