The BEST Star Renegades Characters TIER LIST
In Star Renegades picking the best party could be the difference between success and failure. If you’re trying to figure out the BEST Star Renegades characters, this is the guide for you.
In Star Renegades, there are 13 characters to pick from, each of which has a handful of variations. Knowing which Star Renegades characters are the best and which ones are the worst could be the difference between making it all the way to the end or wiping on the first boss.
In fact, picking the right party in Star Renegades is probably the #1 choice that separates a successful run from a failed one. So, you’re going to want to know ahead of time which Star Renegades characters to be on the lookout for.
I’ve beaten the game multiple times at this point and unlocked all the different weapons and progeny variations, so I feel pretty well qualified to give my thoughts on the best Star Renegades characters.
This is the Best Star Renegades Characters Tier List.
S Tier – Best Star Renegades Characters
Commando
Bentley is easily, in my experience, the best character in the game. Having the Commando in your party makes every encounter infinitely easier. Why? Because his light attack, Salvo, executes extremely quickly and has a ridiculous amount of stagger.
If you equip Bentley with both the Rifle and the Blaster that increase Stagger, Salvo can easily stagger 80+ seconds, making almost every encounter in the game, from common enemies to bosses, a complete cakewalk. I’ve had runs with Bentley in my party where I got 6 turns for every turn otherwise difficult bosses got.
On top of that, Bentley actually does decent damage as well as fairly good armor damage, which gives him a very well rounded toolkit. It’s hard to justify picking, say, Enforcer, who can only deal damage, over Bentley, who deals just slightly less damage and can do so much more.
As with most of the Star Renegades characters, take the in-game attribute ratings with a grain of salt. I’d say Bentley’s speed is B, his damage is B, his armor damage is B and his stagger is A+.
Juggernaut
Once you unlock Juggernaut, your life in Star Renegades gets a lot easier. She has a quick action taunt which can really help redirect enemy damage to her, and while she’s taunting, she refills your entire party’s shields.
Whenever she doesn’t need to be absorbing damage, her Punch skill does a fairly decent amount of armor damage and stagger, and in some variations she gets a decent heavy attack as well.
Star Renegades is a game where smartly making use of traditional RPG roles like tanks can really help your party, and Juggernaut is easily the best specialized tanking character available. Over the course of a run, if you have Juggernaut in your party, you’ll be taking significantly less damage overall.
Once again, the in-game ratings are kind of wacky. Her damage is probably C, her stagger is probably B and her speed is… well it’s hard to quantify actually. She has a couple of quick action moves and the rest of her moves are extremely slow. I’d say it evens out to about a C.
Juggernaut is easily one of the best Star Renegades characters.
A Tier – Best Star Renegades Characters
Spectre
It’s hard to say which is the better character between Spectre and Marksman. They’re both extremely good and fill roughly the same role.
Even though Marksman has long range attacks, I’m going to give the edge to Spectre because she has a stun, Bladeshot is better stagger than Quickshot and faster than Keen Shot, and Jagged Blade is at least as good as Kill Shot, if not better.
Having Spectre or Marksman in your party (or both) dramatically increases your killing potential. On top of that, they both have fairly well-rounded kits.
In the case of Spectre, she has Bladeshot to quickly deal damage with high stagger, Backstab for medium-high damage against slow or staggered targets, and Jagged Blade to chunk HP off of broken targets.
Her invisibility skill doesn’t come in handy that often, but other than that, if you get her in your recruitment roll after a level, you’ll probably be happy you got her.
Specter and Marksman are both great Star Renegades characters and you can’t go wrong with either one.
Marksman
Marksman is very squishy but he also deals a lot of damage. Like I mentioned with Spectre, it’s hard to say which one is better. Marksman is capable of inflicting stagger on targets in the back row using Keen Shot, which gives him a fair amount of utility, but he doesn’t get a stun.
Another difference may be that Marksman starts off with more damage and gets better options for stagger as he levels up, and Spectre starts off with more stagger and gets better options for damage as she levels up.
Other than that, they’re very similar. Early on in a run, Kill Shot can take out enemies basically on its own. His fury attack, Wing Shot, is not exceptionally useful, and the attacks he gets after Keen Shot, like Disintegrate, aren’t particularly useful either. So, in that sense, Spectre feels like a slightly more well-built character.
Valkyrie
Of the front-line DPS options, Wynn Syphex is probably your best bet. She’s tanky enough to off-tank and she has a fully complete DPS kit with some quick hits and several hard-hitting options to dish out the hurt on enemies you’ve staggered with your other characters.
Because she has attacks of various speeds, there’s rarely a turn where you can’t have her dealing decent damage. If the enemy is fast, go for a fast hit. If they have high armor, use an armor damaging move. If they’re speed broken and armor broken, go ham with her full power flurry attack.
Valkyrie doesn’t have a lot of tricks, but she does everything you’d want a melee DPS character to do. Her main competition for this role, Varangian and Paragon, are not nearly as good.
Among the Star Renegades characters, Valkyrie is a solid pick and she tends to pull her own weight.
Aegis
Aegis is your other option for a tank among the Star Renegades characters, and she’s no slouch either. She’s quite a bit squishier than Juggernaut, but she can tank from AoE attacks (although, to be honest with you, this typically kills her).
Because of the way the final dungeon works on the imperial starship, where you have to protect a non-contributing bomb character or you wipe, her AoE defense really comes in handy.
Unlike in a lot of RPGs, pairing Aegis with Juggernaut actually works extremely well. You can use Juggernaut as your main tank and Aegis as more of a backup tank, relying on her superb Shield Throw skill to contribute to fights.
Speaking of Shield Throw, this is an amazing skill that Aegis gets. It’s a medium-speed long range attack that deals a lot of stagger. If your party includes Bentley, Juggernaut, Aegis and Spectre/Marksman/Saboteur, you can pretty much control every fight easily and almost never get hit.
Among the best Star Renegades characters, Aegis adds a lot to a team.
B Tier – Best Star Renegades Characters
Saboteur
Saboteur is pretty good. He fills a similar role to Bentley, in that he’s focused on stagger and does fairly decent damage. The main difference is that he doesn’t deal quite at much stagger, but he can deal stagger at long range.
Saboteur gets a fairly potent AoE bomb skill called detonate, which takes a turn to set up, but is still pretty handy.
Where Saboteur loses out, and I say loses out loosely, because he’s still pretty good at B-Tier, is that his later skills don’t feel like they add very much. He gets a few different variations on his bomb skill, but if you’re using his bomb… you’re going to want the bomb. So it’s kind of skill diversity on paper, but not in practicality.
Saboteur is definitely among the better Star Renegades characters. If you get a bad character selection after a level that doesn’t have any of the A Tier or S Tier characters, Saboteur is probably the right choice.
Enforcer
Enforcer is alright. He does decent damage and decent armor damage, but that’s about it. He’s sort of like Valkyrie but without the ability to off-tank. Despite having a laser rifle, most of his moves aren’t able to hit the back row, which means he’s sort of like a less powerful Spectre but with less utility since he doesn’t deal any stagger.
Like Saboteur, you’ll probably take him in a few of your parties purely because you didn’t roll any better characters after completing a level. He’s not horrible. He definitely contributes. But he’s easily outclassed by Valkyrie, Spectre and Marksman, who can all do what he can and more.
Enforcer is a bit of a one-trick pony, but compared to some of the other Star Renegades characters, he’s not a bad pick.
C Tier – Best Star Renegades Characters
Varangian
Varangian is, with one little difference, pretty much just a worse Valkyrie. Their kit is almost identical, except Varangian gets an AoE attack at high level which is admittedly pretty good.
Still, Varangian doesn’t feel like he does as much damage as Wynn Syphex overall, nor does he feel like he’s as sturdy.
The main factors that differentiate him from other characters are that he does exceptional armor damage and he has a pretty powerful AoE attack. However, armor damage isn’t super hard to come by and his late-game AoE attack doesn’t feel like it makes up for being generally weaker than the Valkyrie.
Once you’ve gone through a run or two with the Varangian, you’ll probably find that most rolls give you a better option than him. Not one of the most sought after Star Renegades characters.
Archon
Archon is all about 2 things: AoE and restoring shields. Here’s the problem with that. The mechanics of Star Renegades don’t lend themselves towards his kit being particularly useful.
His AoE doesn’t do very much damage and it does some tiny amount of stagger, which means it takes up a point of stagger resistance from every enemy, while not dealing any useful amount of stagger. This is horrible. When you play through on high difficulty, staggering all the enemies is pretty much how you win, and Archon really screws that up.
Restoring shields is great but, again, it’s sort of at odds with how Star Renegades works in terms of its metagame (if you can call it that in a single-player game). You want to deal a lot of damage and not get hit. So that means damage, stagger and stuns are really good.
If you do get hit, it should be focused on a tank, and both tanks get an ability that lets them recharge their own shields. If your team is taking damage, you’re not in a good spot.
Archon would be great if he didn’t take up a spot that could otherwise be contributing damage, stagger or stuns. He’s more useful later in the game where enemy groups are larger and you can have a gauntlet that inflicts useful status afflictions. He also has some additional utility in the final encounter where surviving a bunch of AoEs is important.
For those reasons, he’s not terrible. Just, generally there are better choices. A decent choice among the Star Renegades characters.
D Tier – Best Star Renegades Characters
Gunslinger
The main thing that Gunslinger has going for her is Speed, but unfortunately she’s just a fairly weak character overall. She’s like Bentley (Commando), but worse in every conceivable way. Ignore the in-game ratings, her damage is C at best and outside of a single quick action move, her Speed is not notably better than Bentley’s.
When it comes to Star Renegades characters, there are a wealth of ranged damage dealers available and Gunslinger is absolutely the worst of them. It’s extremely unlikely you’ll have a run where you need a ranged damage dealer and have to resort to picking Gunslinger due to RNG or any other reason.
There are enough ranged damage dealers among the Star Renegades characters that you could fill your entire party with better ranged damage dealers. Unless you really, really like Gunslinger’s character design, there are better choices among the Star Renegades characters.
Paragon
The in-game ratings are way off base when it comes to Davion Syphex. For instance, it gives him a B in stagger, but, at least in his default variation, the most stagger any of his moves deals is 10s. They also gave Juggernaut a B in stagger and her normal attack deals 35s of stagger.
So don’t be fooled when it comes to the in-game ratings. If those were accurate, Davion Syphex would probably be pretty good.
In addition to dealing no stagger, Davion Syphex is one of the slowest characters available. His standard flurry attack takes about as long to execute as Valkyrie’s heavy Cleave attack, and his only other option until level 4 is a terrible low-damage low-stagger AoE attack that’s even worse than Archon’s standard attack. Dealing 10s stagger in an AoE is a bad thing.
At level 4 he gets… a counter attack, which is not a good idea at all since his defenses make him suitable as an off-tank at best.
So yeah, Davion Syphex is pretty much useless until he gets better attacks at level 6 or 8 or so, and even then, still not good. When it comes to the Star Renegades characters, even though he’s sort of a ‘secret’ character, usually you’re going to want to pass on Paragon.
F Tier – Best Star Renegades Characters
Empath
If you want to completely waste one of your 5 character slots, pick Empath. Her only legitimately useful ability is that once per battle she can let another character go twice.
Other than that, she has an aura that speeds your characters up by an inconsequential amount, she can restore shields (but not anywhere near as well as Archon), she can use the weakest normal attack in the game, or she can apply a relatively weak speed or defense buff to one of your other party members.
The problem isn’t really that Empath is exceptionally bad, it’s that taking her means you’re not taking another character. Making a useful character go twice one time is not as good as having two useful characters.
Her defense buff is nice for a tank, but you could just have 2 tanks and probably have a much easier time of it.
What I mentioned about Archon’s skillset not matching up with the metagame of Star Renegades goes double for Empath. Succeeding in this game is about damage, stagger and stuns, except for the final boss where Archon and Aegis are probably a little more useful than they are throughout the rest of the game.
Not Empath, though. Empath is a liability. All the other Star Renegades characters are better.
That about covers it when it comes to the best Star Renegades characters. Be sure to check out the Main Page for more content, click here for more game guides related to Star Renegades, and check out the Bright Rock Media YouTube Channel for game, movie, TV and music reviews and recommendations.
