The top five tips for improving at Wuthering Waves. Optimize your characters while spending the minimal amount of resources, improve at getting more damage out of your characters in combat, and clear your exploration goals faster to farm more Astrites!
Wuthering Waves is a lot of take in for both newcomers and to veteran players of other similar games. For many players, they have reached a point where their resources are getting spread thin, they are narrowly losing to harder content like the Tower of Adversity, and they lack Astrites to pull for their favourite characters. While not everything can be immediately solved, here are five tips to improve your combat gameplay and accelerate your ability to obtain resources faster.
Rejuvenating Glow is one of the most flexible sets between healer characters.
Using your resources efficiently is crucial especially in the earlier parts of the game where a lot of your progression is gated by how many teams you have ready for end-game content. Consider the available characters on your account and see if they share any of the following.
A very common tactic for players maximizing the value of echo sets is picking three characters who can all use the same Echoes for Tower of Adversity. You can share powerful support Echo sets like Moonlit Clouds or Rejuvenating Glow with minimal issues, as the goal of many of your support characters is quickly swapping in and out to activate intro/outro skills.
The most common is sharing the same elemental set for damage dealers. Characters like Havoc Rover and Danjin in particular both appreciate the Havoc Set and share the same weapon. This lets you spread your damage dealers across teams without having to grind for a separate set of Echos and weapons for these characters. In many cases, you may only need a single set of Echoes, as many teams revolve around a DPS, a Sub-DPS, and their support. These kinds of team setups often use Moonlit Clouds and Rejuvenating Glow and can easily be passed around.
An important factor about Echoes is that they do not need to be their mathematical best-in-slot, as many teams are finding more viable combinations. One popular team is the Jinhsi, Yuanwu, and Verina team, which takes advantage of the 3-star weapon Originite:Type IV for Yuanwu to allow him to use Rejuvenating Glow, with Verina on Moonlit Clouds. Combinations like this allow you to share sets that are not normally available to characters, especially among less popular characters in the game like Yuanwu, who now has a powerful strategy at a cheap cost.
In general, the most important equipment is always on your Main DPS character, as they will likely have the most field time, and be dealing the majority of your team’s damage. Finding DPS characters that share a weapon or Echo set greatly eases the difficulty of building up your account, as it lets you optimize only a singular set or weapon.
This is especially important for weapons, as currently many of the best weapons for multiple characters are 5* locked on the limited or standard weapon banner. Characters like Encore and Mortefi all appreciate having access to Yinlin’s signature weapon The Stringmaster. Weapons like Jinhsi’s Ages of Harvest has a near-universal effect and crit rate increase. Emerald of Genesis on the Standard banner has many users, making it often the go-to weapon across all of your sword teams as of 1.1.
Yuanwu is a key starter for Jinhsi’s team, building up her Forte Gauge swiftly.
A very common mistake is that many newer players are button mashing their way through content, often switching on a whim, switching too little, using skills at irregular times, and losing a lot of their potential damage. This is normally ok, especially for overworld content where you can take as much time as you need. But in the Tower of Adversity, rewards are timed to how fast you can clear the mode, meaning you want to have faster clear times by squeezing out damage optimally.
With the current sets of Echoes, the most common sets for Sub-DPS and support characters are Moonlit Clouds and Rejuvenating Glow respectively. These sets with their Echo abilities grant powerful buffs that can greatly amplify your Main DPS. In most cases, this is the general order for teams that, while it may not apply to everyone, is often a good general order.
1. Start with your healer using the Rejuvenating Glow set. Stack your Concerto Energy to full. Heal your team with your Resonance Skill or basic attack ability. Activate the Bell-Borne Geochelone’s Echo Skill and if possible, Resonance Liberation skill.
2. Swap into your Sub-DPS with Moonlit Clouds. Stack Concerto Energy. Use any available skills. Swap into your Main DPS as fast as possible with their Intro Skill activated.
3. Use your main DPS until their main damage source (Resonance Liberation, Resonance Skills, passives, etc.) and repeat the process by swapping back into your healer.
With this basic guideline, it allows you to keep up both the Rejuvenating Glow and Moonlit Clouds active on your main DPS. There are some variations where you may swap back into your healer or starting with your DPS to use your healer’s intro skill, but in general this order is often the main way to consistently get high damage numbers on your main carry.
You can have multiple characters on field casting their abilities by cancelling their animations early.
Animation cancelling is an important part of maximizing the damage of your characters, often seen in many other games. You may have noticed situations where your characters and echoes stay on-field after you switch them out. This occurs primarily when you switch characters right as they begin casting their ability. It is possible to have all three characters at once on-field using separate abilities to deal damage to your targets, maximizing how much damage you can deal.
The best way to learn the basics of cancelling your animations is using a character like Encore, or the more commonly accessible Dreamless Echo with your Havoc characters.
Encore has one of the most forgiving abilities in her enhanced Heavy Attack to practice cancelling, where she’ll stay on field and also be invulnerable for the entire duration of channeling her skill. It is especially important to cancel because of the long channeling time, where you can deal damage with other characters while Encore winds up.
Track down your exploration goals easily with your Exploration Progress.
The easiest way to accumulate free Astrites in Wuthering Waves is through exploration goals, where you can find Supply Chests, Sonance Caskets, and quests all over the map. One of the best ways to easily find what you are missing on the overworld is through checking your Exploration Progress on your map screen.
The map screen will give you the best account on what zones still have available exploration goals to complete, giving you an easier time tracking down what you need to fully get all the resources in the zone.
When you are exploring these zones, be sure to drop your Lootmappers as you explore the map, allowing you to more easily pinpoint anything you may be missing in the area. They have a significantly large coverage zone that will ensure that you have found everything in that area. As Lootmappers are free to drop, you can constantly take advantage of this as long as you routinely drop them in areas where you have not fully explored yet. Be sure to do this especially when exploring new areas so that you do not have to return to them later.
Limited Banners have some of the most powerful units in the game, and 4* characters that work well with their teams. Spend carefully!
We’ve all done it before, pulling on a banner that you may have not wanted the main 5* character for the sake of gacha dopamine or trying to get a copy of the 4* featured characters. Then your pull gives you something you may not have wanted, making you want to further spend even more Astrites because you have already pulled.
Consider both the income of your Astrites, your pity on banners, and what you want in your teams to clear for characters. One common piece of advice is that in nearly every gacha game, characters will rerun. Jinhsi who recently appeared in the first wave of 1.1, or Jiyan and Yinlin will all likely appear in future versions of the game, allowing you to save up for them.
For many players, they want both the 5* character and the weapon. Here is exactly the amount of pulls you will need to guarantee them.
160 pulls (25,600 Astrites) to guarantee a limited time-character assuming you lose the 50/50.
80 pulls (12,800 Astrites) to guarantee the limited time weapon on the weapon banner. (Unlike other similar games like Genshin Impact, you are guaranteed to pull the weapon after hitting a 5*)
In total, you potentially need upwards to 38,400 Astrites to guarantee everything at the worst possible luck. Try to plan around this as 160 pulls on a character banner are also likely to score you copies of 4* characters that are featured on the banner. In this case, you want to find banners that have both the limited time character you want, as well as 4* characters already available.
Keep in mind the first tip of the game, where you can use standard banner weapons instead of the newest limited banner weapon, saving you extra Astrites for future pulls.
Fast account progression in Wuthering Waves comes down to both optimizing your characters, your resources, and your gameplay. At the end of the day, there will be things that come down primarily to luck, from playing low crit-rate high crit damage builds, to pulling for your favourite characters early on banners. The general idea is that you can save a significant amount of resources through sharing echoes, clearing more of the overworld map, and planning your pulling carefully.
