Wuthering Waves Beginner Guide

Absolute Beginner Guide for Wuthering Waves

Welcome to our beginner’s guide for Wuthering Waves. We’ll be covering everything you need to know about the game, explaining different mechanics, and how the endgame shapes out.

We won’t cover every part in depth, but give an overall summary of the game. You can check out our Wuthering Waves Guides for a more in-depth look on certain mechanics.

What is Wuthering Waves?

Wuthering Waves is a vast open-world action RPG with a wide cast of characters to play as. Characters and Weapons are obtained through a gacha system, meaning every account will have a unique cast of characters and strengths.

Use these characters to explore the world, play through a story campaign, and defeat enemies.

Wuthering Waves releases on May 22nd on Windows, iOS, Android, and PlayStation 5.

Open World Exploration

Like other open-world games, Wuthering Waves will have a variety of enemy monsters, puzzles, and minigames to explore. As you do so, you’ll obtain various resources for upgrading your characters.

There will be an overarching story that you can play through, exploring new regions and learning about different characters.

Wuthering Waves will be a live-service game, meaning updates will come out consistently, adding additional content over time. This can be in the form of additional story quests, combat events, new regions to explore, and more.

Combat

The combat system in Wuthering Waves is a big draw for the game. The combat is fast paced with attacks, abilities, dodging, and parrying.

Every character has their own unique set of attacks and skills, allowing for a large variety in gameplay. Here’s a quick rundown of the general combat in Wuthering Waves.

• A team consists of 3 characters.
• Each character will have an attribute (element) and a weapon type.
• Every character will have their own set of attacks and skills:
  • Basic Attacks: Includes things like a chain of attacks, heavy attacks, mid-air attacks, and dodge counter (parry).
  • Skill: A unique skill to each character.
  • Liberation: A stronger skill that requires energy to use, similar to a burst or ultimate in other games.
  • Forte Circuit: A unique resource mechanic for every character, allowing for unique skills or empowered effects.
  • Intro/Outro Skill: A QTE (Quick-Time Event) that occurs when switching between characters.

With every character having unique mechanics and combat feel, tackling monsters will be a unique experience. Monsters will have their own set of attacks as well, allowing you to express your skill by dodging and weaving attacks.

All this being said, let’s talk about how you actually obtain different characters and weapons.

Gacha System

Wuthering Waves is a “gacha” game, meaning the characters and weapons you obtain are through a random draw. Instead of obtaining characters as you play, you instead spend in game currency for the chance of obtaining a new character.

With this system, most players won’t have every character in the game. However, you can save up your in game currency to try and choose which characters you want for your own account.

For a more detailed guide on this, you can check out our Wuthering Waves Gacha System Guide.

There are two things you obtain through the gacha system: characters and weapons. Let’s dive into each a little more.

Resonators

In Wuthering Waves, characters are referred to as Resonators. These Resonators will appear throughout the story, and you can obtain them through the gacha system.

However, when you start the game, you will have access to a set of free characters. Some characters may also be given out as a reward from events or game modes.

Resonators have two rarities:

• 4-star: You will get these most often when pulling on the gacha.
• 5-star: Higher rarity characters that have low odds.

Each Resonator has an attribute that determines the type of damage they do.

• Aero (Wind)
• Electro (Lightning)
• Fusion (Fire)
• Glacio (Ice)
• Havoc (Dark)
• Spectro (Light)

So far, these attributes haven’t affected much in terms of in-game mechanics, but this can always be explored further in the future.

To see which character’s are the strongest, you can check out our Wuthering Waves Tier List. This article will also briefly cover every character and what they do.

Weapons

The other in-game item you get from the gacha system are weapons. While you will obtain weapons from the gacha, you can also obtain weapons outside of the gacha through crafting or other methods. Generally, they are easier to obtain than characters.

Similar to Resonators, Weapons are broken down into rarities. However, there are 3.

• 3-star: When pulling on the gacha, most of what you get will be 3-star weapons. You may also find these in chests throughout the open world.
• 4-star: Similar to characters, 4-star weapons are rarer and stronger than 3-star weapons. There are also some 4-star weapons that you will be able to craft.
• 5-star: Obtainable through the gacha. Raising your account level to 45 will also reward one 5-star weapon.

Weapons grant additional stats like ATK, Crit Rate, Crit DMG, and more. Every weapon will have a base attack, with higher rarity weapons generally having more.

Each weapon will have these three things:

• Base ATK
• Substat (Crit Rate, Defense, ATK, etc)
• Effect

Raising the level of your weapon will increase the first two, the base ATK and substat. In order to increase the effect of your weapon, you need to feed in duplicates. This will enhance the effect, like raising the percentage.

Echoes

Along with Weapons, there is one category of gear that your character can equip. These are called Echoes, which are monsters that you absorb after fighting them. So instead of things like a Helmet or Armor, your character can equip these Echoes.

Echoes will grant a variety of effects like bonus stats, set bonuses, and even additional skills. Here’s a quick TLDR of the Echo system, but you can read more in our Wuthering Waves Echo Guide.

• You can equip 5 Echoes
• Your “main” Echo will grant your character an additional skill, briefly transforming into the Echo
• Echoes have main stats, a secondary stat, and substats.
• You can level up Echoes to increase these stats.
• Doing the Tacet Field game mode will grant you Echo XP, Tuners (to reveal substats), and random Echoes.
• Echoes have set bonuses that you can activate by equipping the same set.

Stamina

In Wuthering Waves, you’ll be able to play a lot of content and game modes without stopping. However, there are some game modes or mechanics that are time-gated.

In the game, players will have a resource called “Waveplates.” This resource regenerates over time regardless if you’re playing or not. In order to gain rewards from some dungeons, you’ll need to spend Waveplates.

This is generally the case for character upgrade materials, skill upgrade materials, Echo upgrade materials, etc.

Because of this, some of your progression will be time-gated, so you can’t simply rush your characters to max level. In gacha games, this is often referred to as Stamina.

Endgame System

With a basic understanding of the basics, let’s briefly talk about the endgame. In Wuthering Waves, there are 3 endgame modes that you can tackle.

Tower of Adversity

In the Tower of Adversity, you’ll fight waves of enemies with your teams. It’s a fairly straight-forward game mode, and you can use a variety of characters to fight. However, you cannot use the same characters over and over. As you clear waves, you will need to switch to different characters.

This means you’ll need a larger roster of characters to clear the Tower. From the beta test, we learned that you will need three teams to clear the highest difficulties. This results in a roster of 9 characters.

There is one caveat. If you have a character strong enough to fight solo, you can technically clear the Tower of Adversity with only 3 characters. This can be done with good gameplay, dodging enemy attacks, or by building up your character to be strong enough to solo fight.

Every so often, the Tower of Adversity will cycle to new waves of enemies. This means you can earn the rewards each time you clear the new Tower. Clearing some of the early stages will also reward you with a free character, Yuanwu.

Tactical Hologram

Hologram is a boss mode, where you will fight juiced up versions of in-game bosses. Each boss will have 6 difficulties, and the bosses will learn additional moves as you challenge higher levels.

For this mode, you only need one team, and you can challenge these Holograms over and over until you win. Once you clear a Hologram, you’ll gain one-time rewards.

Depths of the Illusive Realm

Lastly, Depths of the Illusive Realm is a rogue-like game mode. Like the Tower, you will fight different waves of enemies, but you’ll gain buffs along the way.

These can buff up your characters to be extremely powerful. While the Tower and Hologram will likely be more challenging, Depths can provide a fun gameplay loop where you try different things each time.

Closing Words

This wraps up just about everything you need to know as a beginner. While we don’t cover every little detail, the game will explain a lot of it’s mechanics as you play.

This article is simply to give an overall look of the game and how it works.

Thanks for Reading! For more resources, be sure to check out our other Wuthering Waves Guides.