When building up your roster of characters in Wuthering Waves, a significant portion of the process will involve using Echoes. To aid your understanding, I present a wonderful guide that will help you understand the system, and how you can use it to best Wuthering Waves‘ most difficult content.
What are Echoes in Wuthering Waves?
If you’ve played Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail, believe it or not, you’re already well-versed in the Echoes system, minus some nuance stuff. For those who have not touched those games, Echoes are like item drops that come with various sets of stats, all of which directly influence how powerful your characters are. Every Echo comes with a Main Stat, the stat with the highest value, and several Sub Stats, secondary stats with lower values. Typically, when building your characters in Wuthering Waves, you want to make sure you’re using the correct Main Stats for an Echo before even looking at the Sub Stats.
Beyond stats, Echoes also double as additional abilities you can equip on your characters. The top-most slot for an Echo, on a character, determines which Echo active ability you can use since you equip up to five Echoes on a character at any given time. Echo abilities vary greatly, from support healing to damage buffing, to raw damage in general. There is a large assortment of Echo Abilities to choose from in Wuthering Wave, and you’ll want to make good use of these for the game’s hardest content.
Echo Values
While you can equip several Echoes at a time on any given character, you are limited on which ones can all be equipped at the same time. Every Echo in Wuthering Waves comes with a cost value number that determines its stat range. The higher the number, the better the stats will be on the Echo. However, the downside to this is that you cannot equip too many high-cost Echoes, because you’ll too quickly reach the Echo value cap, and will be missing stats due to being unable to equip an Echo in every slot.
To combat this, you’ll want to make sure you never exceed the value cap by ensuring you have an Echo in every single slot. This means using lower-value Echos if need be. If you have even one Echo slot with no Echo equipped, you’ll be greatly weakening your character’s overall strength. The Echo value cap is determined by your progression in Wuthering Waves and will be increased over time as you continue playing.
Echo Rarities
While all Echoes come with a value number attached that determines their stat range, an Echo’s rarity further boosts that range, allowing you to level them up further, the higher their rarity. There are five rarities in Wuthering Waves.
- Common – Highlighted in Gray
- Uncommon – Highlighted in Green
- Rare – Highlighted in Blue
- Epic – Highlighted in Purple
- Legendary – Highlighted in Yellow
When you begin Wuthering Waves, you’ll be using Common and Uncommon rarity Echoes for a good portion of your initial experience. As your account levels up, higher rarity Echoes will automatically begin to drop for you. Eventually, you’ll want to make sure all of your characters are clad in Legendary rarity Echoes, as they offer the best stats in the game.
Echo Abilities
As mentioned already, every Echo you obtain will come with a unique ability to that Echo. All of these abilities are active, meaning you’ll need to press them for them to have any effect. In relation to Echo Value, the power of an Echo ability tends to be determined by how high or low the value of it is. For example, a Value One Echo will have a weak ability with a very short cooldown and a Value Four Echo will have a powerful ability with a long cooldown.
Echo Set Bonuses
All Echos, regardless of Rarity will also have a set bonus attached to it. A set bonus grants the equipped character additional bonus effects if they are using Echos that belong to the same set. You’ll be able to determine this by looking at the Echo and viewing its set bonus. You’ll know you’re getting a set bonus effect if the bonus on the Echo is lit up Green. If you’re not getting the effect, it will appear Grey instead.
How to get Echoes in Wuthering Waves
Normally, in Gacha games, items like Echoes are obtained by using your precious Stamina resource in a short, specific dungeon. However, Wuthering Waves does away with this limitation, allowing you to farm Echoes for free from the Overworld. This is fantastic because you always have something productive to do in Wuthering Waves when you’re out of Stamina. This does come at a separate cost, however.
Every Echo you obtain will come from an enemy you slay in the Overworld. When an enemy is killed, they have a chance, based on your Account Level (think Adventure Rank), to leave an afterimage of themselves behind. When you see this, walk up to it, and absorb it to receive an ‘Echo’ of that enemy. This has no actual cost, so you can, theoretically, farm up as many Echoes as you’d like. However, a couple of things do prevent you from farming forever.
Firstly, there are a finite amount of enemies in the Overworld, so you can actually kill off everything and have nothing left to free farm, excluding boss encounters. Now, this would take some serious dedication to do, as the Overworld of Wuthering Waves is rather large and packed full of enemies around every corner. However, a dedicated player will be able to pull it off.
Secondly, even though you can freely farm Echoes, in order to unlock their Sub Stats, you’ll need to use an item called a Tuner. You’ll be given a very large amount of Tuners initially just playing through Wuthering Waves‘ main story and side quests, but eventually, you’ll run out and need to farm them from the dedicated dungeon that drops them. Naturally, this dungeon requires you to use your Stamina; it’s a bummer, but it is what it is.
