Wuthering Waves Combat Guide

WuWa. Wuthering Waves Combat Guide. Basics. Advanced Techniques. Character Roles. Boss Guides.

Table of Contents

Wuthering Waves features action combat similar to that of Genshin Impact or Devil May Cry. Skill combos can create flashy animations that decimate your opponents, but reaction timing is also important for dodging or parrying specific mechanics. While exploring out in the open world you will be able to easily breeze through combat scenarios, allowing for a more casual experience most of the time. However, if you want to push the limits of your progression, there are bosses and challenges that will require you to optimize your characters and get experienced with the encounters and be able to succeed.

This guide is meant to be an introduction to all of the basic combat mechanics in Wuthering Waves that you will need to know to succeed, and then build on those ideas with more advanced mechanics, character synergies, or specific boss fights. You don’t need to be at your best to see all the content because Wuthering Waves is mostly a casual RPG with no PvP. However, the combat is so fluid and fun that it feels rewarding to get better at it. So the aim of this guide is to facilitate the fun part of getting good by explaining the unexplained mechanics inherent to the combat system, allowing you to develop your own playstyle.

While skill is very relevant for pushing the limits of how far you can go, sometimes you will just need to build your Characters, Weapons, and Echoes stronger to get by. Skill and Vertical Progression are the two major parts of Wuthering Waves progression. This guide will mostly focus on skill and mechanics, so to learn more about how to improve the power of your characters check out the Character Leveling Guide instead.

The Basics

Every character you play in Wuthering Waves will have a different combat playstyle and skills, but every character will use the same skill types with associated key presses. Learning these basics will help set a foundation for you to then learn the specific mechanics of each character.

Stamina

The normal movement keys are W A S D and to move faster you can press the Right Mouse Button or Left-Shift. This will consume some of your Stamina Bar shown next to your character and cause you to Dash for a moment and then continue running. While out of combat it does not cost Stamina to keep running, but while in combat you lose Stamina the longer you run for.

It’s important to conserve your Stamina because it is a shared resource between multiple mechanics:

Aerial Attacks
Heavy Attacks
Dodges
Running

Running out of Stamina not only limits your movement speed and damage, but it also prevents you from Dodging, which is one of the most important mechanics.

Whenever you Dash using the Right Mouse Button or Left-Shift, there is a half-second window that if you would have been hit by an attack you will instead perform a Dodge, avoiding the attack and all other attacks during the dodge animation. This regenerates Stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. During the dodge, time will slow down so you can think about what you’re going to do next (time does not slow down in Co-Op Mode).

You can also Dash twice in a row by double-clicking the dash. This will cost twice as much Stamina but extend the window you have to dodge an attack, making it much more forgiving to dodge animations you aren’t exactly sure of their timing.

You cannot Dash more than twice in a row. You must wait a second before doing another Double Dash, so if you mistakenly Double Dash too early, you will be vulnerable. But if you successfully Dodge an attack you will be able to immediately Double Dash to Dodge again right after for as long as you have Stamina. Since successful Dodges restore Stamina and reset your Dash cooldown, you can infinitely Dodge as long as you have the timing right.

Even though having good reaction speed equates to a lot of power in Wuthering Waves due to how often you can dodge, there are still punishing mechanics because some animations may be obscured by movement or unclear on their timing because of how delayed they are. Situations where enemies constantly attack are safer than situations where enemies attack at unexpected timings or in varying patterns. Learning the patterns to some bosses will be necessary to surviving them and knowing when you can do damage to them. See the boss section below to learn more.

Basic Skills

These next skills can be used without a cooldown, but may have some conditional or resource requirement.

Basic Attack – Pressing the Left Mouse Button will do a simple attack which can be pressed multiple times in a row to create a chain of attacks. Usually the final attack in the chain will have more of an effect than the previous attacks.

Heavy Attack – Holding down the Left Mouse Button will charge up a stronger attack that will use up some of your Stamina Bar. Sometimes you can change the timing of a Heavy Attack by when you release the mouse button.

Aerial/Plunge Attack – Using the Jump Key or Space Bar and then pressing the Left Mouse Button while mid-air will allow a follow up attack that uses Stamina and can catch enemies off-guard.

Dodge Counter – After successfully dodging an enemy attack, you can press Left Mouse Button to perform a Dodge Counter which is a quick attack that will generally do more damage than a Basic or Heavy attack, so make sure to use this whenever possible.

Skill Bar

These next skills usually have cooldowns, meaning they are generally more powerful.

Resonance Skill – The E skill is your character’s unique Resonance ability. This will often have a cooldown and a stronger effect than a Heavy Attack depending on which character uses it.

Echo Skill – The Q skill depends on which Echo you have equipped in the top slot of the Echo menu, which can be used on any character. Echoes are creatures you can collect and their abilities can summon a monster to attack or transform you into that monster for a moment. While transformed during an Echo skill, you take 50% less damage to make up for your lack of control. Find out more about capturing and leveling Echoes in the Leveling Guide.

Resonance Liberation (Ultimate) – Using the R key is your most powerful attack, but it requires the Resonance Energy resource to be full, shown around the skill icon. You gain Energy by attacking or other effects that give Energy Regeneration.

Targeting – Pressing the Middle Mouse Button will lock you to your current target and all of your attacks will focus them regardless of positioning. Normally the game will automatically change your target based on who is closer to you or where your camera is facing, and this can be disruptive to your movement or short ranged abilities. This allows more control when facing multiple enemies, but isn’t too useful when fighting a single boss. Hold the Middle Mouse Button down to unlock your targeting.

Forte Circuit – Every character will have a unique mechanic for their Forte. Either using their Resonance skill or their Basic Attacks will fill up the gauge at the bottom of the screen but above their health bar. Depending on certain thresholds of this gauge, characters can expend this resource to do empowered attacks or abilities. Which ability will be empowered can also be shown by the icon to the right of the Forte gauge, like a Mouse button. For example:

Yangyang gains 1 full bar of Forte when using a full Basic Attack chain, a Heavy > Basic combo, or her Resonance Skill, and when she has three bars of Forte she can do a Heavy Attack to thrust enemies and herself into the air, enabling you to follow up with an Aerial Attack.
Chixia gains Forte as she attacks or by using the Resonance Skill, but she can expend Forte by holding down the Resonance Skill instead. If she uses 35 of her Forte during this skill, the Basic Attack which follows will do a big burst of damage.

Intro/Outro – Most combat situations afford you a team of three characters to fight with, and swapping between them can give benefits or attacks based on which character is swapping out and which one is swapping in (Outro and Intro respectively). Although you can swap characters at any time, you must have full Concerto to get the Intro/Outro effects.

Concerto can be seen in the circle to the left of your Health and Forte bars or in the Party Member Portraits. When the portraits light up or the circle by your health bar is full, you can swap characters to get the Intro/Outro skills. Also a distinct sound can be heard so you don’t necessarily need to look at the visual indicators. Swap characters with the appropriate 1 2 3 Keys to use their Intro/Outro skills. Intro skills will provide a decent amount of Stagger to the enemy, can easily Parry, and will evade attacks during the animation.

Universal Mechanics

Parry – When two yellow circles appear it means not only will the enemy do an attack soon, but also that you have the ability to interrupt that attack using a Parry. To Parry, time your Basic Attack to hit after the outer yellow circle merges with the inner yellow circle. If you hit before they merge you will not perform the parry, and if you hit too long after then the enemy’s attack hits first.

Timing and character animations are important to the combat in Wuthering Waves. In most of the game you can just spam your skills and win, so many players will develop bad habits. When you get to more difficult fights with Parry mechanics and time limits, you’ll need to know when to stop attacking to time your Parry which can potentially provide much more value than a few Basic Attacks. Specific attacks other than Basic Attacks may or may not count as a parry, so this will change depending on your character. Gun-wielding characters cannot parry for the most part, but other skills may be able to parry more efficiently such as Intro or Resonance Liberation skills since they slow down time to hit instantly.

Stagger – Most stronger enemies will have two resource bars. The top bar is their health, and the bottom one is their Stagger bar. When their Stagger bar is fully depleted, the enemy will become stunned and vulnerable to attacks. Right before you fully break their stagger, you want to prepare to unleash your biggest damage combos before they regain control again.

There are multiple ways to deplete the enemy stagger bar, and using these frequently will greatly increase your windows to attack an enemy.

Parry
Intro/Outro Skills
Damage

Inherent Skills – When leveling your character (C for character menu), you can specify in what ways they will improve by using the Forte tab. Leveling specific abilities will improve their statistical effect, but leveling the two skills in the top and middle spots of the Forte line will grant new passive skills called Inherent Skills. They aren’t new buttons to press, but they can trigger when using your other skills. These are highly dependent on which character you are playing, but paying attention to their effects is important to understanding your character as you progress.

Utility Skills – As you progress quests and story in Wuthering Waves, more utility skills will become available to you outside of combat usage. These can range from a Grappling Hook, a Sensor, or the ability to levitate objects, but some of these can also be useful in combat. For example, the Grappling Hook can lift you up into the air long enough to dodge a low attack or to avoid fire on the ground. Use the T key to use your utility skill, and press Tab to quickly swap between a few select utility skills. If you want to change which skills are on the quick bar, go to to the main menu and scroll to the right to find Utilities.

Characters and Team Compositions

Once you understand the basics of combat in Wuthering Waves, you’ll need to translate them over to the actual characters you’ll be playing in the game which have different playstyles and mechanics. While there are objectively better characters than others for specific roles and team compositions, you may not use the most optimal characters because of how random it can be to obtain them, you may enjoy a specific playstyle, or you’re in a situation that limits which characters you can use. Unless you want to spend more money to get the characters you want, you’ll need to work with what you get.

The Tower of Adversity also forces you to build multiple teams to progress. For this reason it is useful to have a variety of characters leveled up and ready to use in various teams.

In Wuthering Waves, every character has three different categories they can fit into:

Elemental Damage	Fusion	Havoc	Spectro	Aero	Electro
Weapon Type	Sword	Broadblade	Gauntlet	Pistol	Rectifier
Team Role	DPS	SubDPS	Support	Tank

Elemental Damage – This is not too important in the beginning, but some bosses will have a resistance to a certain element. Certain characters or effects can provide benefits to one elemental damage type, allowing other characters of that element to take advantage of it. For example, Danjin increases the amount of Havoc damage the next character deals after Outro. Having another Havoc character in your team can be nice to take advantage of this.

The option for a variety of damage types can often be more optimal than putting all your resources into one or two characters that can be countered. Elemental damage is not important for your supportive characters who won’t be dealing much damage anyway.

Weapon Type – Characters cannot change their weapon type, but they can share weapons with other characters who use that same weapon type. For example, Chixia and Mortefi both use Pistol so you can swap weapons that you’ve upgraded between characters. However, if they are both in your party at the same time, you will need two pairs of pistols upgraded to use them simultaneously. For this reason it is best to start out with team compositions using different weapons on each character so that you can focus on leveling up one weapon for each type. Later on you will want weapons that fit the character role and playstyle more efficiently, so you may need to upgrade more than one weapon of a certain type.

Team Role. Only one character can be out at a time, but some characters need more time to use their skills than others. Some characters will provide buffs or healing to their allies, and others will just do damage. When creating a team, there are some roles to consider:

DPS – They want to deal as much damage as they can and don’t do much else. You need this to beat some bosses before their timers. However, going with three full DPS characters wouldn’t work so well because they would be competing with their uptime to get value from their damage.

Sub DPS – May not have as much damage over time as a pure DPS, but they may have burst-oriented damage or can provide buffs to the party. They have fast rotations or Concerto generation that allows them to get their full effect and then swap out quickly so they don’t take up time that your DPS needs to deal its damage.

Support – They provide healing and buffing to your other characters which can make sustained fights much easier and less punishing to your mistakes. Like a Sub DPS, they don’t want to take up a lot of time on the field, so they often only stay out until they can trigger the Outro/Intro Skills of other characters.

Tank – Unlike the first three playstyles, this one is not too popular because dodging exists and you want to deal damage rather than soak damage. But it can still be useful to have a character which you can swap to for mitigating dangerous mechanics. These characters often get value from defensive stats or have extra mechanics to mitigate or negate enemy attacks. When you want to make a risky Parry, you can do it on a tank character and if things don’t work out you will at least survive the attack instead of your DPS dying.

You don’t necessarily need one of each role either. While the most optimal composition is usually DPS, Sub DPS, and Support, you could have two Sub DPS and one Tank for a more defensive composition, or one Support and two DPS for a more aggressive composition.

All characters are viable as long as you put them in a composition that makes sense and build those characters with Echoes and stats that work toward their role. To learn more about which stats each role wants, check out the Leveling Guide.

Character List

Below are all the playable characters, their weapon types, elemental damage types, and the potential roles they can fill in a team composition. There are many ways to play each character, but their general playstyle may lean towards a specific role. If interested in that character, click the link for a guide to learning them.

Animation Canceling

After understanding the basics and learning your characters’ combos, the best way to improve at the combat in Wuthering Waves is to learn how to optimize your characters’ animations, or minimize how long it takes your character to perform their actions by cancelling the unnecessary or detrimental parts of those actions.

An example of this is how Calcharo’s Resonance Skill can be used during his Basic or Heavy Attacks to constantly attack during his skill rotation:

E > Heavy > E > Heavy > Basic > E > Forte Heavy

Animation cancelling is so important because it not only reduces the amount of time your character wastes doing nothing or while vulnerable, but also increases the amount of skills you can do in a set amount of time. It is a skillful method to improve your damage and survivability. While there are many different ways to cancel animations and each character is different, here are the main methods of animation cancelling:

Dodging
Swapping Characters
Resonance Liberation (Ultimate)

Dodging to cancel an animation is usually reactive. You don’t need to stop attacking before you dodge since the dodge has a higher priority than most attacks.

NOTE: Some skills will lock you in an animation such as a jump off the ground and you cannot cancel these with a dodge.

When attacking normally, you can dodge when an enemy attacks you and it will cancel your animation. The timing of the dodge is important because if done too early it won’t trigger the actual evade and will cost Stamina. The sequence will often look like this:

Attack Animation > Dodge Cancel > Incoming Attack Dodged > Dodge Counter

This is especially useful when you are attempting to Parry an attack but you aren’t sure if it will be successful. If you fail to Parry then you get hit by the attack. If you Dodge Cancel your Parry attempt, you can still dodge the attack you are trying to Parry and if you do end up being successful your wasted dodge doesn’t mean much.

Many animations will persist even after their entire effect has occurred. This is called an Aftercast. Because it takes time to do the full animation, but the skill may no longer give any benefit, it only stops us from performing another animation.

This idea can also be transferred to Sanhua’s Heavy Attack and Resonance Skill combo. Normally you would use the E > Heavy combo, but the E has a long aftercast that you can’t do anything during besides channel your Heavy Attack. However, you can cancel the aftercast of the E with a jump. From here you can Aerial Attack and charge your Heavy Attack during the Aerial Attack. This allows you to get off one more skill in the same amount of time, giving you more damage, more Concerto, and keeping you safer from attacks during this time.

E > Heavy
E > Jump > Aerial > Heavy
Jump > Aerial > Heavy > E > Heavy

Character Swap is another way to cancel animations. Performing an Intro/Outro skill is a short evade frame while your new character does their attack. This allows you to use a fully charged Concerto swap as a dodge. Swapping characters is also one of the best ways to Parry since the Intro attack occurs instantly, making it much easier to get the timing than with another attack that has a longer or delayed animation.

Character Swap to Parry

Even if you don’t have enough Concerto energy to perform an Intro, the character you swap off of will finish their current animation before disappearing. Only the current character you are playing as can be damaged. This means that you can Swap cancel by casting a skill that has a long animation and then swap characters at the beginning of the animation, ensuring that the first character does not get interrupted or hurt during that animation. Swapping has a very low cooldown, and you will retain that character’s Concerto for when you swap back to them, so feel free to do this whenever you use an attack with a long animation. Just remember that the next character you swap to will not be safe from any attacks as you swap unless it is during a fully charged Concerto Intro attack.

Encore’s Forte Heavy Attack inside her Resonance Liberation is a perfect time to swap cancel because it is such a long animation and her power level drops off afterwards.

Swap Cancel the Long Animation

Resonance Liberation or your character’s Ultimate skill can also cancel an animation because it has such a high priority. A quick cutscene will occur that stops time while you perform your Ultimate attack. This makes it another great method for Parrying because it occurs instantly, but it will also take priority over any other of your animations, cancelling them. Unlike the swap cancel that will continue your last animation, your Ultimate will immediately cast, interrupting anything you were doing before.

NOTE: Some Ultimate skills cannot Parry or interrupt your other skills.

There will also be a short frame of immunity to attacks after your Ultimate, making it similar to a dodge cancel. Because your Ultimate is often used to deal damage, it can be used to facilitate even more DPS by canceling the Aftercasts of another skill and increasing how many skills you can fit in a window of time, especially during boss Staggers.

Echo Abilities that transform you can also have slow animations with long Aftercasts. It’s common to want to save these until you can cancel their Aftercasts with another mechanic. Even though you gain buffs from these Echo skills and 50% damage reduction during their cast, you are still more vulnerable and potentially losing damage during their long animations. Ideally use your Echo early to get the most out of the damage buff, or use it late so you can Swap Cancel the Aftercast of your Echo ability.

Where each type of Animation Cancel can be beneficial

	Remove Aftercast	Evade Frame	Long Animations	Parry
Dodge Cancel	✅	✅		✅
Swap Cancel	✅		✅
Concerto Swap Cancel	✅	✅	✅	✅
Ultimate Cancel	✅	✅		✅

Quick Swap Team Comp

The full potential of Animation Canceling and Character Swapping can be achieved by creating a team of characters that have high Concerto and Resonance Energy generation or have fast rotations. You can quickly swap between your characters, only spending a few seconds on each character to get out their most powerful attacks and then moving on to the next character. Those cooldowns will come back by the time you have rotated through all of your characters, meaning you can minimize the time you spend doing low impact attacks on that character. You can also get more evade frames and Stagger on bosses while still doing damage because you’ll be using Intro/Outro skills more often.

Specific characters work well with quick swapping, and others work better as supports who spend very little time on field, or a main DPS who will stay on-field for a long time. Here is an example of a quick swap rotation:

In this composition Calcharo is used as a main DPS while his ultimate is up, but otherwise he is used to swap with Yinlin and Baizhi for buffs and off-field damage. This is because Baizhi’s ultimate pulses damage over time on the current character, and Yinlin’s Forte deals damage even while she is off-field. So the most important attacks to land on each character in this team comp are their Forte and Resonance skills.

Baizhi – Q > E > Swap
Calcharo – E > Heavy > E > Basic > Heavy > E > Forte Heavy > Swap
Yinlin – E > 3 Basics > E > Swap
Calcharo – E > Heavy > E > Basic > Heavy > E > Forte Heavy > Swap
Yinlin – E > R > E > Forte Heavy > Swap
Baizhi – Q > E > R > Swap
Calcharo – Q > R > Basic Attacks > Outro when Full Concerto then Swap back

Yinlin gets more Crit Rate shortly after her first E so this is the best time to use her R. She also gains faster Forte and Resonance on the first few attacks after her E. Then she gains ATK after using her second E. These can be used on a low cooldown, but her Forte might take longer, so use the Resonance Skill as quickly as possible and the Forte Heavy Attack, but if the Forte isn’t ready just swap. Also you can take advantage of the Swap Cancel on the long animations of her second E or Forte Heavy so these can be used at the end of her rotation.

Calcharo has a longer combo before he can swap, but it is more scripted since he gets Forte every time his E hits. As long as you land all three of your Resonance Skill hits, you can use his Forte Heavy attack which has a long animation and can be Swap Canceled. It may take a while to use his R, so you can swap a few times before investing in it.

Baizhi is a support so she only needs to be out momentarily to give her buffs and heals. She may not be the most optimal support for this comp, but it is what was used. Any support that increases Resonance or Resonance Liberation damage may work better.

Bosses

Unlike other encounters in Wuthering Waves, some boss fights will test your knowledge of the above skills and mechanics to the absolute limit. Not only do you need to have character and skill knowledge, you also need to know the specific animations and attack patterns that they will do so you can expect them and know exactly how to counter them in a fast-paced combat scenario.

These bosses will reappear throughout Wuthering Waves so you might first fight them as an open world encounter, then take them on in a more difficult timed encounter through the hologram, and even face them randomly in the Illusive Realm. Learning each boss and their mechanics can help you in the long term as you may keep facing them in the future.

Here is a list of bosses, the elemental damage they are resistant to, and links to their specific boss guides when applicable (more guides will arrive as new challenges come out).

Bell-Borne Geochelone Glacio

Crownless Havoc

Dreamless Havoc

Feilian Beringal Aero

Impermanence Heron Havoc

Inferno Rider Fusion

Lampylumen Myriad Glacio

Mech Abomination Electro

Mourning Aix Spectro

Scar

Tempest Mephis Electro

Thundering Mephis Electro

After you understand the basics of combat, know your character’s skills and what role they play in your team composition, and have experience with the enemy mechanics you’ll be fighting against, the only other factors are time spent practicing the fights or leveling your characters. For more on how to optimize your characters, check the Leveling Guide below.

What Is Wuthering Waves?

Leveling Guide