Wuthering Waves: First Encore

Time for another brief (!) update on where I am in Wuthering Waves. I know everyone's been on the edge of their seats, wondering whether I've been able to claw my way over the hump and beat that fight I was complaining about a week and a half ago. 

Remember I said I'd have to go away and "figure it all out"? It also seemed like there was a non-trivial chance I might actually have to l2p or git gud if I wanted to carry on with the main storyline, although it also seemed like that wasn't something I especially needed to do if all I wanted was to carry on having fun with the game?

Yeah, well. Overthinking, right? Bane of the age. 

So, I am not going to start explaining how the game works because

a) it's super complicated

b) there's still way more I don't understand than I do

and

c) no-one cares

But I can tell you I bumbled around and clicked on stuff until at least enough came clear that I was able to move forward. It's a method I use a lot.

As far as I see it, everything levels up or upgrades so you need to do some of that or its like you're fighting mid-level mobs in your starting gear. I mean, it isn't exactly that because one of the things I don't much like about Wuthering Waves and gacha games in general (Noah's Heart very much being the exception but I'm saving that for another post.) is that there isn't really any gear to speak of. In the case of WW it's basically weapons and that's it.

But those weapons really matter. You gotta not just get good ones but you have to keep on boosting them. It really makes a difference although not as much of a difference as getting better Resonators, which is another point of contention between the gacha game model and me that I'm not going to get into here. (Won't do that again, I promise. Mention stuff I could talk about and then not talk about it. It's really annoying, isn't it?)

So, anyway, what I mainly did was figure out how to do the "Pulls", where you spend the special currencies for a chance at a new Resonator, plus I used all the mats I'd been stashing (The ones I had no idea what they were for.) to upgrade anything they'd work on, something the game does for you if you let it, although you can do it yourself once you work out what goes where and that's definitely the better option because, left to itself, the game doesn't always make the best choices.

As with all the games like this I've played, you get a ton of free currency to make pulls. I suppose if you're being competitive you might want more and that's how the money gets made but if you're just plugging through the story I doubt it would come to that. Certainly never has for me. 

I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull. She looked pretty good. Actually, she looked like a ten year old girl, which there always seems to be at least one of in every game like this, but I'm talking about her stats. 

I stopped pulling Resonators and went to try Encore out, which meant making a new team. This, beyond everything, turned out to be where I'd been going wrong until now.

I have a naive tendency to stick with the character I started with. I think of that one as "me". Or "my character". I mean, it would be in any other game but it's not how gacha games work. 

In Wuthering Waves it's even more confusing because that is your character for the main story, the one that appears in all the cut-scenes, but it doesn't have to be in the fights. And if you picked the one I did at the start then it really shouldn't be because she's... not very good.

The way it works is you can have a bunch of teams set up, each with three Resonators, drawn from your pool of however many it is you've got and you're supposed to swap them in and out whenever, for whatever reason. 

I can't be any clearer than that because I have no clue about the finer points but at least now I know it categorically does not work if you just keep going with the character you started with plus the next two NPCs she happened to meet. That is not a good team. Not even if you upgrade them all as best you can. 

I know because I did try it that way first out of misguided loyalty and although the upgrades meant I was doing twice as well as before in that tough fight, I was still only doing half as well as I needed. I really should have saved the mats.

When I swapped "my" character out for the new one I'd pulled, though, and another for one of the others, suddenly everything changed.

It was categorically not because I became any more skilled. I did not learn to play or get good or any of that. I just button-mashed as I always do but now it felt like I was on EZ-Mode..

Okay, that isn't entirely fair on me. I did read up on some of the mechanics I hadn't bothered to pay the slightest attention to before. I found out that every Resonator has Intro and Outro skills which means as you swap between them in combat they buff the others or do AE damage or all sorts of things as they come onto the battlefield or retire from it. So I started swapping between them a lot more actively. Not exactly randomly but not with any real understanding either.

And it seemed to help a lot. If I was going to play the game seriously, I'd take the trouble to remember what each of those effects did and use them tactically. I guess at some point I still might have to do that but not yet. For now, just making sure they keep happening in any old order seems to make a big enough difference.

So does not letting the game auto-select your Echoes, a tip I came across while reading about something else entirely. Echoes are the after-images of mobs you kill. You can collect them and use them like pets to fight or heal or buff. You can have up to five at once and only the first one is active. I'd been using that live one a lot but I hadn't even thought about the others.

It turns out the rest combine to give a bonus effect that I think is called a Sonata although please don't quote me on that. (Also I just now realise combat mechanics all seems to use musical descriptors. I wonder if that's significant...?)

There's an auto-select button to fill all five slots that I'd been using but if it follows any logic I have no clue what it would be. I just let it fill the slots and forgot about it. After I read that was a bad idea I kicked out all my Echoes and hand-picked new sets for all my Resonators, making sure they got all the bonuses they were missing and that seemed to make a big difference too.

I had my new team set up, a team in which the character I'd been thinking of as me didn't even rate a place. I had everyone and their weapons upgraded as far as I could get them. I had all my Echoes in a row. I went out into the world and started picking fights with random mobs to see if I felt any tougher. 

Oh boy, did I!

The improvement was so major I thought I might as well go try the tough fight again right away. I ate some kebabs I'd made and drank some tea to buff up my team's attack power and health and in we went. And we fricken' wiped the floor with them! 

Here's how it went:

Before: Best run - half the mobs killed before the timer ran out.

After: All the mobs killed before the timer hit halfway.

You do the math. I'm an Eng. Lit. grad. I just tell stories.

As I said last time, one of the rewards for winning that fight is everything in the outside world suddenly gains about fifteen levels. (I gained five myself, just from all the XP I'd been storing away while I was stuck at UL 20.) I was wary of what a levelled-up world might mean for my fun but the new team handle the higher stuff about the same as the old team handled the lower, so it all worked out fine.

The other reward is slipping the lock on the next chapter of the MSQ plus a whole bunch of side quests that were waiting for my UL to go up before they'd trigger. Looks like I won't be short of stuff to do for quite a while.

For example, as soon as I dinged, Grandpa Jingzhu got in touch again, wanting Chixia and Rover to help him some more in his amorous pursuit of his elderly neighbor Linghan. We did and it all worked out about as well as could be hoped.

The whole thing also turned out to be a more nuanced, complex story than I was expecting. A very unusual one for a game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, all about aging and failing faculties and the way life stutters to an end. I do wish the translations were better sometimes. I'm not one hundred per cent sure I got all the implications. I think I did.

Either way, the meaning and the emotional impact of the quests, of which there's often a lot more than you'd expect, always comes through, even if some of the finer details get lost occasionally. And the quests can be packed with stuff so it's easy to miss things.

Case in point: that particular quest has a small sidebar about Chixia's real name and why she doesn't want anyone to use it because it's dorky. Her real name, when you learn it, is Chinese. I have no clue what would be embarassing about it but maybe to a Chinese person it would be obvious. I'm not even sure how you'd translate a joke like that so maybe it's asking too much to expect anyone to try.

Despite all that, the upshot is that the game is great, I'm loving it and now I can carry on with the story, which I was finding kinda interesting. Plus no doubt there'll be a million little stories along the way. 

And the little ones are usually the best. Just like Encore.