ChangliBuild and Guide

Changli is a 5-star Fusion Sword Hybrid character who’s defined by her monstrous damage potential. She is the definition of a “Dual DPS” or “Dual Carry” type character, as she features damage multipliers somewhere between the various Hybrid and DPS categories characters in tiers close to hers. Characterized by her huge potential to abuse Swap-Cancels, possibly the most of any character in the game, she’s summarized by two words: skill factor. In this sense, she encapsulates the potential behind the combat mechanics of Wuthering Waves exceptionally accurately. However, as we’ll be able to explore in more detail throughout this review, she remains very much usable at her baseline damage floor, even as the only DPS on the team.

All of her abilities are essential to her kit and she wouldn’t work without all of them working together, but all of them revolve around the mechanics tied to her Forte Circuit and her Resonance Skill: Enflamement, and True Sight. 

Enflamement is the name given to her Forte stacks, which she holds up to 4 and can gain in 3 ways:

• Changli obtains 1 Enflamement using True Sight: Conquest;

• Changli obtains 1 Enflamement using True Sight: Charge;

• Changli obtains 4 Enflamement using her Ultimate (fully restoring her Forte bar).

Once her Forte bar is full, she can cast a special Heavy Attack: Flaming Sacrifice, during which she gains 40% DMG Reduction as it takes a small amount of time to cast, however it deals a ton of Resonance Skill DMG that ignores a portion of the enemy’s DEF via her second Inherent Skill. Therefore, it is very important to fill her Forte bar. The main idea is you want to fill it twice: once before your Ultimate, and once upon using it, so as to not waste any stacks you gain via True Sight to maximize your damage. Speaking of which, Changli enters True Sight in one of the four ways:

• When using her Resonance Skill;

• When using her Intro Skill;

• When using her fourth Basic Attack, on the ground or in mid-air (the mid-air variant will be unused).

All True Sight states last up to 12s and can be consumed within that time window.

She can consume True Sight one of two ways, which as a reminder make her gain 1 Forte stack:

• Using Basic Attack on the ground, after which she casts True Sight: Conquest (her forward dash & slash);

• Using Basic Attack in the air, after which she casts True Sight: Charge (her short phoenix transformation). 

Both of these variants are decently lengthy to cast, typically with True Sight: Conquest being the Swap-Cancellable variant (and also the strongest one).

Now, let’s discuss all of the ways she can access True Sight: starting with her Resonance Skill which takes a while to cast as Changli dashes in front of the enemy before doing several slashes in the air and plunging down. It holds up to 2 charges that restore one at a time every 12s. However, it does a noticeable amount of DMG and is her fastest way to access True Sight outside of her Intro Skill. The plunge makes her instantly grounded, meaning it is naturally followed up by True Sight: Conquest.

Speaking of her Intro Skill, she really appreciates using it as it is her single fastest way to access True Sight - only restriction being one of your characters needs to Outro into her in the first place. She’s as a result very greedy to consume other characters’ Outros as Double Introing into her is a very strong idea to speed up her rotations. With that being said, her Intro makes her immediately leap into the air, meaning it is naturally followed up by True Sight: Charge, making for a very quick Forte stack generation. If you’re going Single Intro style, she can plunge directly into her third Basic, meaning you can skip Basic 1 and 2 to generate the fourth Forte stack she’ll be missing before using your True Sight: Conquest then your Resonance Skills. However, if you’re going the Double Intro route, her Basic chain is not needed; True Sight: Charge is therefore very naturally cancelled by a Resonance Skill, to make her plunge down and immediately follow up with True Sight: Conquest for 2 quick Forte stacks.

Lastly, as mentioned prior, her fourth grounded Basic Attack is rarely used as the final way to gain a Forte stack, since she needs 4 total and has 2 Skill charges as well as 1 Intro (which most of the time will be used twice). It is most often accessed after an Intro Skill, since True Sight: Charge allows you to plunge directly into her third and fourth Basic Attacks to access True Sight quicker than doing the full chain. With that being said, the Basic Attack chain is entirely skippable if you are Double Introing into Changli, which is why this sequence of attacks is rarely used.

Her Mid-Air attacks will go entirely unused simply as no portion of it can be skipped via Intro, and they’re especially awkward and inconsistent against enemies that move around a lot or can attack you and interrupt the chain, meaning you’ll be following up into True Sight: Conquest on the ground. The moving and attacking target problems persist even on the ground; it’s simply a reduced issue, but a present one nonetheless, which is why a lot of players resort to Double Introing into Changli - we recommend this too for most players, as it makes her rotations a lot smoother! It’s also much more preferable for Quick-Swap enjoyers.

As for her Echo, it’ll in pretty much every case be used somewhere before her rotation starts, to smooth out the rough edges of her kit which is already difficult enough to maneuver around. So just use it somewhere while your Supports are busy setting up, where exactly it has little influence, ideally a Swap-Cancel window if you’re bothered - but it’s unnecessary.

Now that we finally explained ALL of her mechanics in detail, a typical rotation will have you use an Intro, then her third and fourth Basics, then 2 Skills, each of these steps followed by True Sight: Charge for Intros and True Sight: Conquest for the rest. If you’re using 2 Intros, the Basic chain is skipped. Her Echo is used anywhere prior to her first Intro. After all of those are complete, Changli can then use her Forte Heavy Attack, then her Ultimate, then her Forte Heavy Attack once again - dealing MASSIVE amounts of damage, before finally swapping back to your supports to start another cycle.

Now, to dive into Changli’s main issue: her skill factor. If you didn’t realize by now: she has a TON of long, Swap-Cancellable animations that her entire kit revolves around, be it her Forte Heavy Attacks, her Resonance Skill, or her True Sight: Conquest(especially so), and even her Echo, are all abilities that can be swapped in and out of. It’s entirely possible and in fact especially strong to use her Echo, Swap-Out, come back to Intro into Changli, use your Resonance Skill and immediately Swap-Out, come back to her a second after, use your True Sight: Conquest, Swap-Out, come back to her a second after, then if you have full Forte stacks you can use her Forte Heavy attack, Swap-Out, come back a second after, use your Ultimate then your Forte Heavy once again and Swap-Out once more.

If this didn’t sound complicated enough to you, nothing’s realistically going to stop you with this character. However, remember this: you’re most of the time only going to Intro to her, meaning you’ll have to adapt your other characters’ rotations accordingly to not have Intros included; you’ll have to do a ton of Swap-Ins and Swap-Outs during which you need to manage what abilities of your other characters are most effective to use and execute them within tight time window. This doesn’t even account for misinputs on Changli herself and assumes that the enemy isn’t hitting you at all nor trying to interrupt your attack sequence.

And lastly, this doesn’t raise the question of having to build two characters to the level of a Main DPS in order to make the most use out of her Swap-Cancel, Dual Carry playstyle, something that doesn’t apply to Hypercarries, making Changli resource-unfriendly.

If we discouraged you, most likely a casual reader, or even an experienced reader maybe, from playing this character optimally, you’ll not only save yourself an impending case of arthritis, but also a lot of potential headaches trying to wrap around the entirety of this character’s Swap-Cancel windows. At most stick to the key Swap-Cancels being her True Sight: Conquests, and that’s it. Either that, or forfeit them altogether. And forfeiting Swap-Cancels altogether is how we recommend most people play her! She’s actually very viable that way, thanks to the huge multipliers of her Ultimate and her Forte Heavies.

Simply use her no Swap-Cancel style, play her in a team with someone like Zhezhi for the Resonance Skill DMG buffing, or someone like Yangyang for the fast Concerto rotations, and that’s all you need to make good use out of her. Obviously she won’t perform like an absolute top tier the way she would if you Swap-Cancel her literally every attack, but she’ll perform fine enough to clear endgame content, and realistically, that’s all you need to have her do.

To discuss her position in the meta, it has pretty much already been discussed enough in this review, however it sums up entirely to skill factor. Changli, at an optimal level, goes with any DPS except maybe Jiyan and Camellya (even then, those can work), but especially with someone like Xiangli Yao, she’ll Quick-Swap enemies into oblivion by literally never staying on the field for more than a second (and that’s when she’s busy using her Intro Skill), and you’ll clear pretty much anything way faster than you ever needed to. If you can’t do that to perfection though? She falls off drastically in performance. It’s to a point it’s most recommendable to simply run her in a Hypercarry playstyle where she’s doing most of the damage - either with Zhezhi to buff her, restore Energy and do some good off-field damage, or with Yangyang to buff her slightly less, Double Intro very smoothly, restore Energy and be able to use Changli’s most important Swap-Cancel windows while retaining acceptable damage. 

Note that this Hypercarry style is how we recommend pretty much all of our readers to use Changli, we can’t highlight enough how much this character’s performance goes from top tier to acceptable tier if you aren’t executing her Swap-Cancels properly. So just run her as the good Main DPS she can be for absolutely anyone.

In conclusion, Changli is a Hybrid character who can use Swap-Cancels a ton. It’s simply not a playstyle most players are going to access or even want to access in the first place, considering how high Changli’s skill factor is compared to anyone else in the Wuthering Waves character cast. She’s one of the strongest characters in the game at an optimal level, far ahead of most competition, but for the majority of the playerbase she’ll be a fine Main DPS character that’s plenty sufficient to clear endgame content, and one who doesn’t require Swap-Cancels to do as much