LupaBuild and Guide

Lupa is a 5-star Fusion Broadblade character whose primary role is to buff other Fusion characters in your team, while dealing some good personal damage of her own. Featuring an extended rotation time and buffs with an equally extended duration compared to most characters out there, Lupa excels in mono Fusion teams where doing full team rotations is lengthy but where the team’s damage potential is just as high to compensate.

Lupa’s kit is frankly very straightforward and there are lots of unnecessary details present in her kit, notably in her Basic Attacks, and her Resonance Skills are rarely used as well. In an effort to keep this review as short as possible, we won’t detail all of the moves that Lupa can perform, and instead focus on the elements used in practice during her rotations.

The most important element of Lupa’s kit is her Resonance Liberation — that is, her Ultimate. It costs a reasonable 125 Energy and operates on a 20-second cooldown, so Lupa will never have cooldown issues and reaching her Energy thresholds requires some Energy Regen, but not a massive amount like most 3rd slot teammates in the meta.

When Lupa casts her Ultimate, it deals Fusion DMG in a good AoE and it directly interacts with her 2 Forte Circuit resources: “Wolfaith” and “Wolflame”. Let’s list their properties and what they’re used for:

• Lupa can store up to 100 Wolflame and 2 Wolfaith. Both are indicated by her Forte gauge, separated in two halves: Wolfaith is represented by a couple of wolf heads generated after certain actions, and Wolflame is the red bar that progressively fills up after certain actions;

• Wolflame is restored after using Basic Attacks, Skill and Ultimate. Wolflame is fully restored when casting Ultimate and that’s all that really matters for Lupa;

• Wolfaith is restored after using certain attacks that also consume 50 Wolflame (one half of her bar), including Lupa’s Enhanced Mid-Air Attack and Lupa’s Enhanced Heavy Attacks;

• Wolfaith stacks last for 10s and restore 50 Wolflame if they expire after that duration — in other words, 1 Wolfaith is considered as replacing 50 Wolflame when generated;

• 2 Wolfaith can be consumed to cast Lupa’s Forte Enhanced Skills, generating a lot of damage, Concerto Energy and activating her off-field attack.

Now, finally going back to Lupa’s Ultimate. It generates 100 Wolfaith, and it makes the party enter the “Pack Hunt” and “Glory” states for 35s.

• During Pack Hunt, all characters in the team get 6% increased ATK against all targets and 10% Fusion DMG Bonus against all Overlord and Calamity-class targets (a.k.a 4-cost Echoes, bosses).

• Pack Hunt can be enhanced in 2 ways: by casting another character’s Intro skill, an extra 6% ATK is granted, up to 18% (2 Intros). By having a team full of Fusion characters (3 characters), the 10% DMG Bonus effect increases to 20%.

• If Pack Hunt is fully enhanced by using 2 Intro Skills, it becomes “Wild Hunt” which allows Lupa to cast an Enhanced Intro Skill called “Nowhere to Run” which deals a big burst of damage at the cost of removing the effects of Pack Hunt and Glory.

• During Glory, attacks of all characters in the team ignore 3% of the target’s Fusion RES, enhanced to 6% with 2 Fusion characters then 15% with 3 Fusion characters (full team).

Due to the nature of their 35s duration, Pack Hunt and Glory can be considered as permanently active since full team rotations will never last longer. However, they will be removed when Lupa enters her next rotation due to casting Nowhere to Run.

Using Ultimate also allows Lupa to cast a special Skill called “Foebreaker” by pressing Basic Attack or Skill shortly after her Ultimate cast. This sends her up in the air and deals a good chunk of damage, setting herself up nicely for her Mid-Air Attacks.

Finally, Foebreaker also grants herself the “Burning Matchpoint” state, which increases Wolflame generation on Basic Attacks by 500% (useless since Lupa gains full Wolflame from casting Ultimate anyway). More importantly though, being in this state allows her to cast an Enhanced Forte Skill (we detail this later).

Lupa’s Mid-Air attacks are nothing special, but since we have more than 50 Wolflame from casting her Ultimate beforehand, her third Mid-Air Attack becomes “Firestrike” which has increased Interruption Resistance and it allows her to follow up with an Enhanced Heavy Attack called “Wolf’s Claw” by pressing Basic Attack, during which she also has increased Interruption Resistance. Lupa has another Enhanced Heavy Attack called “Wolf’s Gnawing” but since it has the same perks as Wolf’s Claw while being slower and only usable on the ground, it’s not used in her rotations.

Anyway, using Firestrike and Wolf’s Claw gave us 2 Wolfaith, so now her Forte Enhanced Skill, “Dance With the Wolf - Climax”, can be cast. This consumes all Wolfaith and removes Burning Matchpoint. Another version exists if Lupa is not in Burning Matchpoint which deals less damage, but because that state lasts forever it never sees use (it could only be used on the second cast of the skill, but onfielding Lupa is not a good playstyle due to her significant lack of damage compared to a character like Brant. She has good personal damage, just not enough to justify taking longer than the field time she takes currently).

Doing this skill will generally end her rotation as it will generate enough Concerto Energy to activate her Outro, which amplifies the next character’s Basic Attack DMG by 25% and Fusion DMG by 20%, which ends upon swap.

It should be noted however, that without the Concerto Energy from casting an Intro Skill, Lupa will lack Concerto Energy to end her rotation after her Forte Enhanced Skill. In this case where Lupa needs extra Concerto due to not having an Intro available (commonly in the Opener rotation of teams where she’s the 3rd slot teammate), casting 1 of her 2 base Resonance Skills is perfectly acceptable. However, you need to make sure the first Skill hits the target before casting the Ultimate.

Indeed, Lupa has access to 2 Resonance Skills, which can be done one after the other. The first skill will apply a mark on the target which allows her second skill to gain a 50% increased multiplier against the affected targets. Other than that, they’re simple ticks of damage which aren’t used if an Intro is available.

Finally, Lupa can perform a pseudo-coordinated attack (not considered as one, but similar in the sense it happens automatically off-field) whenever other characters cast their Ultimate within 8s after using her Forte Enhanced Skill (during which she doesn’t disappear from the field even when swapping). Due to the nature of Lupa’s Outro expiring on swap, outside of Quickswap teams only 1 instance of this attack will be activated, but 2 is possible via Quickswapping. This attack is called “Set The Arena Ablaze”.

Now that all of the useful parts of her kit have been explained, let’s give a proper summary of the buffs granted by her rotations (for the rotations themselves, refer to our Gameplay & Teams page):

All buffs apply to the full team.

• From Pack Hunt: 6% ATK, enhanced to 12% then 18% after 1-2 Intros, and 10-20% Fusion DMG Bonus against Calamity and Overlord class targets (depending on the amount of Fusion characters in the team), lasting 35s

• From Glory: 3-6-15% Fusion RES Ignore (depending on the amount of Fusion characters in the team), lasting 35s

• From Flaming Clawprint (signature Echo Set): 15% Fusion DMG Bonus when casting Ultimate, lasting 35s

• From Signature Weapon if present: 24% Fusion DMG Bonus when casting Heavy Attack, lasting 30s.

You’ll notice this is a lot of buffs — indeed, Lupa’s personal damage is acceptable, but nothing impressive compared to proper Hybrids like Cantarella, Brant or Yinlin in spite of her field time requirements. Where Lupa truly shines is in the 3rd slot to Fusion teams, ideally buffing Fusion-Basic damage dealers like Brant or Encore and her own damage being buffable by Changli (mostly being Fusion-Liberation DMG).

As a result, a new Mono Fusion team archetype is created by Lupa’s presence in the team, with team concepts such as Changli-Brant-Lupa, where all 3 characters buff each other via their Outros and Lupa handles the team-wide buffing while the other 2 handle the heavy lifting in terms of damage (with a bit of Lupa’s help too).

This position in the meta gives Lupa a good niche, additionally being perfectly usable with Encore and a general Support like Shorekeeper or Verina. While generally speaking this use wouldn’t be recommended due to the nature of Lupa’s kit favouring the presence of all 3 teammates being Fusion, in the case of Encore, by nature of her very short rotation often presenting downtime which needs to be filled in for the 3rd teammate’s Ultimate & Echo cooldowns to catch up, it ends up working nicely in favour of a duo with Lupa. Such a team is the only current case of Lupa separating herself from the Mono Fusion archetype. 

Nonetheless, it gives her a brilliant F2P team in the form of Encore-Lupa-Verina, getting even better with Shorekeeper instead of Verina, making her all the more accessible in terms of use cases. However, it’s worth noting this position is contested by Sanhua who also buffs Basic Attack DMG on her Outro, but Lupa while displaying similar performance is undeniably the stronger pick due to her increased buff strength and personal damage which would usually come at the cost of field time, but in that specific team this downside is close to nonexistent.

In conclusion, Lupa is fantastic both with F2P and higher-invested teammates. While her primary downside is her need to expand on damage and her best use case is in Mono Fusion teams with 3 damage dealers including herself, which comes at the cost of a lot of resources, this downside is mitigated by her duo with Encore which works surprisingly well even outside of Mono Fusion team archetypes. In such Mono Fusion teams however, Lupa is a brilliant addition as she brings a brand new archetype into Wuthering Waves, performing equally as well to some of the top tier contenders of the current meta, making her a fantastic character overall.