Last updated: 21/02/2025
Please keep in mind Wuthering Waves is a skill-based game and each character has a different playstyle, difficulty level and even special tricks and combos. Wuthering Waves is also a team based game and it’s only by combining both these factors to the highest level a character can reach optimal performance. Our Wuthering Waves tier lists were created with the help of various players who shared their thoughts about Wuthering Waves characters and their performance with us in both TOA and WW modes. If you want to learn more about the characters and why we rated them in that way, check their profiles - in the Review tab we have posted short reviews and pros & cons.
We offer separate tier lists that assess characters based on different criteria due to the diversity of character traits and abilities different contents require in order to beat them. As a result, we recommend you to check all of the tier lists we offer before concluding on a character’s full position in the game’s meta. The better they perform in a variety of gamemodes, the more valuable they are overall.
Important! Characters are ordered alphabetically within a tier.
This tier list assesses characters based on their combat potential in one of Wuthering Waves’ most challenging endgame contents, Tower of Adversity (ToA). This tier list assesses their performance in the Hazard Zone that resets periodically, as other zones do not reset. ToA is a mode similar to Genshin Impact’s Spiral Abyss or Honkai Star Rail’s Memory of Chaos and requires 3 teams of 3 equipped with strong Echoes and good Weapons. This mode offers a reasonable mix of Boss encounters (single target) and Elite packs (2-3 targets) along with rare AoE scenarios (5+ targets), allowing different categories of characters to find a niche. However, a bias towards single-target is present, as the most challenging floors are centered around beating Boss enemies.
This tier list assesses characters based on their combat potential in another challenging endgame content, Whimpering Wastes (WhiWa). This gamemode, in a similar fashion to Honkai Star Rail’s Pure Fiction, heavily favours a character’s ability to deal with several waves of smaller, lower health enemies quickly (AoE). It requires 2 teams of 3 equipped with strong Echoes and good Weapons. AoE characters are very strongly favoured over single-target ones, almost always creating a big discrepancy between the two archetypes.
As an action-combat game, Wuthering Waves offers many combat mechanics for players to exploit - some of which are not easily executed, but can boost character performance drastically. Swap Cancelling is an example of such a mechanic, allowing you to switch out a character mid-attack to a new character while still fully executing the move you interrupted, essentially allowing you to attack with two characters at once. Such techniques won’t be for everyone, but a tier list must assess characters based on their optimal performance in optimal teams. With that being said, in order for our tier list to assess the performance of characters to the majority of the playerbase, we will only consider the easiest and most powerful swap cancels, such as Encore’s Cosmos Rupture, the Sentry Construct Echo skill, and other similarly lengthy animations. The most complex swap cancels with short time windows, such as Calcharo’s Death Messengers or Changli’s True Sights, will only be considered for certain character tags (Cancel, Expert) and will not affect characters’ positions on the tier list.
Buffs and debuffs that vary periodically are not considered, but may impact short-term unit performance.
We compare characters within their role - so DPS are compared to other DPS for example, and their ratings are adjusted based on their performance within the role. Please do not compare characters between roles, as their ratings are based on entirely separate criteria.
DPS
DPS characters focus on being your main damage dealers and the rest of your team is built to synergize with them and make them stronger. Stacking Echo set bonuses, character kits and Outro Amplify bonuses together to power up a DPS is the goal of a lot of meta teams. Some exceptions exist as certain DPS characters can be played with multiple characters of the same role, but they’ll generally aim to occupy the most of your team’s on-field time, sometimes even up to 14 or 15 seconds. This time can vary depending on the character, but in all cases they’ll have the goal of making the most of your team’s buffs to deal the majority of your team’s damage.
Criteria that impact ratings for DPS:
Hybrid
Hybrid characters directly support your damage dealer of choice, often with incredibly synergistic kits, specialized Outro buffs like “Amplify” multipliers or other beneficial effects, or even by being a great source of secondary damage. They’re often built to complete their rotation right before your DPS performs their full damage combo, as their buffs may, in some cases, expire when switching. Hybrid characters, fittingly to their name, can often execute a variety of roles and offer offensive, supportive or sustaining abilities, if not all three at the same time. As a result of this, they fill the widest variety of niches and playstyles. They typically want to execute their combos in the shortest time windows possible in order to generate Concerto and Resonance Energy quickly to get their buffs up for your main damage dealer in the shortest amount of time. Certain Hybrid characters may be especially desired to deal additional damage in concordance with your main damage dealer, but in any case they’ll usually want to swap in and out of the field quickly.
Criteria that impact ratings for Hybrid:
Support
Support characters must have the capability to provide benefit to the team regardless of the order in which they are switched in, so as to not conflict with the majority of Hybrid characters’ Outro buffs, that tend to solely buff the next character to enter. Their primary utility is to provide team-wide buffing, but they may often be desirable by providing defensive and sustaining/healing capabilities as well; all of this in the shortest field time possible, as they typically aren’t personally responsible for the majority of their team’s damage, in order to maximize the potential of your DPS and Hybrid characters.
Criteria that impact ratings for Supports:
The criteria above this section apply to all our tier lists; however, each unique tier list rates characters based on their average value in the specific mode it represents. Hence, the higher a character is rated on a given tier list, the greater their power and usability in the mode, making accessing all rewards easier for players. We do not consider going for the highest scores or lowest time, only the ability to easily max out rewards. However, some criteria may be specific to certain character archetypes, or within certain modes altogether, depending on the tier list you view. They are as follows:
Additional specific criteria may be developed according to game updates/meta shifts.
Tags represent the most defining features of a character's kit.
Meta Lines categorize each section of the tier list into a power bracket. Here are the three brackets:
With the introduction of the new Whimpering Wastes endgame mode, a ton of changes were necessary to the tier list. We made a brand new one, separate from the Tower of Adversity tier list - we recommend you check both tier lists out to assess a character's full value!
We took the opportunity to fully revise our entire criteria and information about the tier lists from scratch. If you want the full details of how we evaluate characters for each tier list, you're welcome to read those sections for precisions as well. As the Whimpering Wastes tier list is brand new, a changelog detailing every character's ranking won't be provided — refer to our criteria to understand everyone's rankings on that list, the team tried their absolute best to make them as comprehensive as possible.
By the way, we added meta lines, you might be familiar with them from a lot of our other tier lists — they don't change anything to character rankings or tier placements, but they do clarify the meanings of the tiers. As usual, precisions can be found in our information sections above this changelog. With that said, let's get into what's changed for the Tower of Adversity tier list, we have lots of changes there. Special thanks to Saintontas , E-thin and our Discord members for the feedback!
List of changes (ToA):
List of changes:
We had a lot of changes planned for our 2.1 Tier List update. Some changes went through to go along with Phoebe's release. When it comes to her and her teammates, we are fairly certain of our placements, so her pull value should remain unchanged from what is seen in this new edition of our Tier List. However, we face a new problem: two thirds of our DPS category is in our 2 top tiers, everyone else is in the 2 bottom tiers. We noticed a clear discrepancy in power — and some characters are inferior to others within their current tiers, which we'll explain below. This made us want to consider cascading the tier list down: as a result, we added a Watchlist icon. Everyone who's on our current watchlist is suspected to drop by one tier. These changes may go through for some characters, or it won't for others. We ask for your feedback and will do extensive testing to decide how we proceed about the Tier List, all updates going through with Brant's release on the second half of Patch 2.1.
We appreciate anyone who sends feedback our way, make sure to join our Discord to do so!
List of changes:
List of changes:
Tier List (Tower of Adversity)
You're currently viewing the Tower of Adversity tier list. It shows how the character performs in the Tower of Adversity endgame mode.Use the switcher below to view a different tier list.
Tower of Adversity
Whimpering Wastes
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