Wuthering Waves tier list: the CN community's V3.5 rankings, all three modes

By DayOneFix Editorial · August 15, 2026

Below is the Chinese community’s V3.5 second-half tier list, published by Bilibili creator @轩儿Xuaner, transcribed in full and mapped to the game’s English Resonator names.

Wuthering Waves official screenshot: a character standing at the centre of a large glowing blue ritual circle — Official Steam screenshot · © Kuro Games

Two things this source states that English tier lists usually do not:

Investment baseline: 5-stars are rated at 0 resonance chains + signature weapon. 4-stars at 6 chains.

A blue tag above a portrait means that character only reaches that tier when paired with the named teammate. Those dependencies are marked below as (needs X).

There are three charts, not one, because the three endgame modes reward different things — and characters move by whole tiers between them. Luuk Herssen is T0 in Tower of Adversity and T2 in Whimpering Wastes. That single fact is why a generic “Wuthering Waves tier list” is an average of three different questions.

1. Tower of Adversity

	Main DPS	Sub DPS	Support
T0	AemeathSigrikaHiyukiLuuk HerssenYangyang: Xuanling	LynaeLucillaQiuyuanDeniaLupaChisa	ShorekeeperMornyeChisaSuisuinew
T0.5	AugustaCartethyianeeds CiacconaGalbrenaIunoPhrolovaLucyneeds Rebecca	IunoCiacconaRebecca	Verina
T1	Zanineeds PhoebeCarlotta	Brant	—
T2	JiyanPhoebeBrant	CantarellaChangliPhoebeneeds ZaniMortefi	BulingAero Rover
T3	CamellyaJinhsiXiangli YaoEncore	ZhezhiRocciaSanhua	Spectro Rover
T4	Havoc Rover	YinlinDanjinJianxinConductive Rover	Baizhi
T5	LingyangCalcharoChixiaDanjin	LumiAaltoTaoqiYangyang	YouhuYuanwu

2. Whimpering Wastes

Note how sharply this diverges from the chart above.

	Main DPS	Sub DPS	Support
T0	PhrolovaSigrikaHiyuki	QiuyuanLucillaDenia	Chisa
T0.5	Aemeathneeds Denia	LupaChisa	ShorekeeperSuisuinew
T1	AugustaAemeathGalbrenaYangyang: Xuanling	Lynae	MornyeVerina
T2	Cartethyianeeds CiacconaJiyanLuuk Herssenneeds Denia	CiacconaCantarellaneeds PhrolovaIunoRebecca	Buling
T3	Zanineeds PhoebeCamellyaPhoebeneeds CiacconaLucyneeds Rebecca	MortefiPhoebeneeds ZaniChangliBrant	Aero RoverSpectro Rover
T4	IunoBrantXiangli YaoCarlottaJinhsi	DanjinYinlinZhezhiRocciaSanhua	Baizhi
T5	CalcharoHavoc RoverEncoreChixiaLingyang	JianxinYangyangAaltoTaoqiLumiConductive Rover	YouhuYuanwu

3. Ragunna matrix

	Main DPS	Sub DPS	Support
T0	AemeathSigrikaHiyukiYangyang: XuanlingnewLucyneeds RebeccaLuuk Herssen	LynaeQiuyuanLucillaDeniaLupa ↑Chisa	ShorekeeperMornyeChisaSuisuinew
T0.5	Cartethyianeeds CiacconaAugustaIunoGalbrenaPhrolovaZanineeds Phoebe	IunoCiacconaRebecca ↑	Verina
T1	CarlottaCamellya	BrantChangliPhoebeneeds Zani	Aero RoverBuling ↑
T2	JiyanPhoebeBrantJinhsi	CantarellaZhezhiSanhuaMortefi	Spectro Rover
T3	Havoc RoverXiangli Yao	RocciaYinlin	Baizhi
T4	Encore	JianxinDanjinConductive Rovernew	—
T5	LingyangDanjinChixiaCalcharo	LumiAaltoTaoqiYangyang	YouhuYuanwu

↑ marks a character the source raised this version.

What moved this version, and why

From the creator’s own changelog, which is more useful than the tiers alone:

Suisui — new, T0 in Tower and the matrix, T0.5 in Wastes. Rated for easing a healer shortage in effect-based teams.
Chisa — raised to T0 in Wastes. “Still extremely busy as a healer; her importance goes without saying.”
Rebecca — Tower T1 → T0.5, Wastes T3 → T2, largely because she is the best partner for Yangyang: Xuanling after Chisa.
Lupa — restored to her earlier tier, on the strength of her universality in fusion teams.
Conductive Rover — arrives low: built to serve electro-effects, but no matching main DPS exists yet.

And the creator’s warning about the list’s own shape:

“T0 and T0.5 are getting crowded. Expect them to be compressed over the next version or two… New characters will always be stronger; the ones that hold value are sub-DPS and healers with unique mechanics. Fill the gaps in your existing teams first, then pull new characters.”

Where this list came from

This is a transcription of a named community source, not our own ranking — we have not played these characters and would not pretend to rank them. Chinese names are mapped to the English Resonator roster published for the game. If you want the reasoning behind why any two tier lists disagree this much, that is the rest of this page.

Why the lists disagree with each other

Search for a Wuthering Waves tier list and you get a dozen of them, disagreeing with each other, none explaining why.

They disagree because “strong” is not one question. Chinese community tier lists get argued over in real time — the comment tracks on the big ranking videos are people contesting individual placements — and those arguments expose the axes that English tier lists collapse into a single letter.

Here are the five, and what to do with them.

1. Raw power, or value for what you spend?

The single most useful line in that Chinese discussion, thrown at a ranking someone disputed:

“On raw power she really is T1. T0 is the one that factors in value for money.”

That is the whole ambiguity. A tier list built on ceiling performance and a tier list built on return-per-pull produce different orders, and almost nobody says which one they built. A character who needs their signature weapon and several duplicate pulls to hit their ceiling can top a power list and sit mid-table on a value list — without either being wrong.

What to do: before trusting a list, work out which question it answers. If it never mentions investment, it is a power list, and your pull budget is not part of its maths.

2. Resonance chain level changes the answer

The second recurring argument is that rankings quietly assume an investment level:

“The ones getting burned are low-chain. Your fully-chained one is unaffected.”

A character can be genuinely mediocre at base and excellent several chains deep, or the reverse — strong immediately and barely improved by duplicates. A single letter grade hides this completely, and it is the difference between “worth pulling” and “worth pulling again”.

What to do: treat any tier placement as a claim about a specific chain level. If a list does not state one, it is probably describing base, which is the right assumption for most players and the wrong one if you already own the character.

3. Which endgame mode?

This is where placements move by whole tiers within one argument. Chinese players contest the same character up in one mode and down in another — one comment asks for a character to be dropped a tier in one endgame mode and raised a tier in the other.

Wuthering Waves’ endgame content does not reward one profile. Sustained single-target damage, burst against a wave of adds, and survivability under a specific mechanic are different jobs, and characters are not equally good at all three.

What to do: a single global tier list is an average across modes. If you are stuck on one specific piece of content, an average is the wrong tool.

4. Theory numbers versus what you actually land

A recurring defence of an underrated character:

“That team’s numbers are not outstanding, but in real runs it loses very little damage — it lands close to theoretical.”

Theorycrafted damage assumes a rotation executed cleanly. Some characters are far more forgiving of mistakes, hold their damage while dodging, and land near their theoretical output in a real fight. Others look better on paper and lose a chunk of it the moment you are reacting instead of executing.

What to do: if you are not drilling rotations, weight the forgiving character higher than any list will.

5. Sometimes “skip” is about your wallet, not the character

The clearest example: a widely shared Chinese video asks why everyone is recommending you skip a specific new character — is she a deliberately weak release? The top reply is not about her power at all:

“Did you not look at how many characters came out in the previous version?”

Skip advice after a dense run of banners is budget management. It says nothing about the character, and it is often the same creators who rated her highly.

There is also pushback on treating any of this as gospel — one comment notes that in the hands of absolutists, even a well-regarded character “becomes a discard, and listening to too much of that only misleads you.”

The case that shows all of it: Yangyang Xuanling

The 3.5 headliner is the cleanest demonstration, because Chinese coverage rated her three different ways in the same week:

“The strongest all-rounder — peak feel and peak numbers” — one of the most-watched takes on her
“At base she has the best numbers, but the mechanic is unremarkable and the resonance chains are ordinary value” — a second, from a final review
“Why is everyone recommending skipping her?” — a third, whose own answer is about how many characters shipped in the preceding version

All three can be true at once, and they are, because they answer different questions: ceiling, value-per-chain, and budget. There is also a dependency thread — players asking whether she works without a specific support — which is a fourth question again, and the one a letter grade is least able to carry.

What we do not publish, and why

We do not publish our own S/A/B rankings for this game. A tier list is a judgement that requires playing the characters, building them, and running endgame content with them. We have not done that, and a ranking assembled by reading other rankings is the exact thing this page is warning you about.

What we can do is report the arguments accurately, with sources, and name the axes so a list you find elsewhere becomes readable. When a placement is contested in the Chinese community, that disagreement is usually more informative than either side’s grade.

Sources

The quoted arguments are from viewer comment tracks on high-view Chinese ranking and pull-planning videos for version 3.5, collected 15 August 2026, and are translated rather than paraphrased where quoted. Character names follow the game’s own English naming; Chinese coverage discusses several 3.5-era characters whose official English names we could not verify, and those are deliberately described rather than named.