Why You Should Save 3-Star Equipment in Wuthering Waves

The endgame of every gacha game, Wuthering Waves included, is all about getting the best 5-star gear —characters, weapons, and equipment — then taking that equipment into the hardest content. But what if I told you that all those “useless” 3-star weapons have actual value you might only come to appreciate later? Here’s why you should save 3-star weapons in Wuthering Waves.

The Importance of Save 3-Star Weapons in Gacha Games

In Wuthering Waves, as with any gacha game, the 3-star blue weapons are usually only good for the first few dozen hours of the game when you’re leveling characters and slowly collecting better gear. However, we have the two biggest gacha games in the world, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, to thank for showing how useful even the humble 3-star can be.

In Genshin, for instance, the best weapon for the new character Arlecchino was undoubtedly her signature, but if you didn’t have the resources to pull both her and her weapon, the best free-to-play option was a 3-star. The problem? White Tassle, the 3-star in question, was locked to the Liyue region, meaning if you’d 100% cleared it and then used all your White Tassle polearms as EXP fodder, you were plum outta luck.

And in Honkai: Star Rail, the character Ruan Mei is, has been, and will be one of the most valuable 5-star limited character pick-ups in the game, especially with the evolving Super Break meta. Know what one of her best Light Cones is? A humble 3-star called Meshing Cogs. No, it’s not her best-in-slot, nor does it do as much as even the 4-star options, but in the absence of anything better, it’s a perfectly usable Light Cone that will serve you well deep into the endgame.

Which brings us to Wuthering Waves. Not only is the character roster still very small (the game did just come out), but the number of weapons to choose from is also fairly small. That means it’s the perfect time to collect a nice pile of 3-star weapons and use them to level your teams. Hell, use them in Tower of Adversity if you don’t have anything better.

Wuthering Waves Players Will Benefit From 3-Star Weapons

More importantly, the more 3-star weapons you collect, the more you can Synotize them, increasing one weapon’s overall rank and stats by infusing it with additional copies of itself. It takes four such copies to reach S5, but doing so is a modest but still worthwhile boost to the weapon’s stats. And if you plan to pull for lots of characters in Wuthering Waves, you’re liable to get more than a few copies of pretty much every blue 3-star weapon in the game.

That’s another reason to keep 5-star weapons around. While you don’t need multiple S5 versions, especially as more and better 4-stars come to the game, but getting fully Syntonized 4-stars is enough of a pain, to say nothing of limited 5-star weapons. And if Wuthering Waves follows Genshin and HSR‘s leads, there will undoubtedly be at least a few characters down the line who can benefit from a 3-star.

Of course, if you really want to dive down the Wuthering Waves rabbit hole, you could keep a few 3-star weapons around to do challenge fights. That is, take on the hardest fights in the game with off-meta or lower-powered gear. I don’t recommend it for most players, but if you either don’t have the best weapons in the game or just like the look of the 3-stars, don’t let someone like me stop you from using them.

Those are my many reasons why you shouldn’t immediately delete all your 3-star weapons in Wuthering Waves. For much more on the game, check out our Wuthering Waves guides hub, including a piece on the best Echoes for Jianxin.