Limited banners come and go, usually with the latest best-in-slot character that powercreeps the rest of the roster, but standard banners are forever. No matter when you come into Wuthering Waves, the standard banner will be there with a large collection of 4 and 5-star characters to choose from. Let’s discuss the standard banner and why “standard” doesn’t mean “bad.”
How the Standard Banner Works in Wuthering Waves
So, full disclosure: there are technically three standard banners in Wuthering Waves. The one you’ll want to pull on first is called Utterance of Marvels, also known as the Novice Convene, where you can spend 10 Lustrous Tides for the price of eight up to five times and get a guaranteed standard banner 5-star character. Put another way, you spend 50 Lustrous Tides for the price of 40, but if you get the 5-star early (a 0.8% chance, but still a chance), you can shove the rest into the other two standards.
The second standard banner appears after you’ve got the Novice Convene 5-star and allows you to guarantee one of the other current 5-stars in standard. You’ll need to gather and spend up to 80 Lustrous Tide to do so, as 80 is the hard pity where the game will just give you the character for spending so many resources.
The third and permanent standard banner works like every other standard banner you’re probably familiar with. For up to every 80 Lustrous Tide you spend, you’ll get a random 5-star character, with a base 0.8% chance at a 5-star for every pull, and you will be guaranteed a 4-star character or weapon every ten pulls. On average, you’ll get a 5-star before pity at a 1.8% rate, though if you search YouTube enough, there are plenty of people who’ve managed double and triple 5-stars. It’s sickening.
As of launch, the following 5-star characters are available on the standard banner:
- Verina
- Encore
- Calcharo
- Lingyang
- Jianxin
Between them, the general consensus is you want to pull Verina on your guaranteed 5-star banner, as she’s relatively future-proof in the same way Bailu was for the first few months of Honkai: Star Rail. And Verina also has massive damage buffs to your team on top of her healing capabilities, making her even more valuable.
The standard banner also offers every 4-star character available from any source, including characters the game gives you, and characters keyed to limited event banners. Wuthering Waves might also follow in Genshin‘s footsteps and add the odd 5-star to the standard banner as well. You’ll also find every 4-star and 3-star weapon on all three standard banners as something of an olive branch for not getting the 5-star you wanted.
One final note: when you pull on the limited event character banner, you aren’t guaranteed the limited event character. Instead, you have a roughly 50% chance to get them, and if you lose that coin flip, you will get a character from the standard banner instead. Losing a 50/50 is one of the most disheartening things in gacha gaming, but it will happen to every player at least a few times before the game’s first year is out.
In any event, those are the basics of the standard banner in Wuthering Waves. It’s straightforward stuff if you’re a veteran gacha gamer but a bit more complex if you’re a brand new victim player of these games. For more coverage, check out our Wuthering Waves guides hub.
