One of the worst parts of any gacha game with equipment is upgrading said equipment. In Wuthering Waves, “equipment” is replaced with Echoes, and leveling them up not only increases their base stats but also allows you to add more stats to them. You will, unfortunately, need to farm Echo EXP to get them up to speed, and there are only a few ways to do that.
How to Get Echo EXP in Wuthering Waves
Early on in your Wuthering Waves adventure, you’ll have several different sources of Echo EXP, and they’ll be fairly plentiful. The more you progress, explore, and level your Echoes, you’ll quickly find that there are only a few renewable sources of the EXP items you need, and access to them is very limited. Either way, I’ll list all the main ways to get your hands on Echo EXP items in the game as of the 1.0 update and will update as new sources appear.
World Exploration Chests
Sure, it’s not the fastest way to farm it, but most world exploration chests award a few Echo EXP items. There are hundreds and hundreds of world exploration chests, meaning if you’re judicious about what you spend them on, you can accrue an equally large sum of EXP items. Sadly, once you collect a chest, it’s collected for good. There is not and will never be a way to respawn chests out in the world. That the only real way to exhaust an entire region of its chests before new zones are added is to play for a few hours at least every few days, and likely much more, means you’ll probably always have at least some chests to open.
The Jinzhou Souvenir Store
As you open world exploration chests and complete other open-world activities, you’ll be rewarded with a few Wood-textured Shards. You spend these Shards at the Souvenir Store in Jinzhou, where you can buy up to 30 of them for six Shards a pop. That totals 180 Shards, so you’ll need to do a lot of exploring to afford the price, but you can only get the purple version that provides 8,000 EXP. And like chests, you can only buy a pile of 30 EXP items once from the Souvenir Store.
The Points Shop
If you plan to engage in the endgame content in Wuthering Waves, namely the Tower of Adversity and hologram bosses (to some extent), you can spend the tokens you get from both activities in the Points Shop in the in-game store. There, you can buy the purple, 8,000 Echo EXP items. The Simulation fight tokens, called Data Sets, are one-time spends. You can get 20 Echo EXP items, and then you’re done.
Tower of Adversity tokens, called Hazard Records, come from completing floors and earning crests in the Tower of Adversity endgame activity. The Hazard Zone, the highest difficulty version of the activity, is entirely renewable, refreshing its rewards every 20 days or so. And while you can only purchase up to 50 Echo EXP items per month, that’s 50 you wouldn’t otherwise have that you can get multiple times, provided you have the patience.
Tacet Fields
The second renewable source of Echo EXP in all of Wuthering Waves is the Tacet Field Challenges scattered about the game’s world. Completing one awards a handful of Echo EXP items, with higher difficulty versions awarding more and higher rarity ones. You’re honestly better off waiting to farm Tacet Fields until you reach Union Level 30, as you can earn the gold items from that point onward.
Unfortunately, Tacet Field costs Waveplates to actually get rewards from, and you get a maximum of 240 of the things every day. You can spend Crystal Solvent items to get that same 60 Waveplates, but Solvents are incredibly scarce, and unless you want to spend Asterite on Waveplates (please don’t), Echo EXP from Tacet Fields is an almost equally scarce resource.
Depths of the Illusive Realm
The rogue-like game mode in Wuthering Wavfes, Depths of the Illusive Realm offers a regular source of Echo EXP items, and in a fairly plentiful quantities. So long as you accrue enough Illusive Specimens by playing the activity, you can turn them in for EXP:
- 10 Premium Sealed Tube (yellow rarity) for 30 Illusive Specimen per unit. Maximum 10 units per cycle.
- 20 Advanced Sealed Tube (purple rarity) for 10 Illusive Specimen per Unit. Maximum 20 Units per cycle.
“Cycle” in this instance means the current phase cooldown, which you’ll see noted above each item. The Depths refreshes with at the very least new items in the shop, and there should also be additional characters to take through the mode, as well.
Those are the only four worthwhile sources of Echo EXP in Wuthering Waves right now, but I would be remiss not to mention how you can infuse leveled Echoes into other Echoes to avoid spending additional EXP items. You only get 80% of the EXP you spent on the leveled version, but if you have a collection of 4-star and below Echoes with at least a few upgrades in them, by the time you start farming for good 5-star Echoes, you can put those lower-rarity ones to good use.
Echo EXP Will Likely Get an Update
I should also mention that the 1.0 version of Wuthering Waves is not the form it will be in after a few months of updates. The map space available at launch is relatively small by open-world standards, let alone open-world gacha games, and I fully expect the map to expand and more activities and vendors to appear that award Echo EXP.
Additionally, Kuro Games has been very receptive to player feedback, adjusting rewards and mechanics to be slightly more favorable. There’s a non-zero chance that in a future patch, whether that’s with a major update or not, Echo EXP farming will likely become much more generous in Tacet Fields and wherever else you can get it. Also, more map space means more chests, so that’s the solution in the short term.
In the meantime, we’ve covered plenty of other Wuthering Waves topics in our WuWa guides hub, including the best Baizhi Echoes you can equip.
