Building a character up in Wuthering Waves requires farming for powerful echoes, XP materials, Ascension materials, skill level-up materials, and a lot more. Almost everything related to this process ends with players earning Union XP. The gameplay loop is meant to naturally increase the world level as players increase their character levels. However, players can easily end up in a situation where, despite earning a lot of Union XP and increasing their world rank, their characters lack the necessary DPS to take down even regular enemies in a reasonable amount of time.

This is because at every 10 Union levels, the world level—called SOL3 Phase Rank—goes up by 1, increasing the levels of all enemies and content in the game by 10. While typically, this is great as it keeps things from getting stale, it can get especially frustrating if players don't have easy ways of dealing with these high-level enemies. Luckily, Wuthering Waves allows players to lower the difficulty fairly easily. Here is how it works.

Related

Wuthering Waves: Best Way To Farm Echoes (& Echo EXP)

There are a couple of ways to get Echoes and Echo XP in Wuthering Waves, and not all of them involve using Waveplates.

How to Lower SOL3 Phase in Wuthering Waves

To lower difficulty in Wuthering Waves, here is what players need to do:

1. Open the pause screen.
2. Locate the SOL3 Phase Rank display below the character profile screen.
3. Click on the exclamation point icon to the right of the world level.
4. Click on "Lower SOL3 Phase."
5. The next screen will show what the adjusted world level will be. Hit "Confirm."

Now, the SOL3 Phase Rank has been reverted to the previous phase. This means that if you were at Rank 4 with the upper limit of level 60, now you're at Rank 3 with the upper limit of level 50.

Players cannot lower the difficulty by more than one tier. If an account is at SOL3 Phase 5, it can only be lowered to SOL3 Phase 4, not Phase 3.

What Does Lowering the SOL3 Phase Do in Wuthering Waves

Reducing the SOL3 Phase of an account will immediately de-level all monsters in the overworld to the previous phase. In practice, going from Phase 4 to Phase 3 means the enemies' level range will go from 50-60 to 40-50.

Additionally, all story/quest content gated behind certain SOL3 Phases will not be available if the current world level is below the required phase. If, for example, players lower their world level to Stage 1, they won't be able to progress the main story until they revert it.

Here are all the things that lowering your difficulty level by reducing the SOL3 Phase doesn't affect.

• Character Progression: If players reach SOL3 Phase Rank 4, they'll be able to ascend their characters to Rank 4, which means their level limit becomes 50-60, and they can level up their Forte skills past level 3. Reducing the SOL3 Rank doesn't affect these numbers. The ascension level of the characters is tied to the highest SOL3 Phase an account has achieved.
• Echo Drops: Echo drop rate and rarity percentage are defined by the Data Bank Level, not the world level.
• Union Level Progression: Earning Union XP will still add XP to the original world level. So, if players are Union Level 32 with a Rank 4 world and lower it to Rank 3, any Union XP they get will continue to increase their Union Level past 32.

Wuthering Waves

Platform(s)

Android , iOS , PC

Released

May 22, 2024

Developer(s)

Kuro Games

Publisher(s)

Kuro Games

Genre(s)

Action RPG , Open-World