On the surface, Wuthering Wave’s combat system looks fairly simple, but it actually has a ton of nuance built into it that is not explained well, or at all, in-game. One such nuance is Swap Cancelling, and it is a necessity if you want to face the hardest content Wuthering Waves has to offer.
How to use Swap Cancelling in Wuthering Waves
Swap Cancelling is the act of performing an attack with one character, then immediately swapping to another, mid-animation, so that the first character’s attack still fully executes. This sequence can be performed on almost any attack in the game, though the best use of it is during ones with long animations. There are a few reasons with incredible benefits for performing successful swap cancels.
The single most important reason you’d want to make use of Swap Cancelling is that it allows the first character to become invulnerable to all damage, regardless of the length of the attack. It provides the perfect safety net for characters who must take risks to perform their strongest attacks.
Take Calcharo, for example. His strongest attack is his Heavy Attack after gaining enough stacks to perform Mercy/Death Messenger. Calcharo’s Mercy/Death Messenger is a long animation and is extremely unsafe if you remain on him during it. You can, quite literally, be swatted out of the air during it, wasting all the stacks, and suffering a huge DPS loss. However, while performing Mercy/Death Messenger, if you swap to a different character at the start-up of Mercy/Death Messenger, Calcharo’s attack becomes completely safe and will be performed without anything stopping it.
Although certain characters, like Calcharo, benefit more from Swap Cancelling, you’ll want to make use of it on any team composition you’re playing. The other main benefit of the technique is to increase your DPS. As I mentioned earlier, most abilities and skills can be swap cancelled from. What this means is that you can use a skill on one character, then swap to another character and perform a second skill, all in rapid succession. A successful swap cancel will show both your characters on screen at the same time, performing their attacks. Also, you don’t need to stop there. You can continuously perform swap cancels with all three of your characters if you can manage it, though expect sore fingers if you do this too much.
The last thing I want to mention about Swap Cancelling is that it is essential to learn this mechanic to make harder encounters easier in Wuthering Waves. If you refuse to use this technique, you will be severely weakening yourself, especially if you’re using characters or Echoes with unsafe moves. Swap Cancelling is not hard to perform, but it may take you some time to get used to the process, especially if you’re coming from Genshin Impact.
