How Many Pulls for a Featured 5-Star in WuWa
How many pulls a featured 5-star really costs in Wuthering Waves: about 83 on average, 160 in the worst case, and how your pity counter changes it.
The short answer
Kuro publishes every rate that decides a pull, so the price of a featured 5-star is arithmetic rather than guesswork. The long-run average works out to about 83 pulls, or roughly 13,280 Astrite. The worst case stays 160 pulls, the number you should budget around.
| What you are pulling | Expected pulls | Expected Astrite | Guaranteed ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Any 5-star, character banner | ~56 | ~8,960 | 80 pulls (12,800) |
| Featured 5-star, fresh 50/50 | ~83 | ~13,280 | 160 pulls (25,600) |
| Featured 5-star, guarantee banked | ~56 | ~8,960 | 80 pulls (12,800) |
| 5-star weapon from a weapon banner | ~56 | ~8,960 | 80 pulls (12,800) |
Read the columns differently. The expected column is what a player who pulls for years will average out to. The ceiling column is what one unlucky banner can cost. Most accounts end up between the two, and a lot of them remember only the expensive runs.
The three numbers behind everything
Everything here traces to Kuro's own Convene Details page, which lists per-banner rates in plain text:
- Base 5-star rate: 0.8% per pull.
- Average 5-star rate including the guarantee: 1.8% per pull. A 5-star is guaranteed every 80 convenes.
- Every 5-star has a 50% chance of being the featured character. If it is not, your next 5-star is guaranteed to be the featured one.
Two more facts feed the math. A Radiant Tide costs 160 Astrite, and the guarantee counter is shared across all Featured Resonator Convenes and carries over between them, which the current Phase II convene notice repeats for the banners running now.
The arithmetic, in four steps
- 1.8% average rate means one 5-star per 55.6 pulls. Divide 100 by 1.8. This is Kuro's own average-across-many-players figure, not a community estimate.
- The 50/50 turns that into 1.5 five-stars per featured character. Half of all 5-stars are the featured unit, half are not, and every miss makes the next one guaranteed. So the expected number of 5-stars you spend to land the featured character is 1 + 0.5 = 1.5.
- 55.6 times 1.5 is 83.3 pulls.
- 83.3 times 160 Astrite is 13,328, which is where the 13,280 in the table comes from after rounding the pull count down to 83.
A second method lands nearby. Our pity chart uses recorded pull data (base 0.8% up to pull 65, climbing about 6% per pull after that, 100% at 80) and puts the average 5-star at 53.6 pulls, and the average featured character at 80.4. Kuro does not publish the middle of that ramp, so treat those as estimates and the 1.8% figure as the ground truth. Both point at the same advice: budget 80 to 85 pulls per featured character, and keep 160 in reserve if missing the character is not an option.
What your pity counter does to the price
Pity is not a discount you unlock later. It is pulls you have already paid for. That changes the price of the next character by a surprising amount:
| Current pity | Est. pulls to next 5-star | On a 50/50, to the featured | With a guarantee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 54 | 80 | 54 |
| 30 | 34 | 61 | 34 |
| 50 | 18 | 45 | 18 |
| 60 | 9 | 36 | 9 |
| 65 | 5 | 32 | 5 |
| 70 | 2 | 29 | 2 |
The middle column is what most players actually face. At 60 pity on a 50/50, the 5-star is about nine pulls away, and half of everyone who gets there walks out with a standard character and a second full cycle to pay for. Sitting on a banked guarantee is the strongest position an account can be in, and skipping a banner while holding it costs nothing. Both the counter and the guarantee carry over to the next featured character banner.
How often the full 160 pulls happens
The rule-based part of this needs no model: exactly 50% of players get the featured character from their first 5-star, and the first 5-star always arrives by pull 80. The other half loses the 50/50 and needs a second 5-star, which is why the average is dragged up to 83 and why the ceiling is 160.
| Pulls you can spend | Chance of landing the featured |
|---|---|
| 40 | ~16% |
| 60 | ~23% |
| 70 | ~46% |
| 80 | ~61% |
| 100 | ~71% |
| 120 | ~78% |
| 140 | ~94% |
| 160 | 100% |
Those percentages come from the soft-pity model on our chart, and the jumps are not typos. Most 5-stars land in the pull 66 to 80 window, so a 40-pull budget misses four times out of five, while a 140-pull budget fails about once in twenty runs. Someone who gets the featured at 20, then 20, then 150 has a personal average of 63. The 83 figure describes a population of players, not any single account.
What one patch of Astrite buys
A fully active F2P account earns roughly 10,900 Astrite per patch, about 68 pulls. At an 83-pull average, that is one featured character every patch and a bit, and a guaranteed one takes about 2.4 patches of saving. The Lunite pass pushes a patch to roughly 94 pulls, which covers the average but not a doubled 160-pull run.
Free convene items soften the bill without changing the math. Radiant Tides come from login events, the Pioneer Podcast, and the coral exchanges (8 Afterglow Corals each, or 70 Oscillated Corals with a limit of 7 per update). Every Tide you hold is one pull you do not pay 160 Astrite for. The 50/50, the pity counter, and the 80-pull guarantee behave exactly the same either way.
The banners running right now, Jingran, Hiyuki and Mornye plus the Thousandfold Deliverance, Frostburn and Starfield Calibrator weapon convenes, all end September 29 at 11:59 server time. If your pity counter is somewhere in the sixties, that date is the only number in this article that matters.
FAQ
Kuro publishes the 0.8% base rate, the 1.8% average including the guarantee, and the 80-pull cap. The climb between pull 66 and pull 80 is not published, which is why our chart labels those numbers as recorded community data rather than official rates.
No. Any Featured Resonator Convene uses the same rule, and the guarantee count is shared across all of them. Losing the 50/50 on one banner means the next featured character banner starts with the guarantee already banked.
On average, yes. The 5-star rate and the 80-pull guarantee are identical, but there is no 50/50 on weapon banners: every 5-star you convene is the featured weapon, so the expected cost is about 56 pulls and the ceiling is 12,800 Astrite instead of 25,600.
Only if you can reach the 5-star. A 50/50 loss hands you a guarantee that carries over, which is real value. Pulls that stop short of a 5-star simply sit in the counter, where they will still be waiting next banner.
13,280, at 160 Astrite per Radiant Tide. That is the average cost of a featured 5-star. The guaranteed cost is 25,600.
Sources
- Official: Convene Details, base and average 5-star rates, 80-pull guarantee, 50/50 rule – wutheringwaves.kurogames.com/en/main/news/detail/758
- Official: Version 3.6 Featured Resonator/Weapon Convene, Phase II, current banner windows and shared guarantee count – wutheringwaves.kurogames.com/en/main/news/detail/5431
- Wuthering Waves Wiki: Radiant Tide (160 Astrite, coral exchanges), Convene (banner types, separate guarantee counts)
- In-house estimates: the soft-pity model behind our pity chart and the income tiers on the Astrite per patch page
Related reading: how pity and soft pity work, the 50/50 and carry-over rules, how to read your own counter, and the weapon banner explained. Everything else we have written about the current patch is collected on the guides index.