Azur Lane Wishing Well: what a chosen Ultra Rare really costs

Every Wishing Well build has a 1.2% chance of being the exact Ultra Rare you picked, and the UR Exchange hands her over at build 200 if the dice never do. Put those together and the average cost is 75.9 builds, about 152 Wisdom Cubes — well short of the 400 cubes the guarantee is quoted at.

What makes the Wishing Well different

The Wishing Well is the one build pool in Azur Lane where you choose the ship. A standard pool's Ultra Rare rate is for the whole tier, split across every Ultra Rare in it; the Wishing Well's rate is for the ship you wished for, and nobody else:

At the Ultra Rare tier the two numbers are the same, 1.2%, which is exactly why the Wishing Well is the better deal: the standard pool spends that chance on whichever Ultra Rare comes up, the Wishing Well spends all of it on yours. Not every pool can give you one at all — Light Ships has no Ultra Rare tier.

The guarantee: the UR Exchange

The Special and Heavy Wishing Wells cost 2 Wisdom Cubes and 1,500 coins a build. Every cube spent also earns 1 UR Exchange point, and 400 points buys the wished Ultra Rare outright — no roll involved. That lands on build 200: 400 cubes and 300,000 coins is the most the ship can ever cost you.

The ceiling is 200 builds. The typical player pays for 58 of them.

How the odds build up

There is no soft pity and no rate-up as you go — build 1 and build 200 have the same chance. So the odds of having your ship climb steadily, then jump to certain at the exchange:

Half of players have her by build 58 (116 cubes). Nine in ten have her by build 191 (382 cubes) — close enough to the ceiling that, if you are budgeting for near-certainty, you may as well budget for the full 400.

What the average hides

Without the exchange, a flat 1.2% would average 83.3 builds to a first hit. The cap pulls that down to 75.9, because it cuts off the long unlucky tail that drags an uncapped average up.

That tail is not rare enough to ignore. About 9% of players — 1 in 11 — go all the way to build 200 — the ship never drops before it. For them the Wishing Well costs the full 400 cubes, 2.6 times the average. And a budget of exactly the average — 76 builds — still comes up empty 40% of the time. The guarantee only protects the player who can afford all of it.

Planning a wish

• Save the full ceiling before you start if the ship is limited and you must have her. Anything less is a bet.
• If you are happy to gamble, know what the number buys: 116 cubes is a coin flip, and the average is not much safer.
• Near-certainty is nearly the whole price. Nine-in-ten odds cost 382 cubes against 400 for a sure thing, so there is little to save by stopping short of the exchange.

The 32 Ultra Rares are only part of a roster of 888 ships; research ships are built through the research line instead of any pool, and 136 ships drop from campaign stages — not one of them an Ultra Rare (where to farm). The complete rate list for every pool is on the build rates page, exact and updated every patch.