Lyfe - Wednesday

Wednesday is the first operative you use in the game, meaning all players have immediate access to her from the very beginning of the game.
You can also try her out as a Trial Operative in Star Master at max level and with a good weapon, great logistics, max Neuronics/Deiwos, and max Manifestations.

Wednesday provides a fun and easy-to-play operative with decent mobility, and that the game gives you lots of Manifestation shards for her as well as a good 4* weapon (Work-in-Progress) means she is a very strong early-mid-game operative, but as a 4* operative she just doesn't have the damage to compete with 5* operatives for endgame content.
Her drones being actually pretty poor means some players may also find her confusing to build, as building around her SMG only can be counter-intuitive.

The Basics

Role: Main DPS [Early-Mid game]
Deals Electric Damage
Deals mostly Ballistic damage
Mobility is about standard

How to use Lyfe - Wednesday

1. Use her standard skill off-cooldown
2. Use her ult against strong bosses or large groups.
3. Otherwise, just shoot stuff.

How to build Lyfe - Wednesday

Weapon:
As a DPS: Work-in-Progress
As a support: Alloy Truth or Frigatebird
Weapon Parts: Max ATK
Logistics Squad: Twilight
+10.0% ATK
(The second basic stat doesn't matter)
+8.5% Electric Damage
Best squadmates:
Fritia - LIttle Sunshine
Yao - Quiet Quitter

Standard Attack
Wednesday's standard attack is just her shooting with her SMG.
Whilst Wednesday does have a high fire rate, large magazine capacity, and a quick reload, and thus puts of a very high number of bullets, but beyond that there's nothing special about her standard attack.

Passive Effect

Wednesday will passively summon a Raven drone, which will slowly shoot at enemies (Fire Rate = 1 shot per second), dealing Electrical damage.
Raven drones can't be targeted, damaged, or destroyed.
Raven drones have their own stats, and are unaffected by Lyfe's stats, only being buffed by "Auxiliary Unit" buffs.

Standard Skill
Her Standard Skill summons 2 additional Raven drones to fire a missile barrage at the target.
The missiles deal less damage if hitting a previously-hit target, so this skill works better against groups than bosses, but it's still usable against everything.
These extra drones stay around for 20s, and work the same way as her passive drone.

Wednesday passively has 1 drone all the time anyway due to her passive, and these two extra drones make a maximum of 3.
With her Neuronic buff, Wednesday's standard skill summons 2 extra drones, for 5 drones maximum.

The extra drones from this skill last 20 seconds, and this skill has a 25s cooldown, however since Wednesday's Neuronic buff means the duration of existing drones are reset whenever another operative support skill is used, this allows them to survive until Lyfe uses the skill again to refresh their duration.
This allows Wednesday 100% uptime on all of her drones provided she occasionally uses a support ability, which is very easy to do.

Note that her drone attacks are just regular projectiles and can miss, although they can't crit.
Her drones also do not have unlimited rage - if there are no targets near them they won't fire at anything, even if there are targets far away they have previously engaged.

Further note that if Wednesday already has summoned drones up from a previous use of the skill, using the skill again doesn't overwrite the old drones - the old drones stay, and just have their duration refreshed.

Ultimate Skill
Wednesday creates a massive AoE that continually deals electrical damage to enemies within it.
With her Neuronic buff, this also refreshes the duration of all her Raven drones, and then increases the damage of them by 25% for duration of the ult.

Wednesday's ult is great against groups.
It's decent against bosses, and certainly worth using, but not the greatest overall dps increase against bosses.

Support Skill
Wednesday summons an AoE that deals electrical damage and paralyzes for 4 seconds.

Wednesday being one of the first operatives you have means she's also potentially one of the first operatives you might use as a support, however beyond that her support skill is very bad - the damage is poor and paralyze just isn't overly useful for endgame content or builds.
Wednesday is best played as a main dps - you should only use her as a support operative if you have literally no other operatives you can use instead.
Given that you get access to Fritia-Little Sunshine and Acacia-[Redacted] quite early in the game and who both work better as better supports than Wednesday, Wednesday isn't an operative you generally want to use as a support.
Wednesday is generally the strongest main DPS you'll have in the early game, whilst also being one of the worst supports, so using her as an early-game support isn't advised.

Weapon

Work-in-Progress
Her signature 4* that the game gives you for free for completing beginner missions.
The weapon itself is strong, and dealing Electrical damage means it's on-element to Wednesday (I.e. it deals the same damage as Wedneday's other damage sources as well as proc'ing her type-specific buffs) means that it's a great weapon overall.
The weapons actual effect only gives a PBAoE Electrical Damage blast around the target every 5s, which really doesn't make use of Wednesdays high fire rate or her drones at all. The extreme long 5s cooldown of the effect means that its actual effect on Wednesday's damage is extremely low, to the point of being functionally negligible.

Ignoring any buffs Wednesday has (support operatives and their buffs, Wednesday's own logistics buffs, crits, etc.), I calculate Work-in-Progress' proc is around 2.56% of the dps of Wednesdays SMG shooting. Factoring in those buffs it can be less than a 1% increase to the dps Wednesday herself deals by just shooting the weapon.
The effect of Work-in-Progress' proc on Wednesday's dps is so tiny I will be ignoring it for the rest of this page.

Currently the only 5* Electrical SMG in the game is Starfall - the signature weapon of Yao - Nightglow.
Starfall's buffs are mostly worthless for Wednesday, only providing her with a mostly useless DEF buff that doesn't help her damage at all.
Starfall has notably higher base damage and a slightly higher Compatibility stat, which means it does out-damage Work-in-Progress [by 24.83%] and is thus Wednesday's best weapon, however if you have access to 5* signature weapons then you also have access to 5* operatives, in which case you really shouldn't be using Wednesday - she's just not nearly as strong as the 5* operatives.
If you have Starfall give it Nightglow - it's much better suited for her, she can make better use of it, and she's better overall in every way.
Similarly, Yao - Nightglow will out-dps Wednesday, even though Nightglow is a support operative who is by 5* standards a terrible dps.

As such, consider Work-in-Progress to be Wednesday's best weapon - if you have access to a better SMG, then please use it for the character it was designed for, not Lyfe, and if you do have better SMGs than Work-in-Progress, then you're better off using one of your 5* operatives.

Wednesday's drones always deal electrical damage, so Wednesday herself using a non-Electircal weapon means that she is dealing two types of damage.
This does restrict which support buffs she can use (most notably with Vidya - Celestial Swan), but beyond the restricted support buffs there's no disadvantage to Wednesday using a non-Electrical SMG, in which case her best 5* weapon is 100 Battle Veteran, and for certain support operative combos 100BV is Wednesday's highest-dps option by a large margin.

Note that Napoleon in Black - the 3* Electrical SMG, does give +15-25% Electrical DMG as its T1-T5 buff, but it deals less base damage (even factoring in its higher compatibility), and due to the additive way that electrical dmg buffs are calculated, it does work out to deal less damage overall than Work-in-Progress.

Similarly, working out the maths for Divine Justice (Yao - Nightglow's signature 4*) shows it to deal 3.4% less damage overall than Work-in-Progress.

As such, just give Wednesday Work-in-Progress.

If you did want to use Wednesday as a Support operative, her best weapons are:

Alloy Truth
Gives a nice ATK buff, based on Wednesday's Max HP, as well as a nice Crit DMG Amplifier buff.
Frigatebird
Gives the deployed operative an ATK buff based on Wednesdays ATK stat.
This is quite a nice ATK buff, and its 15s cd is quite good too

If you have 5* weapons, you probably also have 5* operatives too, in which case you should be using them instead of Wednesday.
Similarly, Wedesnday is not a good support operative, so if you have an operative you want Wednesday to support, there are better supports you can use instead.

For Weapon Parts just go with max ATK.

Manifestation

M1 gives Wednesday's drones a 15% chance to deal extra Electrical DMG
Note that this is basically a hitscan beam, and in-essence can't miss.
This deals roughly double the damage of a regular drone shot. (94.8% more, strictly)
M2 increases Raven attack speed by 1% for 3s per shot Lyfe fires.
Wednesday's extremely high rate-of-fire means this is quite a large increase in dps for the Ravens.
M3 means that shooting a weakspot always triggers the extra damage from M1, with a cooldown of 5s.
M4 increases the level of Wednesday's standard skill by 1 and increases Raven damage.
M5 increases the chance for the M1 damage buff from 15% to 30%.

Since Wednesday is a 4* operative, you will eventually max her to M5.
Given that the game gives you quite a lot of Manifestation shards for Wednesday from th Main Story Tasks, Wednesday will almost-certainly be the first operative you max the Manifestations of.

All of Wednesdays buffs make her Raven drones stronger, but the drones are so weak even that getting Wednesday to M5 is not actually a particularly large increase to her effective damage.

Where does most of Wednesday's damage come from?
...and what buffs it?

This section explains why Wednesday's drones kinda suck.
This is a much longer-winded explanation than normal as to how Wednesday's drones work, and why they are absolutely s**t.

If you just want the TL:DR, it's that Wednesday herself is doing most of her total dps and you should buff Wednesday and not her drones.

Here be maths. Ye have been warned.

Wednesday's SMG

Her SMG is buffed by all the things that you'd expect it to be buffed by - ATK, ballistic damage buffs, Electrical damage buffs, etc. ... Her SMG works exactly as you'd expect.

Raven Drones

All of Wednesdays drones can of course make full use of the extra damage gained from debuffing enemies DEF and Resistances, as expected.
Similarly, all Auxiliary Unit buffs always affect them.

Wednesday's passive causes her to summon a drone that is always with her.
Since this drone has unlimited duration and can't be destroyed, it's always there, and that means it inherits Wednesdays ATK at the start of the fight and then its stats never change - it's ATK is always 100% of what Wednesday's ATK was when the fight started.

Wednesdays Standard Skill causes her to summon 2 or 4 more drones (depending on if you have her Neuronics or not).
These inherit the ATK stat that Wednesday has at the time the drones are summoned.
This means that they will benefit from other ATK buffs that Wednesday has at the time that they are summoned.
This mean they will always deal equal to or more damage than the regular passive drone.

This means that ATK buffs benefit Wednesday more than other types of buff (electrical, ballistic), as the summoned drones can inherit Wednesday's ATK buffs.
Similarly, if you never bother to summon any extra drones, then since the passive drone is unaffected by any other buffs, you can just ignore buffing the drones ATK entirely.

Beyond that, the buffs the drones receive are extremely eclectic, benefitting from a small number of other buffs
These generally make some sense when you think about them:
Riptide's M2 Skill DMG buff doesn't affect the drones
+Skill DMG only buffs damage from a skill, but Lyfe's skill doesn't deal damage with the drones, it merely creates the drones who then deal their own damage.
Celestial Swans Nebula squads "increases all types of DMG of full squad" buff can apply to them.
The Ravens are a part of Wednesdays damage, and hence should count for this, as Vidya buffs everything.
Celestial Swans 4* weapon Gearlock's "increases all types of DMG of full squad" buff does not persist for them.
This is a buff provided by Vidya, so when Vidya stops providing it, Wednesday (and by extension her drones) also stop receiving it.
I haven't tried every buff in the game to see if it works with the drones, and I have no intention of doing so, but just know that the things that affect the drones are extremely scarce, and other than ATK buffs basically nothing actually buffs them.
Similarly, also note that everything that does affect the drones also affects Wednesday herself, with the one exception of Auxiliary Unit Strength.

In addition, if Wednesday gains an ATK buff, it only affects the drones if she summons the drones whilst she has the buff - if Wednesday doesn't have a buff when she summons the drones, then they don't get it, meaning it's possible for Wednesday to have 99% uptime on a certain ATK buff but if she never has it when she summons her drones then her drones will never receive it.

Similarly, if Wednesday summons some drones that have no ATK buffs, then uses her standard skill whilst she has some ATK buffs, the old non-buffed drones will get their duration refreshed rather than being replaced with new drones.
This does mean that you can just buff Wednesday once and then keep her buffed drones up indefinitely ,but it also means that if you summoned weak drones then you may have to avoid using support skills for the remainder of their duration so they don't refresh and you can get rid of them.

The TL:DR is that the summoned Ravens can be buffed by Wednesdays ATK buffs, but Wednesday can gain many buffs that don't affect the drones, and the drones themselves can be kinda finicky to use optimally.

Drone Missile Strike
This comes from the drones.
I.e. Wednesday uses the skill, which creates the drones (or refreshes the duration of existing drones, as above), who then use the missile strike themselves.
This means the drones' Missile Strike scales off of the drones' ATK at the time the skill is used, not Wednesdays.
This means that if any new buffs are gained/lost after using the skill but before the missiles hit, those buffs will not affect the missile damage.
I.e. You can't use the skill, buff yourself or the drones before the missiles hit, and have them deal increased damage.
This also means that since Lyfe is not the one actually using the skill, any buffs Lyfe gets to Skill DMG also do not apply to the missile strike.
(and the same for other types of buff - electrical dmg buffs, standard skill dmg buffs, etc. - nothing applies.)
Since the drones can't inherit any actual buffs from Wednesday, any buffs Wednesday have don't get transferred to the drones, so again - things like electrical or skill dmg buffs can never benefit the drones damage.

Each drone performs its own missile strike, and each drone is independent of every other drone.
This means that the "Each time a missile hits a part that was already hit, DMG dealt decreases by 50%" is done uniquely per drone - one drones hits don't reduce the damage of the other drones. Since the drones can't really get any buffs to DMG dealt, this is essentially functioning as a Final DMG modifier.

The damage of the first missile is 26% of Raven's ATK + 27, and 9 missiles are fired.
Assuming all missiles hit, the total damage inflicted is 51.898% of Raven's ATK + 279.
This means the total damage is about 180% the damage of the first missile hit. [180.429%]
For 4 Ravens this is a total of around 10,458 damage at 4,500 ATK

Wednesday vs Her Drones
The summoned drones inherit Wednesday's ATK at the time of their creation, so 4 of Wednesdays drones also benefit from any ATK buffs you can give them.
Since you can extend the duration of her drones, you can potentially keep her drones with very high ATK for longer than normal.
E.g. If an ATK buff normally has 50% uptime, then you can use if when the drones are created and then keep the drones up, potentially allowing them 100% buff uptime.

Wednesday's drones deal (7.7% of Raven's ATK + 7) each, and each drone shoots around once per second.
Since you can maintain 100% uptime on all 5 drones, this means that her drones are doing ( 7.7% + 7 )*5 = (38.5% ATK + 35) damage per second.
AT 4,500 ATK this is 353.5 dps per drone, or 1,767.5 dps total over 5 drones.
Factoring in the extra RoF the drones get from Wednesday's M2 bonus, this is increased by 33.27%, up to 2,355.54 dps
(This will be slightly less in practice as Wednesday has to stop shooting to use her skills, as well as Wednesday missing her shots which reduces her M2 bonus.)

The missiles do an extra (51.9%+279) every 25s, for each of the 4 summoned drones.
Over the 25 second cooldown this averages 101.57 dps per raven, for a total dps for the 4 ravens of 418.3 dps.

If Wednesday is at M5, each shot from her drones have a 30% chance to also deal 15% of their ATK as a Whispering Arrow.
Assuming Wednesday is dealing weakspot damage every 5s to proc her M3 bonus too, this means each drone is doing one Whispering Arrow every 2s, for an extra 15% /s
15% /s is an extra 675 dps, per Raven, which is an extra 3,375 dps for all 5 Ravens.

In total, this adds up to 2,355.54 + 418.3 + 3,375 = 6,148.84 dps
Again, this is increased by ATK as well as Auxiliary Unit Bonus.

Her Aux unit buffs would be her Usha 2/3 bonus (24%), her Usha 3/3 bonus (42%), Deiwos (36%), logistics (31.8%), and her Alignment Index (30.9% at 618 Alignment Index).
This totals 164.7%.

This means that for a 4,500 ATK Wednesday, her drones have a max theoretical dps (excluding ATK buffs) of 16,275.97 dps

Assuming Wednesday has around 4,500 ATK, then factoring in Compatibility, Ammo Capacity, RoF, and Reload Speed for a max-level Work-in-Progress, then a 4,500 ATK Wednesday is going to be dealing around 14,734 dps just from the bullets from her Work-in-Progress.

This means that even at absolutely maximum investment and under perfect conditions, her drones deal roughly the same damage as Wednesday deals whilst Wednesday is completely unbuffed.
A completely unbuffed Wednesday shooting at an enemy weakspot deals around 17.6% more damage than her drones do with max investment and under perfect conditions.
(As weakspot hits always crit.)

Even adding in some relatively minor buffs for Wednesday causes her to out-damage her drones by a notable amount.
Wednesday will of course also be buffed by ATK buffs as well, but she also gains damage from her crits as well as from ballistic dmg, electrical dmg, and aptitude buffs.
Things like crit and electrical damage buffs stack multiplicatively with ATK buffs, allowing Wednesday higher damage than her drones when Wednesday has many buffs.

So, is it ever actually worth it to invest into Wednesday's drones?
In a vacuum - no. Wednesday deals so much more damage than her drones that even a minor buff for Wednesday is worth more than a major buff for her drones.
(Usha squad adds 66% to her drones. To get the same damage increase to her SMG's damage, Wednesday herself would only need a 27.5% increase in a worst-case scenario.)

Outside of a vacuum - Wednesday is one of your teams three operatives.
If you are using her drones then Wednesday is your dps operative, meaning she has two support operatives to buff her damage.
Whilst there are many support operatives that provide only ATK buffs (and thus buff her drones and herself equally), for most support operatives they provide many buffs, all of which can benefit Wednesday, but only some of which (i.e. the ATK buffs) buff her drones.
This means that almost all support operatives provide a larger damage buff to Wednesday than they do to her drones.
Given that even some of the support abilities you gain access to very early in the game can buff Wednesday quite a lot, there is no scenario where investing into Wednesday's drones provides a larger dps increase than investing into the dps of Wednesday's SMG.

To put this another way:
Wednesdays drones deal 7.7% dps per drone, or 38.5% dps for all 5 drones.
Wednesdays SMG deals 29.52% per shot, and after factoring in reloading Wednesday fires at an average rate of 11.1 shots per second, for around 325% total dps.
As such, her drones shots deal less than 1/8th the dps of her SMG.
Her drones' skills and buffs are not enough to make them good.

TL:DR (Again): Wednesday's drones are terrible, and you shouldn't invest into them.

Logistics

Yes, the reason I did the maths for Wednesday's drones was because the game recommends Usha squad for Wednesday, which buffs Auxiliary Unit strength and DMG.
Given how weak her drones are, most of Wednesday's damage will come from Wednesday herself, not her drones.

As such, what Wednesday wants is not buffs to her drones, but instead buffs to herself.

Remembering that her drones are pretty terrible, and her ult is also a pretty low amount of her total dps, it's easy to see that most of Wednesday's damage is her per-shot ballistic damage from her SMG.

As such, you want either

The logistics squad that provides the most benefit to Electric ballistic damage
Both hipfire and ADS are fine - Wednesday is fine with both, so it's just personal preference.
The most buffs to the team when Wednesday is used as a support operative.

For endgame content there's really no reason to use Wednesday as a support, but there's also no reason to get a logistics squad for an early-game-only support.
If you did want to user her as a Support, then Navigator or Twilight squad is her best bet (Navigator generally, but Twilight is good if supporting a Main DPS who deals Electric dmg).
(With ATK, Skill Haste, and Electrical DMG as stats.)
As such, I recommend you aim to get Wednesday a squad that makes the most of her capabilities as a main DPS:

Twilight
After dealing DMG with an Active Skill or Auxiliary Unit, the target's Resistance to that type of DMG decreases by 16% for 5 sec.
Given that her drones fire every sec, this is basically a permanent -16% DMG resistance to the target.
If you re using a dedicated resistance debuffer (e.g. Celestial Swan) this is still good but not quite as strong, although if you have a strong debuffer you probably have a better dps operative, so most people using Wednesday likely won't have a debuffer, in which case Twilight is great.
Amano-Iwato
Increases ADS Ballistic DMG by 10% after a crit. Max 5 Stacks. A great choice if you are ADS'ing with Wednesday.
If you only hipfire and if you don't ADS then it's obviously terrible.
Mingyi
When dealing Electrical DMG, increases ATK of the equipping operative by 1% for 3 sec. Max 45 stacks. Repeated triggers will reset the duration.
Still less total damage increase than Amano-Iwato, but again doesn't need ADS, and you can still stop part-way through magdumping to use a skill, which is nice.
Mizuho
When shooting continuously, each shot increases Ballistic DMG by 3%. Max 20 stacks.
Work-in-Progress' large magazine capacity allows you to get a very large average damage bonus from this.
Mizuho averages 39.5% Ballistic DMG over Wednesday's entire Work-in-Progress magazine.
Less than Amano-Iwato, but you don't need to ADS to get it, although you do need to fully deplete the magazine in one go without stopping.
Given Wednesday's long skill cooldowns, this will happen most of the time anyway.

Yes, this means that Twilight is a fantastic squad for her as both a support and as a main DPS, so just with Twilight squad - it allows her to work well as a dps, whilst also allowing her to still work well as a support once you start getting better operatives and don't need Wednesday as a dps any more.
If you did want to just use Wednesday as a support, then Navigator squad is her best choice, but it's not something she can use as a dps, so you'd need to change her squad later once you stopped using her as a dps and started wanting to use her as a support. It's not worth the investment to give her two squads though - it's better to just give her one squad that works for both.

For stats you want +10.0% ATK.
For the Special talent, you want 8.5% Electrical Damage

The game recommends Alignment Index, but Alignment Index boosts her drones damage, and given how little damage her drones do it's not worth it.

All stats other than ATK are mostly worthless for Wednesday.
Her drones don't deal enough damage for Skill Haste to be overly useful.
Wednesday has no S-Energy issues, and doesn't benefit that much from her ult, so U-Energy regen isn't great.
HP and DEF don't affect her damage at all.
She can't heal or create shields.
This realistically leaves Shooting Crit Rate and Crit Dmg Amplifier.
Work-in-Progress has a very low CRIT DMG stat of just 30%, and Wedneday doesn't get any crit chance or dmg from any other source, so Crit DMG Amplifier isn't overly useful.
As such I'd generally recommend CRIT Rate as Wednesday's 2nd basic talent after ATK, but I'd consider CRIT Rate a cope stat and wouldn't go out of my way to get it.
This is doubly true due to Wednesday being a 4* operative - your resources are better spent on 5* operatives, not re-rolling cope stats for 4* operatives.
I.e. ATK is a very good logistics stat for her - the other stat does matter, but since it's never worth re-rolling them for a 4* operative, it really doesn't matter what the 2nd stat is.

As such, +10.0% ATK and +8.5% Electrical Damage are what you want, and don't spend any resources to get anything else.

Good Teammates for Wednesday

Wednesday wants Electrical, Ballistic, and ATK buffs:

Vidya - Celestial Swan (and other resistance shredders)
Celestial Swan and other resistance shredders (Acacia - Kaguya, etc.) that reduce the enemies resistance help enemies take more damage.
If using Celestial Swan, make sure the other support isn't off element to the main DPS.
Yao - Nightglow
Wednesday can make full use of Nightglow's ATK, Ballistic, and crit buffs, and Nightglow is a fantastic support for Wednesday.
Note that Nightglow is on-element to Wednesday (Nightglow deals Electrical damage)
Eatchel - The Cub
A Blitzing Fangs M1 Eatchel provides healing as well as a decent ATK buff.
Not the strongest support, but still good.
Mauxir - Shadow Ka
Wednesday doesn't care that much about the utility of not having to aim, but the extra damage is nice.
Note that Shadow Ka is off-element to Wednesday (Shadow Ka deals Chaos damage)

Wednesday's best supports are Nightglow and Celestial Swan.
Since Nightglow likely out-damages Wednesday though, this is probably not the best way of doing things, but if you did want to use Wednesday those are her best choices...

If you only have access to 4* operatives to support Wednesday, then consider:

[Healer] Yao - Quiet Quitter
Yao creates a drone that provides ample PBAoE healing, which whilst not overly useful in endgame content, does make Wednesday much nicer to play.
For endgame content QQ is objectively worse than Eatchel - The Cub though.
Fritia - Little Sunshine
Little Sunshine can give an aptitude buff that gives per-shot Thermal damage. Given how many shots Wednesday puts out this can translate to a lot of extra damage.
Acacia - [Redacted]
Acacia's slow is a useful QoL and survivability buff, albeit minor.
Any operative that can give out a useful buff, such as an operative using an ATK-buffing support weapon (Prismatic Igniter, Lapis Lazuli, Deep Sea's Call, etc.)

If you want to use Wednesday as a support operative, then she can be used to support most dps operatives quite well, as her weapons provide generic buffs.
If using Twlight as Wednesdays logistics squad, then only use her to support a dps who deals electrical damage.