Tower Tier Lists

[Vent]

I'm just curious how people would rate each tower. Please share your thoughts or your own lists, if you think I've unfairly rated something low then I'd love to hear how to effectively use them.

S:
Ballista - Old reliable. I underestimated this tower when I first started playing, but these usually do the bulk of my damage in any given run. I take slow on them and all the damage over time upgrades I can get, and then put them everywhere. Towards the end of a run, there is no spot that isn't covered by at least a couple ballistas, constantly slowing everything and applying damage over time. I usually invest into universities, and the bonus from those is huge when combined with large numbers of ballistas. I don't tend to manually level ballistas, they do great in large numbers.

Lookout - When used well these can be shockingly effective. These are best in areas where things are hit by a lot of attacks at once. Quick attacking towers, like the sprayers, tesla towers, and the obelisk are particularly effective when paired with a lookout, as the bonus is added on each hit. They pair well with large numbers of ballistas too. If you use universities (you should), the bonus is added twice; once for the tower attacking and once for the lookout. The lookout also adds its crit chance to each attack. Pure insanity with the right build.

A:
Sprayers - These can be incredibly powerful. I prefer these slightly over the tesla due to their faster rate of fire and longer range. The fire sprayer obviously favors armor damage and the poison favors shield, but either can easily be made effective for both and it is better to take one rather than both. These I tend to upgrade heavily rather than spread out. I tend to put three in a cluster and specialize each one for one damage type, and then watch as together they melt everything that tries to pass. With high crit chance and the right perks (expunge for poison and ignite for fire) these will do incredible damage.

Tesla - These are powerful for all the same reasons as the sprayers, but slightly less in my opinion because of the lack of range and lower rate of fire. I follow the same method with these as the sprayers, going for high level clusters of specialized towers rather than a big spread. One benefit they have over sprayers is the ability to add all three DOT effects to an enemy, but I prefer my ballistas doing that.

B:
Shredder - These can be really good but I find them more situational than the sprayers and tesla. These really shine when you have a long, unsplit pathway for them to fire down, and in these circumstances might be better than the towers above. If you have a lot of splits though you might lose a lot of potential damage as saw blades go off the map instead of into the line of enemies. These I go for levels rather than numbers as well, and they do a ton of damage if you have high crit on them and the exsanguinate upgrade.

C:
Mortar - These are my favorite of the long range towers, but I don't find myself using them a lot anymore. They are certainly effective for taking out clusters of enemies and stripping off armor, but they have a critical flaw in my opinion. Due to the long travel time of the projectile, you end up losing a lot of damage to overkill. Sometimes this is due to the enemy dying before the mortar falls, or due to all your mortars targeting the same enemy when you only need one or two to hit. I'm sure this could be alleviated with careful targeting settings on each tower, but I'd rather just put up more ballistas or one of the area of effect towers above that doesn't miss.

Frost Keep - I want to like these but I haven't found them incredibly effective. You really have to cluster these together to see a big slowing effect, and it seems like stuff still slips through them a lot. I find slowing ballistas to be a better method of slowing the enemy, especially when you have them set to targeting the fastest enemies.

Obelisk - These can be very effective but they just aren't my favorite. With these it is definitely better to upgrade a few rather than spread them out. I use the strategy above where I make three in a cluster and specialize them for each damage. These are very mana hungry and it takes several mana banks to support each one. They shred single targets very quickly but they do lose some damage when target switching and have trouble with dense clusters of enemies. Pairs very well with the lookout tower due to its high rate of fire.

D:
Radio Tower - Good at long range but they don't feel very impactful. For being as expensive as they are, they don't do as much as I'd like. Good single target damage at a distance, but they don't disrupt enemy clusters as well as a mortar. Does have the benefit of not wasting damage as much as mortars tend to.

Particle Cannon - I like the idea of these but in effect they suffer a similar problem to the radio tower. Expensive, but doesn't have a very big immediate impact on the overall battle. These do have the same benefit over the mortar in that they don't miss much.

Encampment - I haven't found a good use for these. I feel like the main problem is that they are very slow at placing new landmines. You can speed them up a little by maximizing the area they target, but it doesn't feel like a huge effect to me. A lot of damage is wasted on targets with low health, if you could set them somehow to ignore the smaller enemies then I would like this tower much more. I feel like there are more reliable ways to do damage and protect a lane. These can be good for mopping up any enemies that make it through your main defensive line, but then you have them taking up upgrade slots that could more effectively go toward your towers doing the bulk of the work.

[just.dont.do.it]

Obelisks are hardly C, they are A at least. Generally, towers with high RPM work much better than towers with low RPM (high RPM works much better with all the power multipliers - DoTs, lookouts), and obelisk has an absolutely amazing RPM. The only downsides are the range (not placing them on +3s and above is a huge waste, as they benefit immensely from base damage buff) and mana usage, using them without mana banks is very much impossible.

Particle Cannons are much more reliable and useful than the rest of Ds, so I'd rather have them at C. Indeed, their slow RPM makes them overly situational, but given correct priorities, they *can* deal very reliably with big and important targets, such as hovering portals.

Radio Towers would be C too, if not for their unreliable targetting that sometimes makes them miss shots or attack with much more delay than usual.

[AntiGrav1ty]

My ranking in order would be:

S-Tier: Ballista
A-Tier: Poison Sprayer, Flame Thrower
B-Tier: Shredder
C-Tier: Mortar, Radio, Tesla, Frost Tower
D-Tier: Obelisk, Encampment, Outlook, Particle Cannon

In general single target towers are just not that great unless you can spam them like ballistas. Bosses or big mobs are not really an issue; any difficulty only comes from mass spawns in later levels.

Ballistas and Sprayer/Flame Thrower are just the best towers in the game right now. Not much to add there.

Shredder: Really good with high bleed and crit cards but a bit more situational than towers in S or A tier..

Mortar: They have decent AOE but wasted damage due to overkill or targets dying before the mortar connects really hurts their value. Just a little higher projectile speed would do wonders Mortars.

Radio towers: They have potential and they are fun to use. Their damage is surprisingly good and they have some AOE. A single bombardment can apply very high DOT on clustered enemies. If the targeting/rate of bombardment was better or more consistent I would put them B tier or even A tier just for style. Right now probably C tier.
(They actually changed targetting so maybe B tier right now) Would have to test it further.

Tesla: C tier for me right now just because sprayers and flame throwers fulfill the same role and they outperform Teslas by quite a bit. They are generally more flexible in terms of positioning as well.

Frost Tower: Useable support tower to get some extra aoe slow. Not good for anything else though and not worth any card investment other than range.

Obelisks: Very underwhelming imho. The damage they do is absolutely not worth the mana cost. One singular moderately upgraded Obelisk will eat 40+ mana/sec for a single target beam. Single targets are never really an issue and basing your defense on Obelisks still requires a lot of other supportive towers. D for me, maybe C at best.

Encampment: Probably the worst out of the AOE towers because of the slow mine laying speed and wasting a lot of mines on single runners. Pretty cheap upgrades though so you can get very high levels but not sure if that's worth it.

Outlook: Don't see the appeal. Maybe in combination with high DPS single target towers but they are not that great in general. I feel like amplifying damage on a single target is not worth any investment. Never properly used them though other than when I went for achievements.

Particle Cannon: Wish they were better because they look cool but again, single target towers are rarely worth it imho. Expensive, single target towers with high damage, and slow fire rate also make most upgrades through cards or universities pretty bad.

[Dan_The_Noob]

Ballista - Godtier
Mortar - Pretty Good
Frost tower and Flamethrower/Acidsprayer - yeah, whatever.
Sawblade - whatever, i guess.

for everything else, there's reset XP

[Tman]

I think the towers you like are going to be the ones you figure out how to use. Outside of Ballista spam, which is required AFAIK, doesn't mean it's my favorite tower. It's just a jack of all trades tower that does many different jobs that I require of it but it gets very expensive by the end of the round.

My eyes were opened up when I did the "No Stone Unturned" achievement and won. I figured if I could win (the achievement only requires you to build them, not actually win), then maybe I need to look more closely at all these towers. I have a lot of work ahead of me to do that.

[Ohm is Futile]

Imo:
S- Ballista, mortar
A- Obelisk, Lookout
B- Tesla, Poison, Shredder, Frost keep
C- Flamethrower
D- Radar, Encampment, Particle cannon

Originally posted by AntiGrav1ty:

Frost Tower: Useable support tower to get some extra aoe slow. Not good for anything else though and not worth any card investment other than range.

Frost keeps aren't really AoE though... it usually works out fine but when you get to the late waves or if you get a bad map and enemies come in clustered it's very noticeable that they're not AoE.

[eatonpye]

I've done my last couple of runs after resetting XP with a few ballistas, a bunch of poison sprayers, and a bunch of fire towers. I'd rate those all A, but I don't really like using a lot of ballistas because even they eventually get expensive to build, and since they have to be upgraded individually, that becomes expensive too, for the amount of damage they do.

B: Lookouts, particle beams- both need the right situation to be worthwhile though. I will say that three+ particle beams, while expensive, do wonders for tearing down shields at great distances, and can get poison damage, so enemies have lots of time to get poisoned.

C: Tesla, frost keeps, Obelisks. Frost keeps can work if your map splits really early and you need to cram all your sprayers in one place, but it's a major commitment to mana production because having ten of them sucks up mana constantly, not just when there's an enemy in their area of effect.

D: Mortars, encampments, shredders: pretty much useless, IMO. Never tried the Radar tower, but it doesn't appeal to me.

[Ohm is Futile]

Originally posted by eatonpye:

D: Mortars, encampments, shredders: pretty much useless, IMO. Never tried the Radar tower, but it doesn't appeal to me.

Mortars on D? :o

They are amazeballs for spreading DoT over long ranges... if you get creeping cough they'll even slow when they apply poison... it's also the only AoE tower with a good radius... I could understand putting them all the way down to, say, B, just because other towers might kill stuff before the shells land but other than that it's extremely powerful. Doesn't even cost mana.

[warmaster21]

S:
Poison sprayer, flamethrower, Tesla coil. - all require some serious gold investment and specific tile layouts but can nearly defend entire lanes by themselves, and aren't that mana greedy even when leveled up unless you are spamming them. (i havent given the tesla a re-evaluation since the patch as iv been working on achievements so it may be lower or the same)

A:
Ballista: good old reliable. requires good targeting to make the most out of them to stop overkill, also its shots can be intercepted by other units in the way limiting its effectiveness sometimes. can scale to be a monster with all 3 dots and mana bolts turns them into serious mana hogs worse than obelisks once you get to manabolts 2-3+, but are inexpensive, cheap to level and are the go to tower to sit next to houses for money. One of the few towers that can slow enemies before you get your hand on poison slow

Encampments: After some more experimentation i have to say encampments are far stronger than i gave them credit for, while their usefullness is determined by length of the lane, slows on enemy, and how many you have / upgraded. fairly weak in the early game but monstrous in the late game where killzones of encampents stacking multitude of mines on the same space killing spawners and their paylods. Pairs well with frost towers, ballistas with slow, creeping cough upgrades on anything that does poison.

B:
Mortar: Good tower held back by its abysmally slow projectile time, however its relatively cheap compared to the other towers and are able to hit all 3 dots if you focus on it. most useful when it can hit several lanes at once. also requires target spreading to prevent all your mortars from all missing when their target dies. also interacts terribly with slows as they will miss their target if its speed changes after it fires.

Shredder: Fun tower, great sound effect. held back by the fact that it splits in lanes absolutely decimates this towers usefullness, also gets pierce capped after a certain number of enemies. however it is fun you can start a next wave while there are blades on the map and they will continue and hit the new enemies. this tower loves fast enemies as it will shoot and then continue down the path into the slower enemies to stack up that bleed.

C:
Radio Tower: While fun to use held back by the planes terrible accuracy, never set it to fast as it will most likely miss every shot. also sucks when its initial target dies theres a high chance it stop shooting all together and veers off instead of continuing down the lane. Great at nuking down bosses though. When it works it feels great, most of the time you watch the plan turn to make an attack run, and then veer off without shooting as it didnt get a good angle and has to fly away and come back.

Obelisk: Brotherhood of nod's representation in the game. Great sound effect, satisfying to watch it nuke armor against the early game units. Held back by its wonky refire when switching targets, sometimes its instant sometimes it stops firing for a second before retargeting, which can aboslutely get you killed when a horde of eyeballs goes flying by. Also its the only tower in the game that cannot operate with the 3 passive regen you can get from permanent unlocks. requiring at the minimum 2-3 mana banks to break even without nuking your mana in seconds. turning it from a 1000 gold tower until a 2000-2500 tower to even get started. (probably one of the most visually satisfying towers in the game though)

D:
Frost keep: (pre update, havent used it yet with the freeze) Looks pretty, not very effective unless your stacking lots of them. it gives the impression of being an aoe tower however it only deals damage if its sprite hits an enemy, and even with 2-4 in an area sometimes an enemy can walk through the blizzard without ever getting hit. however once fully upgraded to mega slow it can provide a nice use. once upgraded it can pretty much clear out all the weak trash on the path while drastically increasing the time enemies are in range of your towers.

F: Particle beam: Looks absolutely amazing. it can absolutely chunk the shields off of beefy units, and even its steep mana cost isnt that relevent with its slow rate of fire. held back by being a single target, expensive tower that wont one shot units without serious gold investment. I need to put more time into making this tower work, but so far after a few uses havent gottem them to work (with just them and ballistas)


Unranked:
Lookouts: Iv only used it once on an attempt at the ballista/lookout only achievement which did not go well, dont know enough about the tower to give a rating.

[David]

Compilation of the results so far, ranked by highest votes first:
Ballista Any %Mana SSSSAA-
Poison Sprayer Shield Mana Poison SAAABB-
Flame Thrower Armor Mana Burn SAAABC-
Mortar Armor SABCCD-
Tesla Coil Shield Mana SABCCD-
Lookout Shield SABDD--
Shredder Health Bleed BBBBCD-
Obelisk Armor Mana AACCCDD
Frost Keep Health Mana BBCCCD-
Particle Cannon Shield Mana BCDDDDD
Radar Health CCDDD--
Encampment Armor DDDDDD-

[Oblivion]

Record levels: 45/fully beaten single, 45/fully beaten double, 40 triple

S:
Lookout Tower (S+ if I could) - This single tower synergizes with so many other towers to magnify damage on an unheard-of scale. This, combined with an obelisk, or some other tower that fires similarly quickly (see: sprayers), will melt any single entity so fast you'll confuse a single-target tower for being an AOE given enough time. I'm heavily, heavily convinced this is the best tower in the entire game, bar none.

Mortar - No other tower comes close to the damage/gold efficiency that this tower does. Combined with the AOE and range upgrades, plus a few levels into your choice of damage (I recommend armor), this will carry you clean to level 20, and can be used to chunk down beefier enemies later on if given crit upgrades. Can also apply DOT very well.

A:
Shredder - Similarly, 1-3 (depending on lane layouts) of these can take you clean to Oogie. Upgrades very nicely. The only thing keeping this out of S is that it requires some sort of other tower to handle shields before it fires, otherwise that massive damage is modestly wasted. "But why this in A if Lookout requires another tower by design?" I hear you asking. Simply put, the Lookout Tower makes any tower busted beyond measure. The Shredder would be busted if not for its dependency on the Poison Sprayer or Particle Cannon as the game progresses.

Poison Sprayer - Pound for pound, I consider the poison sprayer to be a straight-up better version of the flamethrower. A few of these will handle groups of enemies no problem early, and upgraded can chunk down shields as the game progresses. Its only holdback is it relies a bit heavily on card investment, but it's worth it.

Frost Tower (*REVISED*) - Pre-buff, this was a tower I used a lot but couldn't figure out why it wasn't working that great. Post-buff, these things shred harder than almost any other tower. Put 4 of these next to each other and watch virtually any target's health get ripped away. The thing that keeps it out of S-tier is the lack of consistency, basically relying on RNG instead of any sort of direction.

Obelisk - This would be S if not for its god-awful mana-hungry nature. Similar to the shredder, it's equally reliant on other investments, namely Mana Banks in this case, to be worthwhile long-term or in any number beyond 1 tower. No other tower beats its DPS output. Combined with a shield-focused Lookout on the same priority, this tower can beat any single entity in the game at breakneck pace. The tower also has no travel time for the beam to hit the target, which is exceptionally useful against missiles and eyes. Just be aware that if you want an Obelisk, be prepared to start to build your run around them.

B:
Ballista - You don't have to unlock them, they're exceptionally cheap, and they pay for themselves. The only downside is they fall off relatively quickly unless you put large monetary and card investments into them. Frankly, most card choices are better. But you're forced to rely upon them, and for that I respect them if nothing else.

Particle Cannon - You might be shocked to hear this, but this tower is second only to the Mortar in terms of damage/gold efficiency. Set it to target Most Shields/Progress, and it will chunk through more enemies than you'd ever expect it to. Relying on this to take out an enemy wholesale is perhaps not the wisest idea. But it's the single best shield destroyer in the game. The downside, of course, is the initial cost. But park 2-6 of these around your tower, get the range upgrades, and forget they exist. They'll do the work from there.

Encampment (*REVISED*) - This feels like a time delay mortar after playing with it a bit. They require a bit of a critical mass to be truly effective, but they're not terribly cost-prohibitive, especially relative to the cost of leveling it. Pairs well with other towers, but you'd be a fool to rely on them exclusively.

C:
Flamethrower - It's fine, but just not as good as Poison Sprayer. If other tower options are available, I'll usually go for them instead. But they are efficient. You could argue this up to B, but for me, I just never find myself using them as much as most other alternatives.

Radar - I personally like these a lot, and they've saved me more than I'm comfortable admitting. It's also really fun to get an airforce going. The problem is they just aren't reliable. When they hit, they hit like trucks, but they just aren't worth getting unless you plan on getting at least 6 of these.

D:
Tesla Tower - I *should* like these. These seem effective and efficient, especially if you upgrade them. I just cannot, for the life of me, get them to work better than a poison thrower or an obelisk. They're more efficient, objectively speaking, than both when it comes to mana. But the damage is just so underwhelming to start with, and it never feels like it gets better unless you pump so much money into it it would make Scrooge McDuck blush. I put them into C because they're well-like and people seem to use them, and so I respect them. I just don't think they're that good, frankly. That's my hot take.

[Carog the Fat]

it is interesting how varied the rating for mortar is personally I set the targeting to Most armour/most health/most health and they always provide best DPG

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by AntiGrav1ty:

In general single target towers are just not that great unless you can spam them like ballistas. Bosses or big mobs are not really an issue; any difficulty only comes from mass spawns in later levels.

I beg to differ: there isn't THAT much mobs to make single-targets useless. The issue isn't the amount of mobs, it's the clump of mobs creating other mobs on death. That is pretty dangerous, and all strategies that use dedicated killzones are always in danger to be overwhelmed by that, as the entire clump dies within a small area and it might have enough "steam" to roll out of killzone and thus end the run.

But when you're not using dedicated killzones, mob clumps are *never* a problem. If there's e.g. one obelisk in a lane configured to kill hovering portals, and then another one configured to kill observers, then downstream towers would only have to deal with a (sizable, but not clumped) wave of eyes, which isn't that much of a problem (even another "single target" obelisk handles that).

If you're well-used to aoe/ballsita spam killzones, it doesn't mean than other approaches are not working.

[AntiGrav1ty]

Originally posted by just.dont.do.it:

But when you're not using dedicated killzones, mob clumps are *never* a problem. If there's e.g. one obelisk in a lane configured to kill hovering portals, and then another one configured to kill observers, then downstream towers would only have to deal with a (sizable, but not clumped) wave of eyes, which isn't that much of a problem (even another "single target" obelisk handles that).

If you're well-used to aoe/ballsita spam killzones, it doesn't mean than other approaches are not working.

You are still using 2 killzones per lane this way. One zone with Obelisk and another zone downstream with aoe or a ton of ballistas to kill the new spawns. You would do exactly the same with aoe towers just that the first set of towers is already aoe and kills all the small mobs that spawn from the start and the second set kills the mobs spawned by observers and portals. There is no need to build any single target towers when good aoe towers can already kill all the bigger mobs (even the lvl45 boss) without any trouble.

Put it this way: You can fairly easily win a game with nothing but poison sprayers. You probably can't do it with only obelisks. Add on top that Obelisks take so much more additional investment and support buildings and it should be pretty clear that they should be lower on a tier list.

Doesn't mean they can't work, just that they are not as good.

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by AntiGrav1ty:

Put it this way: You can fairly easily win a game with nothing but poison sprayers. You probably can't do it with only obelisks. Add on top that Obelisks take so much more additional investment and support buildings and it should be pretty clear that they should be lower on a tier list.

Um. Yes you can. I did that, and it worked perfectly fine. Aside from using ballistas for the first waves, of course, and aside from placing one lookout, which wasn't even needed in the end. Took only about 10 obelisks.

You can't win with only Particle Cannons or Radar Towers, that's for sure. But winning with the fastest firing tower in the game (even if it only hits one target at a time) is quite easy.

[Dudedaya]

I don't know why everybody puts encampments to D tier. It's solid A. They are shredding through portals/beholders/missle guys like there are nothing.
It's super easy to win 1 way with them. And for 3 way you must have a decent map. Try to spread your lanes evenly - mines have AOE damage,
The idea is to begin with ballistas and level up them for range/slow only. Then place encampments near your base covering as much road as possible (mines will be stacking all the time mobs are coming, but will detonate only required for the kill). Since they will spawn mines with higher rate when covering more tiles. All statuses should be coming from the encampments and all ballistas should be set to fastest/progress/progress + near death/fastest/progress. Get all skills for encampments + all uni upgrades
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2750042400
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2750042670