What's the meta?

[Cincinnati Daddy]

What's good? What's bad? What's fun to use? I am currently hardstuck on Bone Desert tier 2 shards.

[achie]

First of all - the character and flame you choose play a major role in what makes sense to pick and what doesn't.
Lets say you play Tana (my favorite) - you should aim for a high fire rate tower and a super-high damage tower to pair it with. Why? Cause Arcane Blast and Fireball pair REALLY well with high fire rate and Arcane Storm is a game-changer on something like sniper tower set to target lowest hp.
Lets say you play demon flame - you should pick someone who can build tight corridors around the fireplace to keep upgrading that spark ability (like Tiny).

More universal rules:
- pay attention to targeting (e.g. certain towers should be set to last/furthest, like flamethrower);
- some towers really suck (I really dislike arcane damage ones and most electric turrets);
- debugging encyclopedia, blessed chisel, tome of the endless, time-saving device and golden roulette are game-changing and can easily turn a mediocre run into a winning one (depending ofc on what you currently need);
- building a longer maze is frequently better than buying one or two mediocre towers, so don't skimp out on card draws;
- range upgrades on towers are really valuable as they reduce towers' downtime and lets them cover more of the map (especially powerful when paired with flamethrower, axe, scythe, hammer, fan);
- slowing enemies who are first down will make them group up which means you can really get your money worth out of AoE attacks (having a froststorm paired with a starfall shows just how great this is);
- most 2x2 towers are trash in my honest opinion (I almost exclusively use sniper and boulder because only these don't disappoint me);
- set some quick-firing towers to "lowest hp" so that they finish off enemies that could otherwise just march into the fire;
- set most high-damage single-target towers to "highest hp" as this lets their damage not be wasted;
- do not underestimate powerups and weird runes - coin hunter/gold rune can easily make you a motherload in an early round, mega rune causes the other rune to be multiplied (creating multiple upgrades), malfunctions can be entirely avoided by having a protection rune, etc.;
- some runes are better for 2x2 and 3x3 towers than others - stat-up runes scale with tower size, having really little effect on big towers, while protection, explosion and gold runes work exactly the same with them as they would with a smaller tower.

[Miathan]

What's good? As someone who cleared 3 regions on heroic shard 24:

- demon flame
- Tiny
- Belloc

Tiny if you can get away with it because the easy access to buff tiles gives you the highest tower strength. Belloc is the most reliable though, because of giving many of your towers immunity to disables.

Tower wise a lot of stuff can work, depends on your buffs really. But DO NOT ignore arcane towers or 2x2 towers like the previous commenter suggests. These categories contain some of the best towers.

[sirensasa]

that too hard for me
I can not clear 24 without event character

[HondaRadio]

I just learned you can use the poison tower to conduct electricity to the other side of a path. That has made some of the later levels a bit easier. My best runs usually involve getting the gold, poison mushroom, flamethrower, sniper, lava and ice spike towers.

I try and get as many gold towers down as possible early on with good coverage of the map (if you use green flame you can get this down very early), cluster short range towers like axes or hammers around these and make a big spiral where enemies are constantly slowed by ice and poisoned (with a good mix of green, orange and purple mushrooms). I make some large areas of solid wall around flame for long range towers + flamethrowers. Place the quick firing small ice towers here too they are very effective if you have a lot of them at end of maze where enemies are low HP.

Chunk seems to be OP for Misty Forest, he is not so affected by many debuffs from Skeleton King the mega runes really help. The roulette wheel always helps a lot too I always choose that. Tana can be the most powerful but is also the most dependent on RNG, I like Tiny.