Hero Tier List (based on usefulness/strength) and explanations

[nil.hypothesis]

I will evaluate every hero at Level 10 and in regards to Impossible difficulty. A grain of salt should be taken, as Linirean heroes (overall) are less useful than Dark Army by virtue of their passive boosts from the upgrade tree being much less useful the further you get into the campaign: Linirean passives are focused on keeping your ground units and heroes alive, and the utility of ground units plummets the further you get, whereas Dark Army buffs your damage overall and the slow effect from using a DA ultimate becomes ridiculously useful the further you get. Melee vs Ranged is another large determining factor, simply because flying enemies are such a major threat that they need to be geared towards almost exclusively.

S tier - persistently strong with few flaws, use nearly always (9.1-10)

Therien (10) - I very much debated whether Therien or Lumenir was the best hero, and settled on Therien for multiple reasons. Her ultimate is insane, being superb crowd control, doing extremely good damage, and having the less-obvious utility of sectioning ground enemies off to allow towers to focus flying enemies. She can teleport instantly anywhere on the map, making her hands-down the best for flexibility in positioning and defending extremely aggro waves. The cherry on top is her ability to buff the range of your towers by a hefty margin, which ends up being a saving grace consistently. Her shadow clone is solid for amping her DPS (and can also be left somewhere while you warp her elsewhere for added utility), and her AOE ability does respectable damage. Her shield ability is probably her weakest, but still very strong at points. I can't think of a time to not use Therien.

Lumenir (9.8) - good god, that ultimate. If Therien's ult didn't exist, this would be hands-down the strongest, and even then it gives her a run for her money that very few other ults manage. She does staggering amounts of true damage and has so much utility across her entire kit. Radiant Wave is one of the strongest AOE abilities in the game, her dragon companion amps your other hero's defense capabilities, she has the strongest shielding ability in the game that is nearly a global buff, and Celestial Judgment is a wicked nuke with strong added stun (if the poor target managed to even take the nuke and survive). Where she suffers is that she is a Linirean hero, and a flying hero. For some reason, positioning for flying heroes is extremely awkward and takes some getting used to to make proper use. She shines regardless of these weaknesses.

Anya (9.2) - Anya is simply just a better Grimson. They both have quick repositioning as a strength, but Anya is dual ranged/melee with straight better damage. Vampiric Claw is strong for keeping her alive against powerful large enemies, Misty Step is a solid multi-target damage ability, and Argent Storm is insanely powerful as an AOE with very high true damage output. Dusk Beasts is her weakest ability, but the gold-stealing can occasionally prove its worth. I think her absolute best strength, though, is her ultimate, and its ability to respawn Anya immediately on death. She's a DPS machine and the best Linirean hero for that use case.

A tier - strong with some flaws, solid general use choices (7.1-9)

Onagro (9) - despite being slow as all hell to reposition, proper positioning makes Onagro a true force to be reckoned with. Has a flexible and strong kit with a lot of AOE and crowd control utility, can target flying enemies, and his ultimate has one of the shortest cooldowns of any available with respectable true damage. You can set up Onagro to defend a lane nearly single-handedly, giving you opportunity to shore up lanes elsewhere. A solid choice at nearly any turn. He can definitely struggle with being overwhelmed at times, particularly with an ultimate that doesn't touch flying enemies, but I have found this weakness to be much less glaring than I originally evaluated.

Nyru (8.9) - for how the game sells Nyru's survivability/health stat, this dude is very hard to get rid of. Quick to reposition with a lot of crowd control utility, especially given that his ultimate is one of the best CC ults around. Enfeeblement Charm and Leaf Whirlwind combine to make Nyru extremely difficult to kill and a solid choice to stop enemy encroachment in its tracks. Verdant Blast is a respectable nuke, only paling in comparison to others by virtue of being magic and not true damage. Nyru's biggest downside is, of course, being Linirean, but this also means he's one of the very best early-game choices with the strengths of Linirean heroes tending more towards earlier stages.

Kosmyr (7.2) - Kosmyr has underwhelmed me quite a bit. He's got probably the strongest crowd control kit of all heroes, and his ultimate does very solid true damage with great true damage in the rest of his kit as well, but the awkwardness and issues with positioning as a flying hero reduces his utility considerably, and his regular attacks and cooldowns are draggingly (dragonly?) slow. Another major issue with Kosmyr is that very little in his kit can deal with flying enemies, so you will need to commit more to shoring up that weakness. All the same, he is quite strong and has a lot of usefulness, I just find myself avoiding him.

B tier - weak or average, some niche use (4.1-7)

Vesper (7) - your typical starting hero with surprising longevity in usefulness. Dual melee/ranged is a key strength, and he has one of the better AOE ults among all heroes, with solid damage and an average cooldown. Strong abilities with a good balanced mix of damage and crowd control utility. He's just not very survivable and he's Linirean with weak repositioning, and there are much better options as you progress. You can't really go wrong using him regardless.

Warhead (6.7) - Warhead is without a doubt the strongest melee hero you can use, even with being confined to melee staying a glaring weakness. An absolute unit with ridiculous tankiness, solid, consistent damage with a lot of strong DOT and AOE, a respectable slow, and one of the best executes you can field. If flying enemies were not so scary here, Warhead would rank even higher. Unfortunately, the game pigeonholes the usefulness of melee in general, so I have not used him much.

Broden (5.8) - another flying hero with a solid kit and multiple issues. Broden leans more heavily into damage in his kit and he has a strong execute (notably only useful on ground enemies), but his regular attacks are pitifully weak, he's Linirean, and he's a flying hero with strange and unwieldy positioning requirements. His ult is also very underwhelming from my experience.

C tier - very weak, almost no use cases (2.1-4)

Raelyn (3.2) - While seeming dependable early on, Raelyn quickly becomes almost a hindrance. You don't really gain much from her tankiness with the tendencies of the gameplay as you progress, and though her other abilities have their utility, they're just not enough. Her strength over Grimson is crowd control and an ultimate that summons an additional unit that does, funnily enough, more damage than she does. I like her kit, I just don't think she's a feasible choice past maybe stage 7, and by then you have quite a few clearly better options. Melee heroes in general make me sad in this game.

Grimson (3) - what a cool hero. What a seriously underwhelming hero. For being melee, he's still better than *cough* Torres... but he's the second from the bottom for a reason. Good longevity in combat, especially to wear out big bads, with a strong AOE/crowd control ultimate, solid damage skills, and an execute that unfortunately is one of the weaker ones (despite having additional survivability utility). His regular attacks tickle enemies, he's melee, and he's just one single guy. There really is not much reason to use him outside of flavor or preference.

F tier - garbage, no reason to use (0-2)

Torres (0.1) - I'll give Torres one single positive, and that's that he essentially becomes a walking ground tower. Outside of that, he's just a damage sponge with no damage to speak of, and when his summon ability is on cooldown, he does little more than hold up one single enemy unit for a bit. His ult has crowd control utility that just pales in comparison to any other option you can field. I got him to Level 10 in forest stages and never touched him again. God awful.

I definitely hope they tweak the current heroes and add new ones, as with the towers, the variety and usability feels considerably less than previous titles. Hope this list gives you some idea of what direction you should take as you get further in, and do let me know your thoughts on where heroes stand.

Edit 7/31 - I moved Anya, Kosmyr and Vesper up and Onagro and Warhead down, and added numbered ratings to each hero's explanation to give more of a clear picture of where they stand for me.

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by nil.hypothesis:

Melee heroes in general make me sad in this game.

There wasn't a single Kingdom Rush game that didn't have really bad melee heroes.
I don't really understand why they keep making low-damage melee heroes - they're very literally useless.

[All For Her Smile]

Originally posted by nil.hypothesis:

S tier

Therien

The cherry on top is her ability to buff the range of your towers by a hefty margin, which ends up being a saving grace consistently.

And more importantly, she buffs the range of all the towers from anywhere on the map, she doesn't have to be standing near them. I haven't finished the entire game yet (just got destroyed on Map 14), but I agree that Therien is by far the best hero, I can't imagine Warhead performing better than her and I was never a fan of the dragons. Now if we could only pair up Therien with Dierdre -who also buffed towers-, that would have been an incredible duo but, sadly, older heroes don't return in this franchise.

Originally posted by just.dont.do.it:

Originally posted by nil.hypothesis:

Melee heroes in general make me sad in this game.

There wasn't a single Kingdom Rush game that didn't have really bad melee heroes.
I don't really understand why they keep making low-damage melee heroes - they're very literally useless.

Dierdre wasn't technically a melee hero, but she could tank everything in close combat and despite her very low damage, she was more efficient than the actual melee heroes in Frontiers. I remember those giant Apes from the Jungle stages, she could stall them forever. I genuinely wish she were added to newer KR games.

[Evil Dave]

Therien S tier? At best It should be A tier. I agree that Lumenir is S tier though. Broden should be A or S tier. He can stun, kill a enemy instantly (sometimes strong enemies) and the griffins he summons are useful in a lot of situations. I used Lumenir and Broden the most and I have beaten Impossible mode in a blink of an eye.

PD: It is me, or the Linirean towers are better than the Dark ones? I ended up using only Linirean towers because of the DPS.

[Steinar]

Originally posted by Evil Dave:

PD: It is me, or the Linirean towers are better than the Dark ones? I ended up using only Linirean towers because of the DPS.

It's not just you. All the tier lists you see this soon after release are flawed.

[nil.hypothesis]

Originally posted by Evil Dave:

Therien S tier? At best It should be A tier. I agree that Lumenir is S tier though. Broden should be A or S tier. He can stun, kill a enemy instantly (sometimes strong enemies) and the griffins he summons are useful in a lot of situations. I used Lumenir and Broden the most and I have beaten Impossible mode in a blink of an eye.

Therien is without a doubt the best hero in this game at the current moment. Instant repositioning and her ult alone make her the strongest. She makes Impossible a cakewalk, especially in Void stages. I value strategic flexibility over nearly any other factor, which Therien pays in spades.

Broden's execute is worse than Grimson's, and both are weak, along with executes generally being worse in a game with higher volumes of swarm mobs. His basic attacks are garbage, the rest of his kit is mid, his ult is not that great when it's pure damage and nothing else, and flying heroes are even more wonky here than previous games, which may be touched on. Outside Lumenir, the other two flying heroes don't feel worth using in their current state.

I mean, if you're really looking for a pure DPS Linirean hero, Anya is leaps and bounds better than Broden in every way.

Originally posted by Evil Dave:

PD: It is me, or the Linirean towers are better than the Dark ones? I ended up using only Linirean towers because of the DPS.

Overall, you aren't wrong on this, barring a few specific outliers (Necros and Ballistas). It is unfortunate as well, since the DA tower passive hero-damage buff from the skill tree is better in the long run, but I can manage to cash in on that with the Necros, being they're my most built tower. Linirean skill tree passives past the gold discount are hot garbage.

[valium]

Broden's activated ability is probably the best single target damaging thing in the game if you get both eagles targeting the same thing, and deal with the small hp spawns a lot of maps do extremely well.

Nyru has been the best performing hero for me overall.

Torres is a 0/10, if he stopped repositioning himself whenever he builds his turret, he would be a 2/10.

[Noop]

I find it weird that you just use the name of the heroes. Do you realy think anybody remembers those without going back into the game and looking them up? Yea exactly. All of them are very forgettable and why would anybody care for the name. Especially considering that so many people critized they are extremly generic and forgettable.

Next time I suggest you add a short description like Blue Dragon or Griffin Guy or whatever.

[valium]

I find it weird you couldnt figure out what hero he was talking about from the context of the description of why he gave them their particular score.

[nil.hypothesis]

Originally posted by Noop:

I find it weird that you just use the name of the heroes. Do you realy think anybody remembers those without going back into the game and looking them up? Yea exactly. All of them are very forgettable and why would anybody care for the name. Especially considering that so many people critized they are extremly generic and forgettable.

Next time I suggest you add a short description like Blue Dragon or Griffin Guy or whatever.

This is the strangest, most daft reply I have ever received, quite frankly.

[???]

Ranking Therien above all the dragons. Now that is a hot take.

[Tommy Gray x Land Raider]

Bonehart is back and I find him as S tier thanks to excellent abilities and crowd control.

[Blakester]

Originally posted by Noop:

I find it weird that you just use the name of the heroes. Do you realy think anybody remembers those without going back into the game and looking them up? Yea exactly. All of them are very forgettable and why would anybody care for the name. Especially considering that so many people critized they are extremly generic and forgettable.

Next time I suggest you add a short description like Blue Dragon or Griffin Guy or whatever.

Dumbest reply I have ever read congrats 👏

[Pielord]

Originally posted by Tommy Gray x Land Raider:

Bonehart is back and I find him as S tier thanks to excellent abilities and crowd control.

I mean, boneheart has amazing skills and he alone can take care of an entire lane. There is absolutely no reason to not take him. And while the Bone Drakes are just extra reinforcements, they actually pack quite a punch. He is one of the best heroes if not the absolute best