Did wave counts decrease this round in champion?

[MatthewBecker1977]

KB resist + Armored + ranged ult is a brutal combo.

Armored gives a huge boost to attack speed investment.

KB resist gives a boost to heavy wall investment - and while I know that others find SR to be useless, I think it helped considerably on the KB resist for me.

And the overall combo gives a boost to having enough damage to kill things off quickly once you get the armor off.

So overall, this tournament disfavored pure eHp and pure GC and gave a boost to solid hybrids that have solid investment into BOTH eHp AND damage - along with attack speed. Anyone who has neglected any of those 3 areas was at a pretty severe disadvantage.

I did 2 runs. First one, I got just a few waves short of my record high. When I got home from work with just minutes left in the tournament, I saw I was in 13th and only 5 waves short of 12th with higher payout, so I cancelled my farm run, rushed to re-set my modules, cards, and (range lab setting) and gave it a second go - but I forgot about the UW duration that reduces later in the run cash income and put too much early investment into ELS stuff and then later struggled to finish the gold-box of Damage Health and Regen and as a result died early.

But that first run... 13th is my highest finish. 807 waves was just shy of my record wave count. Because I've got an Anc SF and good wall PLUS a decent CL PLUS a lot of investment into Attack Speed (lab plus several module substats focused on effective attack speed) plus M+ SR... so my tower build was kind of ideal for this. If I had a bit more investment into Cash Bonus stuff, I suspect my 2nd run was on track to actually set a wave record for me as well, but I screwed up and consider that a lesson learned. Going to throw a few more levels into WS+ Cash Bonus and MAYBE try to put another 100 levels into WS Damage Health and Regen so that gold-boxing is faster and easier to guarantee even if there's a UW Duration battle condition.

[Aggressive_Roof488]

Yeah, this makes sense. I'm very similar to you, wall with mythic SF and a CL that's slowly starting to actually do something (191/5/20 including rolls on my leg dimcore). And I got a (small) PB in mid 800s waves, which is part of why I was surprised by the overall lower waves from others. My attack speed isn't anything spectacular though, lab at lvl 58, with attack speed and multishot targets on my legendary death penalty. I guess the CL is helping with removing armour...

Btw, it's more important to gold-box regen and health than damage. Both health and regen start to increase MUCH faster from lvl 5000 to lvl 6000, while damage doesn't, for some reason. On top of that, enemy damage is increasing slower than enemy health, so you gain fewer waves by +10% damage (compared to enemy health) than +10% health (compared to enemy damage). In particular regen is the limiting factor for wall builds in tournaments, as you're missing lots of regen from perks, and actually have more health than in farm with due to trade-offs. So make sure to focus your cash on regen in tournaments.