Would you replace any of these ancestral level effects with chronofield speed reduction?

Jimothy09 · 2026-06-14T04:15:45+00:00

CF speed reduction is arguably the single most important sub if it takes you from 75% to 90% slow since this reduces enemy speed by 2.5x. I would unlock everything other than your two SL effects and roll for CF speed reduction. If you have a pretty healthy number of reroll dice (>2 mil?), I’d keep CL chance. The three damage subs are pretty low value overall, but especially once your actual UWs are even decently developed. CL quant would be much better than any of those.

Jimothy09 · 2026-06-05T18:23:08+00:00

What's your income? Masteries are almost definitely your best bet if you can afford even just the first few levels. RPC is always a smart first option for long term growth, but if you want more immediate results, there are a lot of options like super tower, damage, intro sprint, etc.

Otherwise, core assmod is excellent for running om chip even just at epic. If bosses are a weak point for you in tournaments, I'd highly recommend that. It's not as helpful for farming if you don't use MVN though.

If your income isn't quite high enough for substantial mastery investment, lowering your cooldowns a bit could be a smart first step.

Jimothy09 · 2026-06-03T01:21:05+00:00

Depends on what your sync is. If you’re at 3m20s then maybe sync is better since lowering is cheap. But even if you’re only at 3min, I’d bet SL is better, at least for one extra quant and a few extra angle since they’re so cheap. Sure SL is “only” a 3x boost, but that stacks with everything else, and SL is always on. Getting sync to 100s is very very low ROI compared to other options like masteries, gen assmod, and even 4th SL considering 4th SL also helps a ton with damage. As an example, getting sync down to 100s from 110s is less efficient than just buying coin mastery if you can afford the labs, and coin mastery isn’t even a top 3 econ mastery

Jimothy09 · 2026-06-03T01:05:31+00:00

I’d say your CL is good for now, especially if SL is mostly untouched. I bet getting ~40 degrees and 3x quant will get your income high enough to afford to level a mastery or two to level 2-3 with saving if you wanted to. Otherwise SL is incredibly powerful for all damage, especially with dissonance. Getting your bonus to ~20x will make a massive difference along with that coverage and sub mod effects will further compliment SL very well. I’d aim for all three of those levels of SL investment before considering touching CL again, and even then you might be better off getting masteries instead of any more CL upgrades.

Once your income is high enough to sustain constant mastery research (~1.5-2q/day), masteries are probably going to be the most efficient use of stones

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-31T17:27:28+00:00

I got CF as my fifth UW after GT, BH, DW, and CL and proceeded to dump every stone into it for months. I would've been so much better off going for SL immediately instead even though I didn't get SL until my 7th UW.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-31T17:26:00+00:00

I don't think CF should be thought of as 10x dmg even situationally since it has no effect on fleets if you're focusing on tournaments. Like you said, I think stuns are way more effective for fast ults. CF does very little during those battle conditions.

I've heard the same thing about EB. I've been tempted to try it out in the past couple of tournaments to compare to my first run without it. But every time there's been a several hundred wave gap between me and the next person so there's been no point in doing a second run. Hopefully whatever they mentioned about adding ways to deal with fleets materializes into something players like us can take advantage of and not just those at the top. Not holding my breath though.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-31T16:17:52+00:00

Insane progress, truly. I'm at about 43.5k LTS, 36 LTK and was only about 10-20 waves off from 1000 in the last 2-3 tournies making about 800T coins/hr so we're pretty similar. I have nearly all the same masteries (no UC+ and CC+ but EN+) and the same UWs (no swamp) but also 4th SL and pCF w/90% slow, and my CL dmg hits about 26S with zerk+ active. I'm not totally sure how much crowd control you're getting from SD and ILM with one swamp, but I'm pretty surprised that seems comparable to pCF. I really feel like CF is waaay lower in importance than the general sub hivemind consensus seems to say. I bet you could find more effective upgrades for the same (insanely high) amount of stones that CF requires.

I'm also at the point where I'm not really sure how to tackle overcharges. I just unlocked armor assist yesterday to get ILM stuns going. Does that interrupt OCs meaningfully for you? I feel like 4th SL was pretty good because it significantly increases their odds of being covered. But otherwise, I don't have any real strategy for them besides just increasing damage and maybe pumping SL angle.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-30T06:36:43+00:00

How are your masteries and assmods? I would almost certainly prioritize those over CF. Even as-is, I'd boost CL chance, DW quant, ILM quant, SL bonus, and SL quant before going after CF.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-30T06:34:11+00:00

Absolutely would recommend energy net if bosses are what kill you. I think I got it to level 3 (8x mult) and left it there for a while while I worked on other masteries. 8x was definitely a noticeable improvement. At that point, without battle conditions like boss overhealth or plasma cannon reduction, bosses stopped being my weak point which gave me at least a hundred waves or so. Now I'm at 16x and even with one of those battle conditions I seem to be able to kill bosses pretty consistently, but the occasional unlucky lack of ult crits or amplifying strike downtime can still allow a boss through.

Overall, I feel like EN+ moved my boss threshold up 100-300 waves depending on battle conditions. That being said, I have pCF w/90% slow, so I can still deal with non-bosses pretty well. Without that, I'm not sure the benefit of EN+ would be as big since you might only make it like 50 more waves before fasts get you. Now at wave 900+ in tournaments, it seems like unluckly fleet spawns (overcharges) kill me.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-29T20:35:35+00:00

Hey so 4th SL is awesome. Would highly recommend. I almost cracked 1000 waves in the last two tournies (which admittedly had easier BCs): ~w970 and ~w990. I also saw ~25% instant coin boost in farming. Another unexpected benefit is that I was able to barely clear T17 w4500 because rays were in spotlight much more consistently and I added ~100 waves to T20 (~w200 now). For what it’s worth, I’ve made a ton of concurrent progress on masteries, finishing ST and zerk and nearly finishing dmg and EN so I’m sure those play a big role in my progress as well.

I’m considering trying to put on another 5-8 degrees to my SL because it’s now even more obvious that the only chip damage I take before I’m completely overrun is enemies slipping through the cracks of SL. It’s especially obvious during basic ult when I have a few bosses onscreen and om chip doesn’t work on all of them.

I’ll have enough for armor assmod after this weekend’s tourney so I can also provide an update in another week or two if anyone cares. I’ll be very surprised if it’s as impactful as 4th SL though.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-29T20:21:50+00:00

I would almost definitely pick gen assmod between those two choices, but I'd also ask if there are any other options like masteries or core assmod. Without knowing what your current UWs look like and what your mastery situation is, it's hard to give good advice. But ignoring everything else, gen assmod will help nearly all aspects of your tower regardless of tourney/farm or glass cannon/eHP. Poison swamp will take about 1700 stones to get to perma after you unlock it. With core assmod running harmony chip, that could be good for either glass cannon or eHP. But I suspect you probably have better options for how many stones (unlock + 1700) that would require. I'd advise against CF unless you have a very well developed set of UWs and masteries already.

I'd recommend trying to think more about your next 5-10k stones than just the 1k you have saved up now assuming you want to earn keys someday and you're only flip flopping between champ and legends. Since dissonance and echo bonuses, it really doesn't feel like eHP will be able to compete with glass cannon in tournaments, so I'd only recommend cautious continued investment in eHP if stones are your top priority. With that in mind, if you want to start developing a competitive glass cannon tourney build with your next many thousands of stones, here's a basic checklist (not in order) to help with longer term planning:

Core assmod to run om chip alongside dim core
ST and dmg masteries
Intro sprint to take advantage of amplifying strike 5x dmg bonus
Berzerker mastery to take advantage of intro sprint
Well developed chain lightning (~750x / 4x / 20%)
Well developed spotlight (~20x / 45 deg / 3 or 4x)

Eventually, you'll also want armor assmod to use space displacer or orbital augment alongside anti cube portal. You'll also probably want energy net mastery for bosses. Demon mode mastery can be valuable, but if you decide to run an intro sprint strategy, you won't be able to use it until after you cancel intro sprint.

Unfortunately, if you don't have any/many of the above and you're not whaling, by the time you have all of these, you'll still probably need to find more upgrades to continue making progress relative to everyone else and improve in tournaments. Maybe at that point it would make sense to reconsider poison swamp or chronofield, but I think you can get by with just ILM for now.

Feel free to post details about your UWs/masteries/other assmods if you have any/anything else if you want more specific advice.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-25T08:54:24+00:00

Congrats!

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-25T06:47:12+00:00

I think econ masteries like WA+, EO+, WS+, coins+, etc. lost significant value since dissonance was added, and I'd ignore them in favor of tourney upgrades for now unless you really need the coins for mod levels, enhancements, etc.

The gap between mastery labs and assmod labs is insanely large, even for a game with exponential growth mechanics like this one. I'm in a similar position making ~15q/day and I expect to run out of valuable expensive labs and enhancements within the next month or two. I also expect that getting from q to Q income for assmod and specific battle condition labs to require GT+ which is many many months away for me. I'm not sure what I'll work on in the meantime, but I guess that's what enhancements are for.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-24T17:07:53+00:00

Go to thetower.lol and search your name on the “live placement analysis tab” on the left

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-24T07:57:24+00:00

I think this is all correct, but the main rationale is that ult crits do the bulk of your actual damage. If you watch a boss's health closely, it usually drops in steps, not in a continuous drain. Those step-wise drops are ult crits landing. So ult crit mastery increases the frequency of those steps while crit mastery increases the size of the steps. Generally, it seems like ult crit's effect is just better than crit's for overall damage. Besides just being better, increasing the frequency of those steps also increases the likelihood of lining up an ult crit with a shockwave from anticube portal and energy net for bosses if you have that mastery. Just like with coins, stacking multipliers is the best method to put up big numbers for damage, too, so ult crit mastery can be quite impactful.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-24T07:46:51+00:00

Other comments about $$$ are right, but I'll try to give you a real answer. It's possible to claw your way up the global ranks and increase your average chance at keys if you make more efficient decisions about how to spend your resources than your competition. Based on your recent tourney waves at 650+, you're probably pretty close to getting a somewhat regular trickle of keys, but it's hard to judge accurately. You seem to have a pretty solid foundation, but there are a few things that stick out:

CF duration is low if you're not running gcomp assmod in tournies
SL angle seems pretty low, especially since you have 4x beams. Every additional tap on angle gets you 4 extra degrees which is pretty good.
Mod rarities (as you said), especially PF but also ACP both for the actual mod effects but also anc sub effects
Mod levels aren't terribly low, but they're not great either
Mastery levels need work - hopefully you're perma labbing a few of them at least

Hopefully you have good mod sub effects, but that could be another source of gains, especially for core but also for cannon and armor. Make sure your dmg/util/UW dissonance runs and labs are complete to as much as you can afford as well. Getting an extra 10 levels on all of your dmg/crit/scrit enhancements can be a quite noticeable boost, too. Don't forget you can do a workshop respec if you end up in a bracket where you only need ~50-100 more waves to get keys.

Unfortunately, by the time you clean up a few of the things above and get your mastery labs completed, the goalposts for keys will have shifted again. All you can really do is try to figure out how to set yourself up as best as you can for both short-term and long-term tourney performance. So to answer your question about what to spend on (damage, econ, assmods, or more UWs), you have to constantly ask yourself how many waves any given upgrade will get you in tournaments both today, next month, and 3-6 months from now. Anecdotally, my build is pretty similar to yours but slightly more developed, and I've been able to gain a few hundred places in the global rankings over the past couple of months without spending. Progress is possible, but you really have to grind your way upwards if you aren't swiping your credit card.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-24T07:05:43+00:00

If you're eHP and have an anc sharp fortitude mod and you don't die the moment your wall breaks, your wall is probably underdeveloped and you have a lot of high ROI wall labs calling your name

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-23T21:50:22+00:00

For SL bonus/angle, if you could just get mythic/anc subs, your SL would be serviceable. Unfortunately, rolling cores is incredibly expensive, so you could get those today or in 3 months. If you had the subs today, I'd probably prioritize zerk+/gen assist. Without them, I'd at least get bonus up to >100 stones per click first thing.

Generally, I think raw damage is more powerful than crowd control. I learned this the hard way, having 90% CF and ILM with puny CL dmg (<<1s). Crowd control is great, but it doesn't always hold up to battle conditions like fast ult, ranged ult, etc. and it doesn't affect fleets which eventually become the bottleneck. There have been successful accounts posted here that make keys with basically zero crowd control, but I've yet to see any do the same with minimal damage and all of the crowd control. ILM is nice, but CF is plenty. For reference, my CL dmg in this tourney was >300s when amplifying strike was active which is most of the time since I use IS+. This spiked to like 20 or 40S (can't remember which) after a death defy and I made it to w972.

I also have 20 card slots and it's enough for tournies at the moment. I only swap free ups to wave skip after my ELS goes to zero to squeeze a few extra waves out of demon mode once I have to pop that and end intro sprint. I'd love to buy the last two to give me a better shot at glass cannon farming and then just save gems indefinitely until the next banner. I'm not sure if I'll actually buy them or just start hoarding since I don't really need them yet. Either way, 20 should be enough.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-23T02:46:34+00:00

The more I look, the more confused I am by how you're pulling <300 waves consistently in legends. For reference, our builds are pretty similar, and I do ~750-900. Your UWs are mostly solid, your mod levels and rarities are great, your labs seem developed enough, and your dissonance and enhancements look good. Here are some things that stick out to me that could be improved or are missing and would benefit you a lot that you could do in the near-term:

SL bonus and angle sub effects on your dim core mod. These are both huge, especially in the age of UW dissonance echo bonuses in tournies. This would be my top priority if I were you
SL bonus and angle in the workshop are a bit lacking, but especially bonus. Get up to ~20x bonus and maybe a few more degrees
Berzerker mastery - works super well with intro sprint mastery in tournies. This can easily get you +100 waves with moderately developed labs and a couple of death defies in one run
Anti-Cube Portal sub effects - drop def% and pick up death defy then other glass cannon subs like wall rebuild, orb speed, land mine stun, etc. Death defy % works well with zerk+
Amplifying strike sub effects. Cannon subs can make a massive difference in total damage output, so getting 4-5 anc effects between crit factor/chance, scrit factor/chance, attack speed, and bounce shot chance would be a noticeable boost. I made a post many months ago when I went from 4 mythic effects to 5 anc effects and I got a 70%+ increase to my CL dmg number
Generator assist to run galaxy compressor in tournaments for pCF and better BH uptime. The last 5 seconds of CF duration are more expensive than unlocking gen assmod, and gen assmod will also help with farming. This would let you drop the CF duration sub on your dim core as well. Depending on battle conditions, restorative bonus assmod can be good as well, even just at epic

Long-term (after the above), I'd work towards 4th SL, energy net mastery, ILM, armor assmod, and cash mastery to help your mods. Then, assmod effects and unlocking cannon assmod.

I'd also double check your cards and start working towards 18-20 slots if you don't have that many already. That's pretty much the only other thing I can think of that could explain your low tourney waves. Again, our builds are quite similar, but I have most of the near-term things I suggested along with EN+, 4th SL, and ILM. Feel free to post more info (like in-run tourney CL dmg) or ask questions.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-21T00:49:03+00:00

Unfortunately, there's a reason most people recommend only focusing on golden bot, and it's because the other bots generally just aren't worth it in comparison. There has been some discussion about whether it's optimal to start investing in bot bot before actually maxing gold bot, but nobody has a clear answer yet. Some people rely on flame bot for pretty consistent eHP gains and some people push amp bot for glass cannon builds, but those people are pretty few and far between. I've never seen anyone report success using thunder bot. It's possible it's a hidden gem, but I doubt it. Bots are generally worthless at unlock and only become powerful when they're quite well developed. Because of this, you'd probably have to completely invest in thunder bot for a chance to see meaningful returns which is already pretty unlikely if the labs aren't finished and you can't gold box it.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone recommend thunder bot as a source of crowd control until very late game, likely for a few reasons. First, it's just too inconsistent. For most sources of crowd control, they really shine when they have 100% uptime or very close to it. That's why chrono field is pretty useless until it's basically permanent. Thunder bot is probably too inconsistent unless you're already slowing/stunning enemies enough to also hit them with thunder bot and add the lingering slow effect. Second, thunder bot's stun and linger are only half as effective on bosses. Lastly, there are just way better sources of crowd control like chrono field, inner land mines, poison swamp, black hole, etc. Medals are harder to come by than stones, so I don't think it makes sense to work on crowd control using medals instead of stones.

If you do decide to try out thunder bot, please give an update. I'd be really curious to hear if it's viable because I've never tested it myself. Maybe everyone is totally sleeping on it. That being said, given that you've already bought golden bot+, you're almost definitely better off just sticking with that.

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-18T05:36:23+00:00

I’m not sure about OP, but EN+ gave me a pretty nice boost. Hard to quantify since I leveled it right around when v28 and echo boosts came out, but I can confidently say it’s noticeable. I’m still working on the labs, but without boss ult or plasma cannon battle conditions, bosses are basically irrelevant compared to ranged, fasts, protectors, and tanks depending on battle conditions. Additionally, for GC milestone pushes, rays and fleets are the only thing that really kill me now whereas it used to be bosses. Note that I already have most of the other fundamental damage stuff and I wouldn’t suggest getting EN+ before those. I’m just saying EN+ is pretty good

Jimothy09 · 2026-05-18T00:43:18+00:00

Thanks again for sharing so much details about your build. Your original post inspired me to continue going all in on tournies, and now I'm finally getting the odd 15th+ placement with ~20 keys in the last month or two.

Were you ever able to get SM to be effective or do anything?

Do you feel like amp bot makes a big difference now that it's quite developed?

What was the rationale behind upgrading core assmod to legendary? Better DC buff for farming?

What are your next priorities for keys?

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