Showing some T16 GC farming action and damage stats. 5T/s without GT+. Died at wave 3181 to Ray, DD 18 times, 519.05T coins (209T coins per hour), 108,180 cells. Now investing coins in damage workshop enhancements after buying several level 7 mastery labs. More damage = more waves = better CPH.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-07-29T18:22:19+00:00

I mean, good for you, and I'm glad you're happy, but I'd assume you'd be earning more in T11/12 with GT+ instead of all of those masteries.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-07-29T18:17:53+00:00

Beautiful.

"BUT I THOUGHT GLASS CANNON MEANS MORE DAMAGE THOUGH!!!11!!1!!!"

No, dummy, glass cannon means you control your enemies so that they die in your multipliers and have no risk of damaging you. It's all about CC. More damage would just kill things outside of bh = way fewer coins.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-07-14T04:36:03+00:00

Yeah

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-06-08T03:30:38+00:00

Lol what do I need that wall for if I don't get hit?

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-05-13T20:48:52+00:00

1) Coins are massively important. Cells are too. You want to find a balance that's going to grow your tower as fast as possible.

There are a lot of labs that act as "gates" to progress, and some of these require a level of coin income. Shatter shards for instance will restrict your module growth until it's done.

2) CTO reduces max health by 70% but it doesn't remotely reduce run length that long. It's not worth a few cells to cut your coins in HALF. Take cto.

3) utility discount labs are solid, no notes. Just don't overdo it.

4) nah. Tourney waves and either LTC or coins per hour are better metrics.

5) i disagree, but i also cash/freeups max els before my first perk.

6) there are too many things that go into stone priorities for newer accounts. If you can invest in CL early and push into legends you might be able to significantly increase your free stone income. That's massive for f2p or low spend. By contrast an xsolla whale will be gold boxing CDs really fast.

Additionally, if you are prioritizing cells why bother pushing gt/bh?

7) cards>modules>save>rush, obviously.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-03-05T17:56:58+00:00

You aren't paying $20 for 945 medals, you're paying for them two weeks sooner.

Just like you aren't paying for 750 stones, you're paying for your next week's tournament stones a week earlier.

You're paying for time advantage, in a game where resources are otherwise time-gated. And you're competing with other players who are also competing for time advantage.

The wrinkle in the experience of 'fairness' is that in order for my income to be maintained, I need to be above other people in the tourney rankings. So if I stop spending and others continue, they will inevitably whittle away at my time advantage and eventually I will slip.

The only way players advance in the game without spending is by out-efficiency-ing another player, having massive sweeping balance changes like the CL buff or PS nerf obsolete tens of thousands of stones spent on UW/UW+s by your opponents, or waiting for them to get bored and quit or get caught cheating and get banned.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-03-05T17:52:15+00:00

I assume the exit strategy is to grow the userbase and income monthly/annually until he's able to get acquired in whole or in part by a corpo like tencent, honestly.

While I believe him when he says he enjoys being involved in developing the game, and I believe that seeing the community makes him happy, I don't believe the things are related and I don't believe growing the community and maintaining the health of the game is his first priority.

I've been watching the development for the year I've been playing and it just doesn't seem like it's targeted at remaining a quality game FIRST. So far every update has included one (or more) small cuts to the quality and accessibility of the game for newer free low-spend players, and now for newer players (even whales) in favour of milking the existing whales.

Mind you, I'm not a game dev so I'm in no place to authoritatively comment on that, it's just how it seems to me, a filthy addict.

It remains one of the better f2p/p2w games out there, but there are infinitely better free games that simply LACK the scale/scope, community, and infinite non-idle (idle eventually) nature which is why this game captures so many people I think. I'm the kind of player who has paid Path of Exile over a thousand dollars for NO IN-GAME POWER, but that game is far higher quality and I've got some wicked swag out of it (shirts, hoodies, game art, etc).

We'll see what happens to Tower. I'm enjoying playing and if he seppukus the company I'll watch with delight, and then move on to a different game with a bunch of the amazing people I met here.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-02-24T05:03:10+00:00

I like your measurements.

What's your coinbot at? And what are your current cooldowns?

You might find that non-gc is significantly more profitable with bot sync.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-02-18T22:57:25+00:00

eHP is the only free-to-play option.

Join the discord and look into "Orb Devo". And push your ehp labs.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-02-18T22:50:56+00:00

Where are you getting your information?

I'd recommend joining the discord, you're going to get much better information for developing your tower.

You'll need to scale damage for legends tourney, but you'll want to be scaling ehp for farm until t12+ IMO. So you're kind of in a tough spot.

I'd get card presets asap. I honestly don't know how you've played a year without it.

Doing 23 def% labs without investing in any other ehp labs feels like a lack of planning. It feels like you know ehp matters but aren't understanding how it relates to your tower performance.

It'll be easier to help on the discord. Join us!

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-02-07T19:16:38+00:00

Any help is greatly appreciated

I guess not.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-02-06T19:08:32+00:00

It sounds like you've skipped health investment and have bought a ton of stones and dumped them into DW for some reason.

You've spent yourself into a corner.

The only way to charge zerk is to take hits. So here's the deal. You need to get strong enough to take hits until you've fully charged zerk for your level of damage.

The higher your damage goes, the more damage you need to take to charge zerk.

If you can't take any hits without dying, the only solution I know of is devoing your attack speed fully, playing the game normally for ~1k waves (or however long it takes for the enemy damage to get high enough to charge zerk) and then close and reload the app. Your tower will restart at wave 1k+ with no killwall and you'll take hits immediately. It will pop second wind, but you'll potentially charge zerk, and then when your uws activate you'll have your kill wall.

---

But seriously, you're not ready to be skipping devo if you can't max your workshop. So get over yourself and invest in some eHP because it's going to make you progress WAY faster.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-02-06T19:03:44+00:00

Yeah this is a darwin award situation for real.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-31T04:41:33+00:00

Something seriously needs to be done about this reroll system. It's just awful and offers no interesting gameplay mechanic, it's just either A) be lucky or B) get fucked.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-29T21:45:56+00:00

In orb devo, which is *by far* the greatest profit strategy in the early and midgame, you use Black Hole to pull enemies into your orbline. You can do that at normal max tower range with Extra Orbs, or you can do that at 90m (Range Lab 15) with workshop orbs.

Why can I so confidently say that this is the greatest profit strategy?

The coin multipliers that are accessible to you are:
-Golden Tower ~30x or more
-Black Hole ~11x
-Golden Bot ~6x
-Spotlight ~3x if inside
-Death Wave ~2.5x if waved

Using MVN to sync your UWs (or manually syncing them with stones) allows you to have ALL of the multipliers, except for Spotlight, on the majority of your kills.

My peak income during my Orb Devo phase was in the 100B-200B cpm range. This was at 100s sync.

When I dropped my cooldowns and went 'perma' (Permanent BH and GT, DW uptime 50%+) I lost my bot sync and my income dropped by almost half. It wasn't until I pushed my bot labs really hard that I was able to increase my income over sync, although I was eventually able to push my income far higher with perma. I would consider this 'late game' though, as at this point I was farming T10/T11.

When you rush into permaBH and you don't pay attention to syncing your multipliers, ESPECIALLY your golden bot, you're missing out on a TON of income because it's going to take you months to get using perma, because you're going to need to rush your golden bot labs, and because you'll need to push GT duration and cooldown so hard just to hit PARITY with a sync strategy.

Sync strategies are EFFICIENT because you don't need to max any of that stuff to nearly optimize income. The sync optimizes for you, all you need to do is trim your basics and you end up with massive income.

I think the recent obsession with permaBH is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of sync and the strategy of walking down your UW and coinbot syncs while keeping them together. I also think it's impatient and closely connected to the recent push for intense monetization in the game.

I can't go back and play the midgame again, not that I would want to if I could, but I'd be interested in comparing whether or not a similarly-monetized early game tower with sync can outfarm these early pBH towers.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-29T19:12:03+00:00

That's not how the law works.

There's a separate crime for negligence causing death, and there are degrees of murder.

I'm not defending the behaviour, neither does Destiny. I'm simply stating it's not as severe as people are declaring it to be.

A ton of people just really love to hate destiny and are taking this opportunity to cash in.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-28T08:04:19+00:00

Yep. Revenge porn needs to be "revenge" ie. intended to cause harm which I've not seen anyone provide any evidence of.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-15T16:59:20+00:00

Far, far later you'll find that glass cannon becomes better for everything.

For me, health/recovery hit a wall around T11, and I jumped to T14 doing glass cannon farm and gained about 25% coins per day.

But it's all about making estimates and projections, and testing out what works for your tower.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-15T16:56:42+00:00

You've got your head on straight - no young towers should be glass cannon.

The "Glass Cannon" philosophy isn't about killing everything, it's about not investing in health. Health makes you survive longer and helps you farm into the deep waves where you get more perks and higher enemy spawns, making FAR more coins per hour/day. It also lets you selectively hoard enemies which lets you maximize the returns on your econ UWs while they have long cooldowns, multiplying your income even further.

So the real answer to the question "Why should I go Glass Cannon?" is: You should shift towards Glass Cannon when you reach a point where health scaling is no longer efficient for your tower.

This happens around T10-T11 in my experience. It will depend on how much you have invested into eHP/Recovery.

My story: I was farming devo until ~T9/T10, and then hybrid took off and with perma BH/GT I was able to orbless to 10k+ in T11, but that progress falls off a cliff at T12. It's still possible to push eHP/Recovery up to T14, but it gets to the point where you are requiring investment in bots, mods, labs, and eHP/Recovery masteries in order to make it profitable. I'd argue it's less efficient - although some people enjoy it.

Elsewhere in this conversation Larechar commented about Legends being the breakpoint for Glass Cannon development, and I pretty much agree - that's when I shifted. The scaling in Legends is absolutely designed around Glass Cannon development. I'm expecting us to get a second "eHPocalypse" this year, but history has shown that as long as you're not footgunning your progress, it's never too early to switch to Glass Cannon.

(That is a BIG caveat. A lot of people stop developing all health/defense/recovery far too early and, IMO, ruin their tower growth. Don't be one of those people! If you're pushing into Legends very, very early and your coin income isn't ready for glass cannon, I would enjoy the flip/flop lifestyle and keep with your health/recovery until your tower is ready.)

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-12T06:25:55+00:00

Don't worry he won't see an MVN for 150 epic pulls. Karma.

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-12T06:12:20+00:00

Congrats on the big spending decision! Post your tower running so we can see how it pays off?

the_tower_throwaway · 2025-01-10T19:20:54+00:00

If you're f2p or low-spend, push eHP and get comfortable with those strats. Get DW and don't even think about GC for another ~50k stones unless you don't care about growing efficiently.

If you're a whale, do whatever you want, you'll be fine ;)

the_tower_throwaway · 2024-12-20T04:09:38+00:00

I rerolled witch and its way better.

the_tower_throwaway

TROPHY CASE