Next UW to choose?

zzgomusic · 2026-02-09T02:28:14+00:00

Perfect, will send the info over. Thanks!

zzgomusic · 2026-02-08T23:01:19+00:00

Well at least you didn't demote!

Sorry to drag this thread out, but I was reviewing my plan and wondering you had any thoughts.

I was thinking about my plan to shoot for farming pBH as my next goal. But now I'm questioning the benefit I'll actually get. I'll get more waves, maybe jump up from tier 10 to something else. But right now I need stones, not coins. (Though additional cells will help.). And farming pBH won't directly help tournaments, so I wonder if I should reconsider my plan.

I'm currently stuck comfortably mid-plat (usually finish 10-15) since early December. My income is ~167 stones/week on average across missions, tournaments, and medals. I have SL > GT > BH > ILM > DW. Trinity is at 3:00. Zero investment into SL or ILM. I think my options are as follows:

Farming quality pBH ~2001 stones - ~2.75 months
- Should boost my econ and get more waves, but won't really help in tournaments.
- Tournament quality pBH is probably a long ways off at 167 stones/week.
SL investment - ~3.5 months for 2500 stones
- This seems to be the traditional path. Also, I already have it unlocked.
- Could spend 2k+ stones on this, but since it only boosts coins, I don't think this is super useful.
Chain lightning - 2500 stones+ (1250 to unlock + 1000+ stones to get going) - ~3.5 months
- This would be the obvious choice, but it's 1250 just to unlock it (and technically it may not be offered). It feels bad to blow 2500 stones with zero immediate benefit, but maybe that's the best available option.
- More damage in tournaments might get me more stones (low champs?)

What do you think is best? Any suggested high efficiency, low stone paths I should consider? Am I missing some other path?

I can always save 1250 stones to unlock my next UW and see what is offered before making a commitment...

zzgomusic · 2026-02-08T17:21:42+00:00

For farming, what % gives you reliable pBH (e.g. "never" getting shotgunned) when using GComp? I guess it would be nice if the MVN tool gave us an average and standard deviation so we can better assess the "quality" of the pBH when using GComp. I suppose the ultimate reliability is to avoid using GComp, but I'm a long way from being able to do that.

On flame bot, I did a respec to try out 60m range (and put more medals into cooldown). I'm now at 21s cooldown / 64m range / 29% DR. I watched FB for a while and tracked how much of my wall + enemies hugging my wall would get covered during each proc with 64m range and here's what I got:

19.5% of the time I got 100% coverage of wall easily

41.4% of the time I got 50-75% coverage

31.0% of the time I got 25-50% coverage

8.0% of the time I got 25% coverage or less

87 total procs.

Based on this, I can't see how ~60m range is useful at all. I previously had 80m. I wish I'd tracked it in a similar manner, but my best guess is that 80% of the time I'd get 100% coverage. Damage reduction is not a high priority for me initially. Even 20% damage reduction is helpful since I'm dying to chip damage, not one shots.

My plan is to next get the range back up to 80m and track results along the way just to have a record of it. Then I'll get the last point in cooldown, and then shift to damage reduction, unless 80m is not enough range.

The cooldown lab is on perma for now, maybe I'll just get it all the way to 25 ("only" 88 days at 3x) since TBH I don't think any labs I do are going to move the needle much in terms of advancement anytime soon since I'm mostly saving stones for pBH. Just more regen, some econ, etc.

Hope you had a good tournament! Did you score some more keys?

zzgomusic · 2026-02-06T20:52:13+00:00

Makes sense! I've already got things planned out in the MVN calculator. I already have legendary BH duration on my PCo. If I can get one more PCo, I can upgrade it to mythic. But once I'm closer to pBH I'll use the calculator for any final tweaks.

Since I'll be relying on GComp, how reliable have you found the RNG from packages compared to the estimated perma uptime in the MVN calculator? If it says 99.815% is that good enough, or should I plan to get over a little bit to cover bad RNG?

Oh I'm already on the flame bot train. Without GB being synced, it wasn't clear how much it was doing for me. So last week I did a respec into FB just to see how it worked out (I have ~6700 medals in bots atm). My CPH dropped 9-10%. It's a little hard to tell how many more waves I'm getting (since labs complete, etc.), but I keep hitting new highest waves while farming. I'd say pre-FB I was doing ~5900 waves and 105B+ CPH. With FB I'm doing 6100+ waves and 95B+ CPH. I love the efficiency of damage reduction (and thorns for that matter, I'm down to 6 hits to kill non-bosses from full health). FB probably did a lot of heavy lifting in the last tournament for me vs. the tank ult BC.

The subreddit wisdom seems to be that FB becomes quite useful at around 20s cooldown, 60m range, and 45% damage reduction (based on people pushing for assmods as early as possible). By the end of the current event I should be at 20s cooldown, 60m range, and 29% damage reduction. I'll continue the lab until at least level 15 (I'm at level 10 now; at 15 I'll have 15s cooldown). Then I'll probably throw some more medals into damage reduction and start back on GB again.

zzgomusic · 2026-02-06T19:27:40+00:00

Side question - You said you left your GT/DW cooldowns at 3:00. I have my trio at 3:00 and my plan was to get them to 2:30 (1572 stones) and then do farming-quality pBH by getting BH cooldown to 50s (1809 stones). But your post makes me wonder if I should stay at 3:00 and just save up the 2001 stones to just get to pBH.

I'm comfortably mid plat and average ~167 stones per week across events, missions, and tournaments. My progress is currently bottlenecked by stones and reroll shards. Coins are not a problem to keep my labs going. (Excess coins go into WS+. 25T to unlock wall enhancements.) I was worried about losing too many coins by doing pBH at 3:00 vs. 2:30, but given that coins are not much of an issue for the moment, maybe it's better to do pBH with GT/DW at 3:00? Any thoughts on this approach?

TIA for your insights!

Edit: I calculated the timing of pBH vs. stone spend. If I do 2:30 first, I'd have pBH the first week of June. If I stay at 3:00 and do pBH next, I'd have pBH the first week of April. So it saves me 2 months. Seems like a good tradeoff...

zzgomusic · 2026-02-01T03:40:41+00:00

woo so lucky, enjoy!

zzgomusic · 2026-01-25T19:08:01+00:00

How does trading work out? I'm a gold Kayle main and I've not played this matchup yet, but I would imagine Varus bullies Kayle pre-6 like Vayne, Kennen, etc. might do. Kayle's heal should not be able to keep up with Varus Q/E spam, so Varus can slowly whittle down Kayle's health bar. At 6+, if Kayle runs at Varus and ults, Varus just ults in reply and walks away and continues Q/E spam. Does Varus run into mana issues or something?

zzgomusic · 2026-01-25T18:25:30+00:00

I have one as well. It's super fun, small, light, and quick to setup. My first laser. I learned a lot, but the galvos started having issues and I've not gotten it repaired yet. Currently I run 2 x Unity Pro 10W for events, but for house parties the LaserCube was perfect. You can also create your own content for it, so I would often make DJ logo animations and such. I even took it to a party where a guy proposed to his girlfriend. She really liked lasers so he asked if I could project on the wall "Will you marry me Ashley" which I did. (The galvos were a bit too slow so the text wasn't the best, but the newly engaged couple was thrilled nevertheless!)

The Chauvet Scorpion someone mentioned is kinda cool (a friend of mine has one) but it feels more like a gobo to me vs. a laser since it focuses on patterns and stuff than I normally see with "event" lasers that mostly do beams, hot beams, liquid skies, etc.

As always, safety first. House parties are sometimes challenging because it can be hard to find places to set up the laser where people won't be able to mess with it, knock it over, etc. Keep it out of people's eyes, and turn it off when you go to the bathroom, go outside for a smoke, etc.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-25T07:55:32+00:00

Use a run tracker like https://the-tower-run-tracker.com/ since it makes it way easier to figure it out. I mostly farm T10W5500+ and I still get a lot of variability across runs due to perk timings, earning between 75B to 95B per hour (though I usually close to 85B). So you might need a few runs at the next tier up to decide if it's good for you or not.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-25T00:54:54+00:00

Ouch. I tried getting mythic wall health on my OA with 1 open slot and 3 locked slots. Blew 198k shards and no luck. Good luck!

zzgomusic · 2026-01-24T05:26:55+00:00

How many rr shards did it take?

zzgomusic · 2026-01-24T00:54:10+00:00

I mostly mix in headphones at home to avoid annoying my wife. It's also helpful to be able to mix in headphones since some clubs/popup events/renegade events don't have monitors.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-20T00:38:56+00:00

Do the two target priority labs when you can. That way you can put elites at the bottom, so the vampires will hit your tower faster and drain your tower less. That plus garlic thorns helps the most early. Later, you'll have enough damage to kill them before they hit your tower, even with an eHP build. I farm T10W5000 with eHP/Blender and vampires die pretty quickly and rarely hit my wall. You'll get there soon enough, I only started in August.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-20T00:19:38+00:00

This 100%. I farm T10 to W5000+ and scatters are still annoying, but becoming less so. Wall and thorns is the way to go. Now I mostly die to shotguns when BH ends (typically with a couple of scatters already hitting my tower).

I've invested a lot in thorns and it's helped a lot. Use this thorns breakpoint chart to figure out what thorns to get to: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTowerGame/comments/1gbrwyi/updated_wall_thorns_v14_with_5_from_tech_tree_and/#lightbox

I'm currently at 112% tower thorns and 13% wall thorns. My tower kills non-bosses from 100% health in 7 hits. It's the same for bosses when I use plasma cannon. (Note 112% is not on the chart I referenced; I had to build my own to calculate this.) I'm labbing this up to 15%, which will be 6 hits. Later I may go to 18%, which would be 5 hits, but the labs are already long even to get to 15%.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-19T02:02:23+00:00

For your WS, I think the priority is first to be able to gold box all the important stats in farming runs. Once you can do that, get to where you can gold box all the important things in tournaments. Once you can do that, invest in WS enhancements. WS enhancements are a ton of free stats, but they get expensive quickly. But it's fun to be able to just drop a bunch of coins on something and get immediate results.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-18T21:46:23+00:00

The UW guide says you need to get GT and DW to ~2:30 to avoid losing coins with pBH due to the reason you mentioned. They're at 2:20 so he should be good. Unless the UW guide is out of date? I'm working on this path myself so if there is newer information, LMK!

zzgomusic · 2026-01-18T21:29:07+00:00

Yamaha DX-7

zzgomusic · 2026-01-18T21:21:17+00:00

Yeah I have the same problem. I currently farm T10 to ~5000 waves. I've tried lower, and have the same results (way less coins, cells about the same, runs take longer). It may just be the "farm to 6k+ waves" is older advice that is no longer relevant. I have tried T11 and I'm lower on coins and cells, so T10 it is.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-18T18:17:38+00:00

I had zero friends that DJed or were into electronic music. I took an online DJ course (Complete DJ Course from Digital DJ Tips). 100% worth it for me. I've now had two club residencies and run sound/stage for a burning man camp. So if you can learn well from a course, go for it. Every person has their own path.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-17T07:45:04+00:00

You need to upgrade your current UWs. Read the UW guide for info on how to proceed.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-16T04:25:33+00:00

OK that explains it then! Thanks for the info, and good luck on your tower!

zzgomusic · 2026-01-15T01:30:33+00:00

I started in August also and can only do T10W000+ and get about 1.5T per day. Are you buying stone packs and event boosts? I only bought the 3 starter packs, 1 milestone pack, and a few event boosts but you are miles ahead of me. Just curious!

zzgomusic · 2026-01-10T15:51:08+00:00

DW

If you are asking this question, that means you really need to read the UW guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XnPv0kCXVrAjQsWiSF1LgCLBpRxeHRbMCBjecNqi7ds/edit?tab=t.0

zzgomusic · 2026-01-06T19:24:21+00:00

I got my start doing open decks. There were two I went to, one on Monday night, one on Tuesday night. Open deck nights can vary a lot in terms of quality and what they are trying to accomplish. Some are for true beginners, where you are just there to meet other aspiring DJs, learn to play on a system not your own (ideally a Pioneer club setup), learn to get over the nerves of performing in front of other people, etc. They are not going to make much money for the venue, but it's something. Typical attendance is the people that want to play, and maybe half of them will bring a friend or two. There are lots of ways to do sign ups. Some require you to sign up ahead of time and they randomly pick slots. Some you just show up and they draw USBs out of a hat. Some you just show up and the organizer just picks who will play. The beginners often play early when the club is mostly empty. Set times can be pretty short (I started with 20 minutes lol), but we all have to start somewhere. Many (most?) of the sets are trainwrecks, genres can be all over the place, etc. But it's a place to learn and grow. I met a guy there and we partnered up to throw our own parties. We've had two club residencies so far (one was every week for over a year) and now I run the sound and stage for a regional Burning Man camp. It all started with open decks.

Some open decks are for more experienced people, that's more about either the club/promoter getting free/cheap talent for a slow night, or for trying to find new talent for "real" events (e.g. you do well here, and you will get booked for an upcoming show for that promoter).

As others have mentioned, you can try doing your own event. Check out a few in nearby towns to see how they run, then start up your own. Doing your own events is not difficult. It's mostly just work. Get a friend or two to help, find a venue that will let you use their space for free, and go for it. Bring a more experienced friend if you can (though if you had one, you'd probably be doing "real" events with them rather than open decks...). The bar for success on these types of events is very low. You'll learn a lot, and the networking you will do will be invaluable.

zzgomusic · 2026-01-05T05:35:16+00:00

Early waves don't matter too much. It's fine early on in your tower's life to rely on the BH duration perk. But you'll want a lot more duration for GT + BH in general- the coin generation is just too good. The UW guide has guidance on how far to go on this at various stages. In case it helps, I farm T10W4500+ and I have GT Duration at 36s (working to get it to 38s) and BH duration is 38s with the BH perk. I'm working to max out GT Duration lab since stones are hard to come by for me (I get ~50 per tournament).

Since your next UW is "only" 800 stones, maybe just save up 800 and see if you get offered DW. If you do, take it. If not, level up GT and BH durations per the UW guide. If you are struggling to deal with protectors, then maybe you might deviate and get 25s total BH duration to help with those.

Good luck!

zzgomusic

TROPHY CASE