TLDR: Ranged + Flying > Ground > Melee for regular Gear
If you have Premium Gear, Camo Cloak + Plaster is the best combo for critical runs, Sim Chip + Metal Detector for farming runs
Gear Damage doesn’t give much of a benefit (it’s more useful for fast guns like the Smart Minigun, Auto Handgun and Looper) but it’s still an improvement, and the new Premium Gear gives additional benefits.
Choosing the Gear - How many?
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First think about how many gear types you can afford to maintain. At higher levels, the amount of upgrade material and coins needed are crazy. If you are playing seriously enough to be reading this guide, you should be aiming to reach Mythical 60 on your gear. Doing that for 2 gear types is hard, doing it for 4 or more takes a lot of grinding and trying to level them all at the same time means you have 3-4 at an average level instead of 2 at a high level
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Consider also the weapon you use - if you use the Plasma Cannon (or Laser Rifle, Devastator or Nuclear Lasso, none of which I recommend) the impact of gear is minor and is not worth the extra expense needed to be able to get the “right” gear for your run
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My recommendation is,
- If you use a fast gun and have the battle pass (where you earn more coins), work on 3 gears.
- If using a slow gun, or if you don’t regularly buy the battle pass, work on 2
- In either case, the unused type could be either scrapped, or fused up and left aside without levelling up until you at least reach Mythical on your main gear - you will stall there for quite a while and in the meantime you can develop other gear types. See also scrapping guide.
Choosing Gear - Which?
If you only have regular Gear
- In worlds, you can look at the Boss Bestiary if you want to plan based on them, or based on mobs (I haven’t analysed it but I can tell you how to do it if you want to)
- For the Tower, you don’t know in advance which worlds you are going to get. So you could pick based on the kind of mobs or bosses you find difficult to beat (if you pick based on all the bosses, Ground + Ranged is best). But even if you pick wrong, you can try again easily (especially if you’ve developed up several heroes, and I suggest you have at least 1 Poison, 1 Ice, 1 Fire and 1 Magic)
- For the castles:
- in the Fire Castle all the mobs are Flying, and the Final (i.e. Level 40) boss is Flying + Ranged; So Flying + Ranged is a good pick but if you find some of the melee mobs/bosses harder then you could play Flying + Melee (but will want Flying + Ranged for the Final boss anyway)
- For the Metal castle, the mobs are all melee; but it’s generally accepted as the easiest castle so don’t really need to have Melee gear equipped for it
- For Daily events, based on the bosses, and also because all the Thursday Mobs are flying, Ranged > Flying > Ground > Melee. (If it’s only about Thursday, Flying > Ranged, but Ranged will also help you on the other bosses more)
- For Guild event, the Titan is Flying + Ranged, so again it’s the best combo (Flying + Flying or Ranged + Ranged is also OK if you are mixing regular + Premium gear)
- For Endless Waves and Hordes events, all enemies are Flying.
My recommendation is to focus on the Daily events, because
- The guaranteed Hero Medals on completing Medium/Hard/Nightmare (and the key drops in Hard/Nightmare) are very important to progress, so you want to be strong enough to do them consistently as early as possible.
- You are limited to 3 tries a day (6 if you are able to spend 100 gems) it’s really important to get this right first time (eventually do nightmare on first attempt so you can use the other attempts for Hero Medals at Medium and Hard)
- You are likely to be strong enough to clear Worlds (for one-time rewards; for grinding XP completion doesn’t matter and is usually a disadvantage) and grind Castles before you can do all the daily events at nightmare consistently on your first attempt
With 3 events ending in Flying + Ranged (and 2 have multiple bosses so you don’t get much help from Focus Shots) they are the two most important. Flying also helps the Fire mobs and castle.
That’s the basis for the overall recommendation being Ranged + Flying > Ground > Melee
If you have Premium Gear, my priority order is as follows
- Plaster for Right hand slot - This is the most versatile premium gear:
- Counts as Flying (which is preferable for all the reasons mentioned above)
- Healing is useful in Dark Castle, Campaign Endless, Endless Boss, and most of Tower tournament (at very high levels you take more damage than Plaster can heal you for). No healing benefit in Endless Waves, Guild and Horde but still you get the Flying damage benefit (all enemies in these events are Flying)
- Only consistent source of healing in Gambit (it’s not a popular event but occasionally has decent rewards in the shop)
- Healing is also useful in Campaign and Castles but eventually you will be strong enough to not need it for these runs
- Camo Cloak and/or Sim Chip for Left Hand Slot
- In critical runs (Campaign Endless, Endless Boss, Dark Castle and high Tower Tournament floors) the chance of being invisible for a few seconds can be the difference between clearing a tough room or dying: Advantage Camo Cloak
- Invisibility is less impactful in Jetpack Heart Hunt and Gambit but is still useful
- Guild, Endless Waves, Horde: All enemies are Flying and being Single room events there’s no benefit in Camo Cloak at all: Advantage Sim Chip
- Regular runs (esp. grinding campaign) you want the Sim Chip to level up faster
- If you can afford to acquire, and level up, both, then you can equip whichever one more suits the run; if you can only afford one, my recommendation is Plaster but some players would prefer the Cloak.
- Metal Detector for Right hand slot
If you can afford more gear for the right hand slot, I recommend the Metal Detector - you’d still use the Plaster for the critical runs, but on farming runs (esp. Campaign) you’d get more coins - I no longer recommend getting the Shield Generator, but some points to consider:
- In really high floors in Tower Tournament, avoiding damage is more important than healing, so you might prefer the Shield Gen over the Plaster - but it’s a trade off between guaranteed small healing every room vs small chance of safety bubble every room and I think the benefit is not clear enough to be worth the cost of unlocking and levelling up (and there’s the issue of loot pool dilution)
- Now that the Dark Castle has been made much harder, at higher rooms avoiding damage is more beneficial than healing; however having the Plaster’s healing will make it much more likely to get to those higher rooms, so there’s even less of benefit here than with the Tower Tournament
- For Titan, Shield Generator has an advantage over Plaster - the damage benefit is the same because the titan is Flying + Ranged, but if the shield procs, you get a free safety bubble.
- For Endless Waves and Horde, if you use the Shield instead of Plaster you will lose out on some damage (for Flying + Ranged enemies it will be the same, but for Flying + Melee you will lose out) but if the Shield Generator procs you have a free safety bubble which is really helpful for survival - more useful for Endless Waves because in Horde you revive anyway.
- For Dodge time events the Shield Generator is the only useful gear - on the runs in which it procs it is very useful - but these events have very poor rewards
- I don’t consider Radiation Field (review) to be worth diluting your loot pool for
Revision Notes
19/02/2022: Updated to include Premium Gear
20/07/2022: Updated to include Sim Chip
30/12/2022: Updated to take into account different game modes
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). Thanks in advance!