Overview
Wanted to make a tierlist based on personal experience using each legendary skull(Final tier of each skull post-upgrades) against bosses. Note: I will be using the base skull images for clarity purposes instead of their final form.Also, since this is specific for boss-fights, there will likely be bias towards: speed > balance > power since dodging boss attacks tends to be quite helpful.(Also some classes have entries for their Unique forms as well as Legendary forms )General Notes: – Stacking Courage/Tactics depending on which skull you get is optimal on most skulls for damage output. – Stacking Fortress/Mirage/Heart are good for surviving much longer on most skulls. – Any time I mention Tactics, you can also substitute Fairy Tale if have Elementalist’s Blessing.Spoilers Ahead
Win Condition
—————————-Win Condition——————————–
These skulls will win you the game easily. If you get one of these skulls to legendary, the run is won.
Thief:
Surprisingly strong for how weak its earlier forms can be. Hits twice since dual wielding for the purpose of on-hits. Has high speed so dodging abilities is easy. Extremely good abilities. Can have several very effective item builds depending on what items you get.
– Gold Toss: is an insanely strong ranged ability on low cooldown and is basically infinite ammo.
– Backroll(Legendary): Being unhittable in smoke screen is a large period of benefit for bosses.
– Backroll(Unique): Has 3 low cooldown charges of invulnerable dodges. Much more spammable than legendary version.
– Rip Pocket: While it seems worse than the other abilities, for the purpose of attack speed builds, it drops more gold from enemies, thus acting as effectively on-hit damage.
– The Stun Blink is a good repositioning tool for bossfights and does alright damage. The stun doesn’t work against bosses though.
– Sorcery(CDR)/Manatech-3(2 sec cd per spell) Build works amazing with gold throw and smoke screen.
– – If your build is focused solely on these, keeping Thief as Unique can be better since the Backroll is significantly more spammable. Combined with Gold Toss, you can be infinitely throwing abilities.
Legendary works with this build too, but the playstyle is more focused on dodging than spamming.
– Madness/Sprint/Soar(Attack Speed) Build works great in cover of smoke screen(and is quite fun).
– Tactics(Magic Damage) Gold Toss Build works solidly.
– Courage(Physical Damage) also works solidly in general.
Alchemist:
The Alchemist legendary does insanely high damage and can store charges of their potion throw ability. In other words, if you want you can just swap to the alchemist when their potions are up. The main negatives of the Alchemist is that status effects don’t work against most bosses and that using the ability locks you in animation for a bit. Just being the current skull summons high-damage golems, and using the summon skill lets you quickly nuke a boss’ hp in exchange for not getting passive summoning for awhile. Overall, you can just use their abilities before swapping to your other skull. If your other skull is useless, you can just stay alchemist to get the passive summons.
– Fire potion is best against bosses because legendary fire pot leaves sustained field of fire.
– You are free to move at all times except the brief timing when throwing a potion. You can also hit bosses with ease from afar.
– I don’t think the summon golem active is very good if you plan to keep using alchemist afterwards due to putting golem spawning on cooldown. It should only be used as a finisher or if you plan to swap skulls right after.
– Hold basic attack button the whole time while alchemist.
– Tactics/Magic Damage Builds work well.
Bomber:
The Bomber has two major builds based on the abilities/items you get. The first will be referred to as Nuke and the second will be referred to as Battery.
The Nuke Bomber may as well be considered an ability as long as you have the instant explosion skill. Every time your skull swap is available, you can swap and instantly detonate, giving you the Bomber’s swap skill dmg, the explosion damage, and your other skull’s swap skill all at the same time. Naturally, this means you can obliterate most enemies every few seconds when swap comes off cooldown. Since it is instant, the positioning and timing doesn’t matter.
– Prerequisite is having the Bomber’s instant explosion skill. Magnifico priests can help you get this. If you don’t get the skill, you can still use the bomber to relatiavely good effect as a reliable nuke against bosses, but the timing to dash into a boss right as your explosion is about to go off can be hard, and you lose some dps waiting for the explosion to come.
The Battery Bomber revolves around having Manatech 3 or higher (Each skill usage drops 2 parts). Bomber has two skills that have extremely low cooldown and are thus spammable with Manatech to infinitely spam these skills. Burn and Miniature Bombs are the two skills. You want to move left and right on the ground such that you can catch the Manatech parts as they drop to continue spamming skills. The manatech parts also recharge your other cooldowns aside from Bomber, so you can use long-cooldown skull abilities(such as Reaper’s) in between Bomber swaps, thus the Battery aspect.
– Miniature Bombs is much easier to use and useful earlier than Burn. Ideally you have both skills to double the amount of Manatech parts you get, but the build is passable with just one(Preferably Miniature Bombs for damage)
– Need Tactics(Magic Damage) for optimal nuking. Also nice for Battery build.
– Early Sorcery is nice for before you get legendary to reduce instant detonation cd or before Manatech 3 for Battery. Some of the sorcery items work very well with spamming abilities.
– Mutant(Swap CD) Build works well since final tier of bomber has 0 cd on the instant detonation. Swap off cooldown to use bomber. Preferably have secondary skull with good swap skill.
– – Nice combo is Mutant Build with Legendary Mummy + Legendary Bomber.
Prisoner:
Unique Level: Skills tend to have good range and only a little hard positioning, so you can chip away at boss’ HP over time (and contrary to the description, also provide cells). His dashes are fast, but have a slight stutter at the end of the dashes if you don’t jump/attack afterwards.
What makes this skull amazing is the passive cell generation. More specifically, one specific buff that comes from the cells is broken strong. The Prisoner is able to get 10 stacks of 5% damage reduction, which seem to stack additively and refreshing on getting the same scroll again. In other words, you can get to 50% damage reduction such that you are rather tanky.
– Heart/Fortress + Some Attack speed/dmg + Priest’s Staff makes you incredibly durable
– You want some attack speed of some kind to allow you to keep up with cell generation to maintain your stacks during a boss.
– Side Note: You cannot swap skulls without losing your stacks
Legendary: You have upgraded skills and can open Crates/Chests that spawn on levels to pick up new skills that can be higher levels(I, II, III, IV, V)roguelike-style. The cell drops seem to also be much larger, getting you to max stacks quickly. He does a LOT of damage. I will say the one key weakness is that the earlier you get the legendary version of this skull the better, since you will have more crates to open, which can be difficult. Can fit most builds because of the vast variety of his skills. Many can be hidden in dash animation. Can get Permanent stacking 100% DMG buff + 50% DMG Taken from chests, along with high lvl skill.
– Sorcery/Manatech(CDR) helps DPS since most dmg is from skills
– Wolf Trap does alright damage, but the dmg buff is great
– Spartan Sandals(Phys) is worse Broadsword
– Rampart(Phys) is amazing Counter+Shield
– Front-Line Shield(Phys) is good Counter+Buff
– Assault Shield (Phys) is meh Counter Dash
– Broadsword(Physical) is amazing dmg, cd, speed, and aoe. Best Phys skill
– Ice Crossbow(Magic) tap-shoot is amazing dmg. Charge is slower vs Bosses
– Symmetric Lance(Phys) is great dmg
– Wave of Denial(Phys) is bad. Low dmg
– Heavy Xbow(Phys) is meh. Animation+Low Dmg
– Phaser(Phys) is meh, just for repositioning
– Fire Grenade(Magic) is great
– Powerful Grenade(Magic) is amazing dmg, cd, speed, and aoe. Best magic skill
– Cluster Grenade(Magic) is awful dmg
– Double Crossb-o-matic(Phys) is good
– Cleaver (Phys) is basically caltrops. Not very good
– Sonic Carbine (Phys) is a machine gun with great damage, but animation
– Blood Sword(Phys) untested
– Lightspeed(Phys Dash) is amazing.
A-Tier
———A-tier——————
These skulls are also great for killing bosses, but need more set-up or are limited in some ways. Getting any of these skulls to legendary(aside from Barbarian) gives me very high confidence of winning the run.
Werewolf:
Honestly, this is likely the second best common skull you can get. Incredibly fast skull with solid damage attacks make the game a breeze. The abilities are fairly straightforward as either dash damage, debuff enemies, or lifesteal abilities. Upgrading it to legendary makes it scale to lategame.
– The lifesteal ability makes it quite easy to stay healthy before reaching the boss since most levels have rooms spamming normal enemies. More HP going into a bossfight helps with bossfight.
– The debuff abilities make enemies hit take more than double damage, so naturally this works well against strong enemies.
– Courage(Attack damage) Build works amazingly. Fits with werewolf passive of not staying in one place as opposed to standard attackspeed builds.
– Blitz (Dash damage) build works alright too with the passive.
Reaper:
Invincibility Frames and mass aoe with large damage makes most fights just a matter of dodging boss shots while you wait for the cooldowns. One caveat is that the skull is a balance skull and is therefore a bit slow, so dodging can be a little harder. Aside from that, the cooldowns are extremely long for how much single-target damage they do.
– Sorcery(CDR) Build is pretty much required if you want to use this as main boss-killing skull.
– Combined with Tactics(Magic Damage) so your basic attacks and spells do damage.
Archlich:
High damage chains means you can usually kill bosses faster than they can kill you. Balance skull so slower speed, and doing damage on some bosses is not guaranteed since you have to land abilities/attacks. A lot of being in a dangerous position, but you do insane damage.
– The “row of chains from the ground” ability locks you in animation for a second, so it is dangerous to use.
– Prison of the Damned is an insane ability in terms of damage and utility(slowing down bosses to a crawl for several seconds). This may as well be almost equivalent to the Thief’s smokescreen ability.
– Soul Steal is hard to keep stacked in boss fights, but is good damage and a good buff for the start of the fight(if you can’t flawless). It is instant animation, really low cooldown, and solid damage.
– The map-aoe chain ability is really good in general, but has long cooldown.
– Deathly Chill sucks as an ability. Frozen is a status effect that doesn’t work on bosses and will often get you hit by canceling normal enemy animations. The damage burst is delayed and it has an animation lock just like the aforementioned row of chains ability.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) is optimal.
– Sorcery works well as a focus build, especially with Prison of the Damned.
– Soar/Madness are decent secondary stats for sending basic attack chains out more often, but most of your damage comes from spells.
Barbarian:
In my opinion, this is the one skull I would rather keep the unique version than the legendary version. It isn’t necessarily so that the Legendary form is worse, but it is significantly different as a skull to the first. Upon upgrading, the guaranteed skill is replaced with a worse skill for bosses due to the health sacrifice. For the purposes of this paragraph, I will be talking about the unique version. The guaranteed skill is very strong aoe instant-cast damage that gives a large attack speed buff. This alone makes bosses doable, even neglecting the other skill. The attacks are fairly slow without the speed buff, but the attacks do significant aoe damage. Being slow means damage will be taken often, but this skull can do enough damage to easily outdamage enemies.
– In particular, the heavy strike is quite useful, akin to half a samurai’s full-charge 5-mark strike per attack.
– Bone Scream is the guaranteed skill and is by far the best this skull has in terms of damage and DPS since it increases attack speed by 100% (aka double damage).
– Mad Rush is only alright since it does not much more damage than basic attack combo in the same time frame, and leaves you animation locked. If you really want to use it, use it at the end of basic attack combo for clean animation cancel of the last basic attack. This scales with attack speed, so using it after Bone Scream is optimal.
Legendary version: guaranteed skill costs 10% of current HP to use in exchange for a demon form with upgraded skills after a delay. The best comparison I can make is that upgrading to Legendary turns the skull into Predator. You struggle against flying enemies, move a lot by spamming abilities, and have to DPS race the enemy. Your basic attack combo has reduced DPS since it attacks only twice in basic combo as opposed to the thrice hit in the Unique skull. However, you do significantly more damage with the demon-form abilities if you can land all of them, akin to how Predator works. So against flying enemies and bosses that like to run away in special animations, it struggles immensely. Conversely, you do significantly higher damage against enemies you can wail against.
– Hell Scream is the guaranteed skill and is more of a desperate move since you will guaranteed take damage by using the skill. For the purposes of bosses, gives you a time frame to try to DPS race the boss.
– Hell Scream – Demon Form is basically just a jump strike with good damage.
– Mad Rush is actually better for the Legendary Version than the Unique Version because the basic attack combo is worse. It will get damage out faster than hitting normally.
– Mad Rush – Demon Form is the Predator move. If you can hit the enemy, you will demolish them in exchange for taking a good amount of damage.
– Courage(Attack Damage) Build is definitely optimal.
– Fortress(Shield) and Priest’s Staff can be nice to stay low HP for the attackspeed buff, while still being safe.
– Some Attack Speed is nice to have on power skulls to reduce attack animation time.
Dark Paladin:
Able to create shield buffer on self and has long-ranged skill. Solid all around, but some skills have bad animations and the skull is Balance speed. The dash skill and the long-ranged skill are both really clean animations with high damage and range. Conversely, the melee skills tend to have long animations. Your main DPS revolves around having your shield barrier up, granting you super long-range basic attacks with insanely high Magic Damage. Your basic attacks in magic form will pretty much always out-DPS your abilities.
– Dark Charge (The Dash) : Solid skill with good damage and quick animation.
– Dark Rush: Super long animation, but is extremely good at filling bar.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) Build is optimal for damage.
– Madness (Attackspeed) Secondary is very useful for the DPS magic basic attacks.
Carleon Soldier(Summoner):
Try not to charge your attack if you can help it. Simply swap to this skull when it’s up to summon the 5 familiars, then use abilities to summon 2 more familiars. If you have free time, can charge an attack to buff familiar attack damage. Swap out when available. The basis is that your familiars do all your damage while you focus on dodging. Struggles against flying enemies.
– Your basic attack is awful, but you can get enough summons to steamroll every boss.
– Mutant(Swap Speed) build works amazingly to maximize the number of times you use the swap skill.
– Sorcery/Manatech(Cooldown Reduction) builds work amazingly to maximize the number of summons you get from your abilities.
– Having some physical attack items is useful to increase summon damage, but not worth building around completely.
– Bomber Skull with instant explosion skill is likely best synergy with summoner playstyle.
A-Tier Part 2
Gravedigger(Necromancer):
Mostly Physical Damage Power skull that has the same basic attack weaknesses as other power skulls. Not really limited by graves to spawn things since you can make 5 graves appear from the Swap skill. Legendary version uses 3 graves to spawn summons at a time, making it effective for mass-summoning. Abilities can be animation cancelled as soon as the summons spawn with a dash. Struggles a little against flying enemies. The spirits reducing skill cooldowns mean that as long as enough spirits spawn, you aren’t hard-locked out of using abilities based on cooldown. Unlike many other skulls, this skull actually supports boss-fights by having spirits spawn during them, and very frequently at that. During bossfights, try not to attack the boss directly if you can help it. Instead, just try to keep summoning creatures. Overall, plays a lot like the Carleon Recruit, but a bit riskier.
– Courage (Physical Damage) is optimal for damage.
– Some sorcery(CDR) is nice since the skills are really long cooldown, even with the spirit reduction.
– Works well with battery skulls using Manatech such as Skul and Bomber.
– Naturally works well with Bomber with instant explosion to spawn graves and the damage field.
– Othello (Spear)is good for bosses because it hits everywhere.
– King Lear (Ranger) looks good for spamming against non-flying enemies.
– Hamlet (Melee) is relatively bad for mobile bosses.
Stone Monkey:
Full Physical Damage speed skull with a really good 3-hit basic attack animation and loop. The Clone summons are actually rather good for killing bosses. At legendary, you can basically do concentration on your spells, but this isn’t really worth it against single-target enemies like bosses. Instead, you can absolutely nuke enemies by spawning a bunch of clones in one spot and tapping an ability to make them all attack the boss with a high-damage ability. The only reason this isn’t S-tier is because it is a bit difficult to generate the clone meter against some later bosses. So you can nuke one phase, and have to fight it normally against the next. Also, since bosses move a lot then they can move away from your clone horde.
– Courage(Physical Damage) to make use of the clones and Physical skill-scalings.
– Some Madness(Attack Speed) secondary is nice to generate more of the Clone meter and make your Clones attack faster.
– The Staff-Stab and the Staff-Stun abilities are very good instant-tap skills.
– The Staff-Arts ability isn’t very good and will lead you to be hit because of animation.
– The Staff-Spin is alright too, but makes you rooted in place while you use it.
B-Tier
———–B-Tier—————–
These skulls can work to kill bosses, but are rather limited in some capacity or another. I have high confidence in winning with these skulls at Legendary, but have a chance of failing.
Champion:
Range is as low as possible, and bosses are unmovable so you cannot do wall damage(which sucks anyway). The slowdown is very good, but basically only works once in a fight. The positives are that this skull does a lot of damage with basic abilities and dps with basic attacks. More specifically, some of the skills make up for the downsides of this skull by a far margin. The abilities focus more on having energy to use them rather than cooldown.
– As someone commented on this tierlist, I severely underrated the Parry ability for Champion. This ability not only does a lot of damage, but it is instant-cast and no cooldown. It pays for more than itself in energy on landing a parry. In other words, any time you would dodge you can just parry, funding another ability while also dealing heavy damage. Parry costs 10 energy and refunds 40 energy.
– The Nuclear Punch has a small wind-up, so it may get you hit, but it does good damage, so it can be worth it damage-wise to exhaust your energy by spamming a few of these in a row. Costs 40 energy. Relatively bad compared to the One Inch Punch and Quick Step.
– Quick Step is an instant animation + small dash to target that does good damage. It costs 20 energy which makes it so you can spam this many times before running out of energy, especially since it has little animation.
– Courage(Attack Damage) build is good to make your punches and abilities do lots of damage.
– Madness(Attack Speed) build is also good and lets you charge your abilities faster.
Mummy:
Surprisingly good damage as soon as you get a real weapon. Rocket launcher and Grenade Launcher can hit bosses from ranged, while flamethrower and shotgun do close quarters damage. Quick tip for shotgun: Shoot then jump shot for back-to-back shotgun shots. Machine gun and flamethrower are excellent with some on-hit items. Two main drawbacks are having to swap out to get a new weapon (or wait 30 seconds/hope random boss summon drops it) and the horrible speed (and dash stuttering)of mummy after the initial swap. This basically means after exhausting your weapon’s ammo, it is in your best interest to swap out. Optimal secondary skull is bomber with Kaboom for insta-reload. The abilities of the mummy actually do good base damage, despite you never directly building to support them.
– Chase/Weakness (Long-ranged dmg/Crit) is optimal. You do a lot of damage with many ranged attacks.
– Tactics (Magic Damage) Build is good as well if you have the Head Toss/Scarab Skills.
– Courage(Attack Damage) Build is good enough to win because you get the most out each bit of ammo for each weapon.
– Madness(Attack Speed) / On-hit effects are nice because many weapons are spammable or use many instances of damage. EX) True damage on-hit or crit daggers
– Mutant(Swap Speed) Build means you get whatever weapon you want whenever pretty much. Decent if this is your secondary skull.
– Defensive Fortress/Heart build is nice to maximize your time alive to deal with bosses from out of range while dodging attacks.
Clown:
Really good single target damage and speed, but range is suboptimal and has some animations. Awful jump attack. Also struggles against flying enemies. Really good against big enemies when using Jack-in-the-Box or the midair ability.
– Madness/Weakness Build is optimal for dps with throwing knives.
– Courage (Attack Damage) Supplementary works well in general, and supports the scaling on abilities.
– Tactics (Magic Damage) Supplementary works well for bosses, but quite slow against flying enemies since normal-attack dependent.
Pike:
Able to spam dash attacks for invincibility frames makes most bosses a breeze. Has a skill to spam dashes with no invincibility frames, but increases dps immensely. As long as you play it right and build around it, works great.
– Blitz/Dash Build synergizes well with pike abilities(Especially the spam-dash ability)
– Courage Build works well with the buff-damage abilities
– DO NOT FOCUS MADNESS. Legendary Pike makes normal attacks considered dash attacks. This does not mean it is both normal attack and dash attack. It is only dash attack. Madness does not stack whatsoever on legendary Pike (rip that run btw).
Shield:
Able to hit shield hits without really taking damage makes this a decent boss killer. Hard to hit flying enemies and is slow as a power skull. If not solo-carry skull, you can use it as a shield-buffer every so often, swapping between skulls. Can pair with some skull with high cooldown abilities, really good swap ability, or bomber. A noticeable weakness is that while shield-charging, you can still be hit unlike any other shield in other games with shield charges. Basically, there is a timing while blocking that you are able to be hit because you automatically attack when concentration is complete.
– The Concentration Speed ability is by far the best ability. It allows this skull to actually have great DPS.
– Every other skill is basically “do damage and give me 10 shield”.
– Courage(Physical Damage) build is optimal for having slow, but very heavy hitting attacks.
– Fortress(Shield) build supplements damage since Legendary Shield gets damage from shield strength.
– Mutant (Swap CD) build is optimal for very, very slowly killing a boss with infinite shields.
– Surprisingly, Attitude(concentration speed) is not that relevant. The item slots are better taken by other items.
Predator:
Amazing DPS and swap skill, but too mobile and vulnerable while using skills. Trying to micromanage ability usage without getting hit is extremely difficult. The fact that its skills move it without providing invincibility makes it extremely likely to take damage while attacking enemies. Has high enough range with attacks. Able to win the DPS race against bosses with enough damage.
– Hack is a great ability because it keeps you in place in exchange for more DPS than other abilities.
-Courage (Physical Damage) is optimal.
C-Tier
——C-Tier———–
These skulls have alright damage, but if possible should not be your main way to deal with bosses for various reasons. I have confidence in winning with these skulls, but I can also see myself losing too much HP.
Samurai:
Does super high damage with the Final Slash/Slash attack. Can oneshot boss phases. Main caveats are having to get in close to create marks, only being able to use the final slash a few times, and actually landing your abilities/marks can be hard without taking damage sometimes. Struggles a bit against flying enemies. The Slash ability can be hard to position without getting hit, and can miss. Playstyle is fun and rewarding for getting Slash procs on max-marked enemies.
– Courage (Attack Damage) makes your Final Slash/Slash do optimal damage.
– The 50% Crit dmg Bow is good for Final Slash.
– Best second skill is the counter slash, which puts full marks on target and does damage.
– Flurry Slashes does damage, but has a risky movement animation.
– The Quickstrike slashes is basically 5 Kirion slashes, so it’s not bad.
Gambler:
Does mediocre damage with basic attacks, but the nature of the skull allows a madness/on-hit build to work(though the basic attacks scale on Magic damage). Jump attack is horrible because it is a melee downward slash that does small Physical damage. The abilities in general are medium strength, have lengthy animation time, do delayed damage, and require specific positioning. They each vary on whether they deal Physical or Magical damage, making skills sometimes awkward until finding the Magnifico Priest to reroll skills.
– Black Jack is this skull’s best ability because the animation time is short and the ability fits in well while basic attacking. It scales on Magical Damage and pierces enemies. The damage and cooldown are decent.
– Roulette of Destiny requires jank positioning, has a second-long animation, doesn’t work at all against enemies that move a lot, sometimes blinds you by cluttering your screen, and does alright damage. It scales off Magical Damage.
– Russian Roulette scales off Physical damage, has a long animation, but pierces enemies, has high range, and does great damage.
– Dice Toss scales off Physical damage, has a second-long animation, and has low range. It actually does good damage if you get decent RNG.
– Sorcery(CDR) Build is very good, especially with Black Jack. Think of it like Madness, but ability-focused.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) Build is alright to do damage to bosses.
– Madness(Attackspeed) Build works alright with basic attacks.
– Weakness(Crit) Build actually works if you have Black Jack because you throw out an insane amount of projectiles.
– Chase(Long-ranged Damage) Builds are actually playable on this skull. Gambler has good enough range with skills like Russian Roulette, Black Jack, and basic attacks.
Skul:
Main idea is to challenge yourself with this skull. Swapping to this skull is awful because it locks you in a moving animation for awhile, so you will be hit. If you are killing bosses with this skull, you will want to throw skull, pick it up, and repeat. You can actually get enough sorcery to spam and infinitely fly using your abilities, making a run built around sorcery very viable, albeit a bit slow against bosses relative to other skulls. Before bossfights, several levels can use skull toss/flight to bypass enemy spawns.
– Very low dps comparably for lategame without sorcery.
– Sorcery(CDR) Build works extremely well for Skul. As soon as you get the fireball wand in sorcery, you actually have damage. Enables infinite flight with only a few cooldown reduction items.
Frost:
Actually has decent damage, but incredibly subpar compared to other skulls. Caveats are that the skull is slow and freezes enemies. Sometimes freezing enemies can be good, but other times it can mess up your dodging because their attacks stall while frozen and go through after unfreezing still. For the purpose of bosses, bosses are immune to the freeze effects. The damage is good enough to kill bosses, but the overall DPS is significantly lower than other skulls. The cooldowns are relatively long.
– Projectile Ice ability is the best abiilty for magic build at range.
– Dash Ice ability is the next best ability.
– Hibernate can be a run-defining ability, if you build around sorcery. The idea is that with enough cooldown reduction, it is on a low enough cooldown to spam almost off-cooldown. You still have to do a tiny bit of dodging in between abilities, but this can win you a run.
– Avalanche kinda sucks, but if you plan to do sorcery build, it cleanly works into it as a damage ability.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) build is optimal.
– Sorcery(CDR) is good to minimize the long cooldowns, especially with Hibernate.
Warrior:
Concentrating attacks will definitely get you hit against bosses. Long animations and struggles against flying enemies. You will only do damage if you concentrate abilities, at which point you can do a high chunk of a boss’s HP if you actually hit the ability. The problem is standing still and hoping they go to a position you can hit can be hard. If possible, try to charge abilities mid-air instead of on the ground the whole time. While you will take damage trying to concentrate abilities, you can do enough damage to have it be worth it against bosses.
– Courage (Attack Damage) is optimal.
– Attitude(Concentration Speed) is suggested to minimize the effects of standing still for a year.
D-Tier
—-D-Tier—–
These skulls suffer greatly against bosses specifically due to their nature or animations, but you can still conceivably beat a boss with the right setup. I can beat the run with these skulls, but I do not have consistent confidence in doing so.
Rockstar:
High Damage burst skills, but very immobile while trying to attack despite being a speed skull. The basic attack damage is consistent, but hardly good DPS. Filling the gauge is very difficult against a boss unless you plan to take damage. The damage mechanics are similar to alchemist in that it creates ability charges and is better to swap off of after using the cooldowns.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) build allows you to burst down boss HP with amps and the full-charge bar
Gargoyle:
Flying is nice and all, but the damage type of abilities is mixed so your item build may be messed up. Normal attacks do magic damage, but abilities are either physical or magical damage only. The abilities can often lead to you being hit, and flying in the air can be hard to control in many bossfights. Against some bosses, it makes it harder to dodge abilities. Overall, it is just a really awkward skull to use, with not that great payout if you learn it. The damage is extremely mediocre if you build direct damage. You usually try to stay midair after the flight by spamming basic attack mid-air. Important Distinction: Gargoyle “flight” is considered multiple jumps (5 total. Therefore, using Soar lets you stack the %dmg increase up to 5 times. So if you have 4/5 Soar, then 70% dmg increase is actually 350% dmg increase.
– The abilities suck in general compared to basic attacks.
– The tornado scales off magic damage, but is more of a fire and forget ability. It does significantly less DPS than just attacking normally and will only sometimes be hitting the bosses.
– The laser beam scales off magic damage and slows enemies hit for the duration, including bosses. This is the best magic ability this skull has, though the DPS is still less than just basic attacking. The benefits are the extremely long range, the slowing, and the fact it keeps you midair the whole time. The main negative is that it locks you in animation for awhile, meaning you may get hit.
– Soar(damage midair) Build is basically essential to do relevant damage on gargoyle.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) Build supplement is good with Soar to deal damage.
– Madness(Attackspeed) Build is a good secondary to Soar as well for basic-attack spamming.
Ninja:
Very mobile, but the damage is extremely low and does not provide much support against bosses. Hard to use effectively, but you can eventually chip away a bosses’ HP. Doing normal attacks is awful as the ninja because it moves you automatically in the direction you are facing, which sometimes moves you to bad positions against bosses. Similarly, doing midair normal attacks will dash you in a direction. The abilities usually require positioning and do abysmally low damage compared to most other skulls. Basically the embodiment of death by a thousand cuts, but the payoff for being able to control this skull is not worth the payout whatsoever.
– Courage/Madness/Piercing Wind/Sorcery.
Warlock:
Does good damage if you concentrate some spells. However, trying to dodge boss attacks while channeling spells is extremely difficult and completing concentration locks you in animation for a long time, meaning you will likely be hit. It seems like you also do not get invincibility frames dashing while concentrating. Overall the damage trade-off isn’t worth it. While channeling the legendary version, the spell will shoot small versions of itself periodically, but these tend to miss the boss regardless and do small damage. So, your dps is alright due to your concentration burst, but the price to pay is also great. Without concentration items, it is far more DPS reliable to spam basic attacks. A playable strategy is to just tap-shoot abilities instead of concentrating, and just spamming basic attacks.
– The Meteor spell is a particularly reliable spell against bosses since it hits everything on screen, ignoring positioning. It has good enough DPS from the mini-meteors while channeling.
– The Spike spell is absolutely awful because of how specific the positioning must be to actually hit anything. It does not have a channel mini-spell.
– The Orb spell is not that good against bosses from the full-charge, but it has sustainable aoe damage from the channel mini-spell. May be worth using to 99% charge and stopping before full-concentration.
– Basic attacks do main DPS.
– Tactics(Magic Damage) so your spells do damage.
– Attitude(Concentration) so you can make it actually worth using concentration. In particular, Magic Pocket Watch makes your abilities significantly better.
Living Armor:
Works alright, but is slow. Does very good damage, but relies on risky melee hits to charge abilities, making some bossfights hard to do without getting hit. The abilities are quick, making them easy to hit while maintaining maneuverability.
-Tactics
E-Tier
—-E-Tier—–
These skulls suffer extremely greatly against bosses. They each have limitations that make defeating bosses a herculean task, but still possible. Once in a blue moon, I can win a run using specifically these skulls, but I would prefer to not try to do so until they’re updated.
Sword:
Slow, melee and alright dps. Basically is a worse version of other skulls for the purpose of bosses without taking lots of damage. The mixed scaling is quite odd. Basic attacks do physical, most abilities do status effects, but the skills have a magical damage component.
– As most non-hero bosses are immune to status effects, half of the abilities are wasted.
– I have tried Tactics build(magic damage), but it just simply isn’t as good damage as dedicated magic classes
– Courage(Physical Damage) is optimal, but makes it a weaker version of other physical-based skulls.
Ranger
Charge attacks suck for how long they take to charge, which is problematic in itself. Being locked in animations with shockingly low range for an archer means you will take damage. The only saving grace is the ability that shotguns arrows at many angles.
– Do not play as a dps ranged basic attacker. The only way to do any real damage comparable to other classes is to use it as an attack damage caster focused on using abilities.
– Read what the concentration abilities actually do. Some concentrations will do less damage than tap-shooting it because they change the scope of the ability.
– Concentrate abilities mid-air to maintain movement.
– Courage and Attitude/Sorcery are needed to play as a caster for the most part.
Rider:
Incredibly high DPS damage… against non-bosses. Struggles incredibly against flying enemies and some stages. Being able to take damage while riding and unable to dodge makes this a DPS-race skull, so a worse version of the pike skull. Damage is so incredibly inconsistent against most bosses that it should not be used. Overall super painful to fight bosses with.
– Courage to maximize the hits you can actually do.
Treant:
Slow as sin and dps does not make up for it. Mixed ability damage.The main benefit is that it has great reach for a melee-attacker. Basically a really vanilla power-skull with no particular strengths, but also doesn’t have the horrible weaknesses of many other power skulls. The saplings that spawn are not too useful in the bossfight since they are hard to actually stack up.
– Courage(Attack Damage) makes you actually do damage.
– Madness(Attack Speed) makes you not suffer trying to attack as a power skull.
F-Tier
—-F-Tier—–
These skulls are actively sabotaging your chance to win against bosses if you have the option to use them or not. I have zero confidence in winning a run with these skulls.
Yaksha:
Slower than sin, with long animations. The damage aside from 5th step absolutely does not make up for taking tons of damage trying to dodge attacks.
Minotaurus:
Basically the same as Yaksha for the purpose of bosses.
Ghoul:
Basically the same as Yaksha and Minotaurus, but worse because getting bigger means you get hit by more attacks and your abilities are actually useless against bosses without taking damage. You also cannot use your Flesh Chunk passive on most bosses because the duration is too low, while you get no chunks from a boss.
Genie:
The Genie is a special tier of bad because of one fact: your dashes are absolutely awful for bossfights. The Genie blinks instantly instead of dashing, which sounds great in theory until you realize your invincibility frames are also gone. This makes it significantly harder to dodge almost every attack in the game compared to a normal dash. You basically have to use your abilities to dodge key attacks instead of your dash. Hits decently hard, but the dash outweighs it by a significant margin.
– Courage(Attack Damage) to make your attacks actually do damage.
– Madness(Attackspeed) to take advantage of the clones from finishing a basic attack combo.
– Sorcery(CDR) to get your invincibility abilities up more often.
– Get anything defensive if you want to live against bosses.
Water:
Same problems as Yaksha, except your abilities and attacks may as well all stun you for a second because of their animation speed. Every sequence of attacks will likely make you get hit. Struggles against flying enemies and does significantly worse against mobile bosses.