Relic Explanations
S-Tier
The best of the best. Setting scores with these will leave the tile unbeatable for hours.
Moab Clash: +3 damage to moabs on (nearly) every attack creates the best relic in the game. In least cash and least tiers, moabs become a complete non-issue, and some towers like dartship and sun avatar become absurd least tier solos. In bosses that dont allow first strike or AOW, moab clash is also a must-have, as the best boss towers otherwise are overdrives and elite defenders (with the occasional off-meta spike storm). Moab clash isnt a top tier relic in races, although it still does hold some power in letting recursive or the like solo the entire game
Restoration: The lives relic with stats leagues above any of the others. 20 lives per round up to 200 over max is enough lenience to just tank numerous earlygame rounds. A very impactful relic in least cash or least tiers when you need to struggle through earlygame, and occasionally great in races.
Flint Tips: The damage over time makes some towers absurdly powerful, notably druid of the jungle and glaive ricochet. Very frequently used in races with these towers to destroy earlygame like nothing else can. Also valuable for specific least cash or tiers tiles, as flint tips also combos well with nevamiss, ODS, and dartship, allowing saveups into the strongest least tiers towers in the game
Monkey Boost: An auto include for all bosses that have solutions that aren’t first strike or elim. Also a very useful least tiers and least cash option, as having 3 get out of jail free cards can very often allow a defense to work just by entirely skipping the hard rounds.
Alch Touch: Whenever flint tips are used in races, alch touch is never far behind. Alch touch allows sharp type towers being used with flint tips to pop lead, which otherwise would become a big problem in races when ricochet or jungle vines hit a lead bloon and stop dealing damage. Occasional least tier use with fairly frequently used towers.
Camo Trap: The unquestionable best relic for least tiers. Bypassing camo always saves at least a few tiers and most of the time allows for entirely different strategies. Camo trap has a decent amount of power in least cash, especially on restrictive tiles. Not very helpful in bosses or races.
A-Tier
Very strong. Commonly used relics that have a significant impact on the game.
Box of Monkey: Box has the same strengths as starting stash, but with more generalist strength as long as you’re buying something that costs more than $300. While box is more overall useful for snowballing, it lacks the niche uses that starting stash has; stash can occasionally start races with farm or a much stronger starting tower while box lacks that power.
Starting Stash: A $300 jumpstart very often starts massive snowballing in both race starts and boss farming. Nearly an autoinclude in races; starting with more money always lets you start sending significantly faster, and sometimes lets you send much, much faster if the extra cash lets you start with something like gwen. The $300 headstart also lets you start farming much earlier in bosses.
Royal Treatment: The towers that benefit from this specific immunity are among the strongest over the entire event. Wall of fire and Gwen in races. Plasma accelerator, midpath wiz, and sun avatar in least tiers/cash, and absolutely nothing in bosses.
Super Monkey Storm: An auto include for all bosses that have solutions that aren’t first strike. Also a very useful least tiers and least cash option, as having 2 get out of jail free cards can very often allow a defense to work just by entirely skipping the hard rounds. The main drawback to not using it is that in the vast majority of scenarios, monkey boost is better. Super Monkey Storm is still used often, though, because using both Super Monkey Storm and Monkey Boost is common.
Glue Trap: The strongest get out of jail free card for least cash and least tiers. Having three of them is extremely powerful; round 63 is neutralized with one, and several midgame rounds at once can be removed with the other. Unlike SMS and Monkey Boost, however, Glue Trap holds nearly no power in bosses.
Road Spikes: While road spikes can be used as a +200 lives (double what box of chocolate gives!) or to pop the moab on 40 (like moab mine but worse!), its main use comes in bosses, where road spiking to avoid penalty is used in nearly every boss run to allow farming as hard as possible
B-Tier
Good relics. Impactful yet may struggle to find a spot in your 4 relic loadout. Usually requires a specific tile ruleset to see use. Typically very strong as event relics.
Air and Sea: While heli and sub’s discount and buff has a niche use in tiles that need reactor, first strike, or dartship, the real power comes in its boat buff, which makes merchantmen farming much stronger, and ace buff, which is a very noticeable help for least tier tiles that use flying fortress or shredder.
Box Of Chocolates: A bad lives relic. This should never see the light of day in least cash, least tiers, or bosses. The immediate boost to starting lives gives it a rare gimmick in races, though, so it sees extremely fringe yet occasional usage. If you don’t have many relics you can stack box of chocolates and restoration for an obscene amount of lives
Marching Boots: A gimmick relic used almost exclusively to increase the amount of farms or main dps towers available in races and bosses. Very strong when applicable, Very useless otherwise.
Moab Mine: A rare sidegrade to moab clash, moab mine will outperform moab clash in the first 54 rounds in the game and then immediately cease functioning after. Sometimes that’s all you need though
Hard Baked: Ceramic damage matters. From race towers like mael, reactor, and wall of fire, to least tier towers like dartship, plasma accelerator, spectre, and operation dart storm, a constant for the majority of strong towers in contested territory is a struggle with ceramics. Hard Baked is impactful in many games but is very rarely used, as it has a very hard time finding a spot in a 4-relic loadout (especially so for races). Most frequently used in least tiers with either apache dartship or spectre needing to kill r81+ super ceramics.
Abilitized: 10% ability cooldown reduction is very universally helpful. From races to bosses to even least cash and tiers, having faster cooldowns always benefits your defense. Very rarely sees use in loadouts, as it usually isn’t impactful enough to warrant giving up a better relic..
C-Tier
Either rarely or never used in the 4 relic loadout. Has either a moderately usable gimmick or would be nice to see as an event relic.
Mana Bulwark: A worse version of restoration that can still do the same job occasionally. Restoration is more than 4 times better (Bulwark: +5 per round, +50 max from current lives Restoration: +20 per round, +200 max from starting lives) but mana bulwark and restoration can occasionally be interchangeable. No reason to use it over restoration, but sometimes restoration just doesn’t exist.
Rounding Up: +20 end of round cash is a pretty big deal in races. It’s undeniably strong in every race and even boss to some extent. It has major difficulties fitting into the 4-relic loadout of race and boss, mainly in part due to those gamemodes having so many auto-include relics.
Durable Shots: This is used with two towers in the entire game; wall of fire and druid of the jungle. The increased lifespan is a significant boost to these towers’ dps, and wall of fire is used extremely frequently in contested territory. Durable Shots suffers from not fitting in a 4 relic loadout, especially with wall of fire usually demanding royal treatment and druid of the jungle benefitting far more from flint tips (which means alch touch is needed too). Can see use in least tiers midpath wizard solos and when you need to fill a 4th relic slot on a gwen tile.
Bigger Bloon Sabotage: 15% less HP (and 5% less speed) on moabs is significant. Practically any tile will get some use out of this, but none would ever consider running it over its alternative in moab clash, and it would often get cut from the loadout even when moab clash isn’t present due to other relics providing more value to the defense.
Thrive: The farming relic. Useless in race and least cash, barely usable in least tiers (pushing a saveup is better done with SM, Monkey Boost, or Glue Trap), but extremely powerful in some bosses. The extra income from pops and farms is op when applicable, and useless otherwise
Sharpsplosion: The relic with the most potential power in C tier. Sharpsplosion is a rare gimmick relic that massively boosts the power of bomber aces, dartship and churchill. Would only be used if one of bomber ace or churchill was used as main dps, which is exceedingly rare, or if dartship was somehow struggling before round 80, in which case far better relics exist.
Extra Empowered: The biggest oddball of the entire list. Used entirely for gwen/sauda starting races. It has one of the most restrictive niches of any relic but on those tiles it is the best relic in the entire game. Its limited scope cant escape the gimmick tiers but its insane potential stops it from being any lower
Camo Flogged: Struggling with camo bloons while having camo detection is such a rare and generally unhelpful niche that even the massive +3 damage bonus cant find a use. The best use case it has involves races with terrible camo detection, but even then camo flogged is rarely worth running over a better race relic.
Going The Distance: A 20% range buff makes all defenses stronger. It may not be by much, but it will always be a noticeable buff. Going The Distance is one of the most generalist relics in the entire game, but is nowhere near impactful enough to see use in a loadout.
Hero Boost: Even at +15%, the relic just doesn’t provide meaningful enough value to see conventional use. Tiles where you scramble to a certain hero level do sometimes exist, mostly with eti ucav in least tiers, but nearly any relic in the game will let you survive an extra round or two to get to that level anyways. Already niche by being hero dependent but also extremely unimportant.
D-Tier
Rarely even impacts the game. Theoretically not useless but would never, ever see use in a 4 relic loadout and will be disappointingly useless as an event relic.
Regeneration: Terrible. +10 lives per round is never worth running over any of the other life relics, but unlike all the other life relics, is also just not worth using on its own merits.
Fortifried: A weird situation where this relic actually holds a decent amount of lategame power, especially with dartship or spectre on rounds 82 and 83, and can do a little something on round 64. Not ever used when compared to the miles better alternatives and such a massive gimmick that it has nearly no use as an event relic
Deep Heat: Ice tower outside of races is one of the worst towers in contested territory. The only ice upgrades that are even worth considering outside of race are super brittle and embrittlement, both of which are used to debuff a boss and not to pop white bloons. This has theoretical use with ice shards in races, where freezing white bloons allows the ice shards to create slightly more shards than if it had just killed the white bloons with the shards. This is the most miniscule buff in exchange for one of a race’s precious relic slots. It isn’t ever worth it. Buffs sentry expert though. That’s cool I guess.
Broken Heart: +1 damage to regrow. Why. The theoretical use case is if your defense is struggling on 76 and 79, which is only applicable to.. like… dartship saveups? Just use a relic that makes your defense better. Flint tips, monkey boost, glue trap, hell if you’re in that hypothetical dartship saveup you can even just use sharpsplosion.
F-Tier
Gonna have to theorycraft pretty hard to explain how these do anything.
Heartless: You aren’t going to find yourself in a situation where you want anti-regrow relics, but if you somehow magically do, why not use the relic that actually kills the regrows instead? At least Broken Heart’s +1 damage immediately neutralizes all regrows. -25% regrow rate barely even helps.
Tech Bot: Tech Bot. There is one scenario where tech bot does anything. If you’re on a 2-tier bloonarius with first strike and some form of farming enabled, on the 2nd tier you can activate your first strikes one singular frame faster to get a better time (this has no effect on the first tier, as only two first strikes are needed to kill the boss and you can activate two first strikes in one frame without tech bot). It also lets you use abilities on covered garden where they would otherwise be unusable, but considering that (at the time of writing this), covered garden is banned on all banners, relics, least cash, least tiers, and bosses (leaving covered garden with only regular race tiles, which techbot cant be used on because its a power), this doesn’t seem too relevant.
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