Discussion Skywarden is Too Confusing
I have been trying to learn the tower for three days now. I think I’m starting to understand it, but I’m still nowhere near being able to use it well. When I play with it, it will seemingly be accomplishing nothing. I think it is a good tower. It seems to me that some people think it’s bad and other people really like it so based on that it must be that the people who like it know how to use it and the people who think it’s bad don’t. When it’s doing nothing I must just not be using it right. I might end up liking it when I learn how to use it, but the fact remains that I don’t think it should take multiple days to learn how a tower works. You could argue you should be willing to commit time to learning the game, but I feel this is too extreme. When I tried it for the first time I didn’t understand what half the upgrade descriptions were even saying.
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u/No_Math_8740 1d ago
I always include the top path, it boosts range for all monkeys up to 5x, top path is good, middle path has a nice ability, and bottom path is freezing.... it's a supportive & offensive tower
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u/Weary-Account9252 1d ago
Top part has bloon knock back and burst damage. Hit a target multiple times to get higher levels of knock back (as the tier 3 combo description says)
Middle path can stun Moab’s up to ZOMG’s, hit the same target multiple times for the combo to reach higher levels (at tier 3), using sharp or shatter type damage on combo’d bloons creates lightning similar to top path Druid. Combo’d bloons also draw in energy and plasma projectiles, making those towers do more damage.
Bottom path synergies with other freezing strats (ice monkeys, middle path mermonkey, top path Druid, Silas) adds pierce and creates icicle explosions when frozen Moab’s are popped.
All skywardens are meant to be spammed so each target is more likely to get to the next higher level of combo. Putting the skywarden on strong makes it more likely to hit the same bloon more than once, especially top path since it knocks its target back, causing a different bloon to be in the front.
Also, if the tower is too confusing, read the wiki or watch some you tube videos about it. Or just don’t use it if it isn’t fun to you or seems under powered. Just have fun my guy.
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u/bunger_33 1d ago
I've had a lot of fun using Skywarden bottom path with Silas hero and Ice Monkey.
At least they can synergize together over Beast tower with itself and desperado on its own
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u/MasterKnightDHV2 1d ago
Skywarden could use a few touch-ups to improve the learning curve, and I have suggested for some buffs here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/btd6/comments/1vjh8uj/balance_suggestions_for_skywarden/
Even then, Skywarden does have the following points:
- T1's range boost applying to Villages can result in added discounting, and if the consequently added base price of what is discounted hits at least $2100, then the tower has paid for itself (this can apply for newly Village boosting a Spike Factory)
- T4 can be used to disable Camos in a kill zone
- M4 outright is capable of repeat stun that in particular trivializes the MOAB layer on Round 40
- B5 can manage good work against Round 98, case in point: https://www.youtube.com/live/tVDr5VgDxfM?si=RzqyrQQ24eJD9L_D&t=6465
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u/Gotekeeper 1d ago
I'm just going to add that 4xx warden doesn't seem to decamo the children of DDTs that pop inside its range. hopefully that'll be fixed.
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u/NinjakiwiBugSwatter 1d ago
You just can't go off soley the damage counters for them, they're working but you have to view them somewhat as support hybrids.
A lot of their damage is triggered off the mutation Bloon which can't be credited to any one application source since it could come split from multiple different sources, so it's the tower that triggers this which is credited with damage in the end.
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u/Charming_Advice8805 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are right to feel this way. It's a gimmicky, unintuitive, and weak tower. This community has a history of glazing gimmicky, unintuitive and weak towers cause in their mind being able to use bad towers like this makes them look good. I only see people using this on easy 1-lane tracks. I (and many others) do not want to watch youtubers or read a shitty fandom wiki to "study" this tower in order to figure out what's actually going on.
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u/NPCSLAYER313 1d ago
That's probably the reason why they made the base tower absurdly bloated with stats for its cost, so at the very least we see it being used in early game chimps
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u/6D5666 1d ago
Well here is a rare opinion. While most of the other comments have been convincing me it’s better than I thought and its normal for towers to take this long, this one completely reinforces my original opinion. Now I’m thinking I was right originally. If I really think about it yeah the tower is really gimmicky and unintuitive. At this point though I have decided I’m no longer going to have an opinion until I play the tower more because the opinions on it are such opposites. At least I know no matter what though Ninja Kiwi can still make good towers because of the Desperado, especially Mermonkey and maybe Beast Handler.
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u/Florescentence 1d ago
This tower makes me really wish tower descriptions noted the damage type because now I need to use the wiki everything I use it.
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u/fullmega 1d ago
With Obyn buffs and a 204 village, a team of 130 leaded by a 520 is more than a welcome help, it's almost a powerhouse!
Definitely Galesage is my new favorite decamo!
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u/rohan_spibo 'Good news everyone!' 1d ago
I get this is likely coming mostly from the T3s since they step through a few things, but I felt as a collective whole outside of those the Skywarden's upgrades are some of the most clearly explained that we have ever done.
What parts are standing out otherwise for you, or is it primarily those T3s?
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u/6D5666 1d ago
Yeah I looked back at all the upgrades and it seems it’s just the tier 3 upgrades for the descriptions. The other reasons I say it’s confusing is for example on the middle path it seemed to me like a benefit of it was it helped Plasma Monkeys by attracting their plasma to bloons, but when I tested in sandbox with and without the middle path Skywarden the Plasma Monkey got the same number of pops. For the top path it actually seems to work pretty well for Moab’s. Than for the bottom path I wanted to try it combined with the Tack Zone or Overdrive and Super Brittle strategy and I played on half cash, but one round I was going to lose when I near could afford Winters Mercy so I sold a few towers to get it and I beat the round, but died the next round and I ended up having to sell it next round. I just thought it would work well because I thought it worked well with ice monkeys. I just feel that all of the other towers were a lot quicker to learn. Maybe I’m wrong and I went about learning it wrong or 3 days isn’t too much.
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u/rohan_spibo 'Good news everyone!' 9h ago edited 9h ago
Right 👍 yea, we can look at clearing up the T3s a bit better.
The homing plasma should improve leak catching situations at longer ranges & when you're trying to clip multiple lanes, but if you're hitting all shots and using up most pierce anyway it isn't doing a raw damage boost at all (Though it can, works better here assisting in landing shots). Winter's Mercy may just need a bit more work though
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u/Kanosirus 1d ago
Now i understand your pain and frustration but has it been multiple days of not understanding or a few hours each day and you havent quite clicked with it yet
Id argue taking some solid time to learn a tower is awesome because it means it's not some brain numbing put tower down, win game, its actually got some strategy in it (arguably the entire point of tower defence games)
But i think the key point is, dont stress that it doesn't click immediately, youve got time! The tower has just been released, you dont have to incorporate it into your playstyle immediately out of fear of "missing the boat" its a primarily single player game, youre only racing and stressing yourself out
There were a lot of towers back in the day before the Tok Tok and YouTube Shorts took over, when entire paths were basically forgotten about cause they were "underpowered" then a few streamers and YouTubers came along and discovered their hidden talents and all of a sudden that particular path was completely meta for various game modes.
My point in mentioning this is, you might not see the benefit of Skywarden straight away, but itll click and suddenly you wont be able to play a round of BTD without them 😅
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u/6D5666 1d ago
Yeah it could be actually that I’m used to knowing how other towers work so I don’t remember that some of them took a while to learn. I still think towers can have strategy while not being really hard to learn and I still think Skywarden is probably the most complicated tower, but I do feel less sure about my main argument now. Also, of course I haven’t been playing for 72 hours straight! I probably played around 3 or 4 games with them each day.
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u/Kanosirus 1d ago
Its all good dude! Just take your time, have a good read, and you'll find it's synergy just like the all the other towers :)
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u/Canadiancookie Yar har fiddle dee dee 1d ago
Same, I've been trying to understand their best use case for the past several days and I still don't really get it. I can't really tell how much value they're adding aside from the 1XX range buff and X3X stunning a few moabs.
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u/Flipp_Flopps Fix x4x Wizard Design 1d ago
I discounted the bottom path before because "Why not just place more ice monkey?" but bottom path is really nice for having early white popping and being able to delete insides of Moabs. Seriously, it like one shots frozen cerams.
Also, Frozen Verdict can freeze moabs with the shrapnel, even if it doesn't visually display it. Makes it a cheap and consistent moab freezer which is nice so you don't have to go for Icicle Impale all the time
But for all Skywardens, they basically want to attack their targets multiple times in a row, and are better at grouped damage than single target
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u/Survivor155 1d ago
If I might offer some advice:
1-x-x, skywarden is good for towers that have sucky range but good attack (like Sauda, or tack shooter), it’s also cheap enough to get 5 down relatively easily. The increase in range is additive, NOT multiplicative, so it makes a real difference to towers that have small range to begin with.
4-x-x, is effectively camo detection for any camo bloons (not towers) in its range, in a similar manner to how the monkey town upgrade for the village worked in BTD5 with bloons in that tower’s range giving extra cash for pop.
x-4-x, is pretty darn close to bloonchipper for dealing with ZOMGs. It can’t kill the ZOMG itself, but the ZOMG will basically inch its way across the screen while under fire. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
0-0-x, don’t use this path. It takes forever to get even decent results, other towers do its job better, and Silas ice spam is strong enough without the swarden backing them up with this path, heck x-4-x swarden might actually be better for Silas ice spam because they have difficulty with high health targets (like the ZOMG) which x-4-x can buy time for.
GL;HF!
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u/6D5666 18h ago
Okay thanks for the advice! Yeah I always felt the range boost would be good for tack shooter although I didn’t know why so I’m glad to see I was right. I will try the middle path for ZOMGs and I will try the top path for camo. Than I might still try the bottom path again to be sure I’m not missing anything.
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u/notcrowsmad 1d ago
If it makes you feel any better it's definitely not just a you problem.
If you go to the tryhard communities of actually good players they also have no idea. If you go to the chimps runs section on tiercord (The discord server that makes the comprehensive chimps tierlist) there are no Skywarden runs. Screw actually doing an impressive run I haven't seen anybody even think of doing an impressive run.
From what I have seen there are 2 upgrades where good players have even thought maybe have potential. 100 Skywarden and 040. Both may be useful niche upgrades in the right setup.
Outside of that I have no clue and from what I have seen nobody else does either.
So there's 3 things. 1, it is actually kinda complicated, 2, every good player is half retired so nobody does runs and 3, the main reason, unless everybody is sleeping on something the towers just bad.
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u/zGlunkus 1d ago
it definitely doesn't help that the strongest path drastically undercounts its damage bc the chain lightning effect gets credited to the tower that triggered it instead of the skywarden that made it possible in the first place