Informational: GC aka Glass Cannon
What is Glass Cannon (GC)?
Glass cannon is a term used to describe a tower setup where you kill the enemy before they touch your tower. With this setup, every hit can kill you but the goal is to maximize your damage so they don't hit you. This is different than eHP (Effective Health Points, where you deal minimal damage but you can take all the hits) and Hybrid (where you can take most hits and deal effective damage). There are recommendations for what your tower should have in order to be GC, but there are no hard requirements. Any tower that relies on killing enemies before they hit your tower is GC.
Is my tower GC?
A simple test: If you take the -50 hp/-50 enemy hp tradeoff perk, you are not GC. eHP and Hybrid both need that tradeoff perk to be most effective, but it's the death of GC (just like -enemy speed/x2.5 enemy damage is the death of eHP/Hybrid).
Should I go GC?
GC is the end game build, but it takes a very long time of lab research and heavy stone investment. eHP is the best build to start with, it helps you get much further much faster and requires minimal investment in labs and stones. This allows you to get to higher waves more quickly, which means more coins, which means more upgrades. GC will slow you down a lot, even if the initial investment will be "wasted" once you switch to GC. The expedited progress at the start with eHP will far outweigh the negatives. Once you get to the point where you can't effectively deal with protectors or elites, you'll switch to Hybrid. From there you'll go GC. A rough outline of stone recommendations per build is below:
- Under 5,000 stones: eHP
- 5,000-50,000 stones: Hybrid
- 50,000+ stones: GC
If GC is the best build, why would I waste lab time on HP stuff?
- You're free to disregard any advice or suggestions and do what works for you, but you're in for a very slow start unless you can get a lot of stones quickly.
- GC is the best build at the moment, and historically it's always been pretty great. However, game changes and updates happen, and not too long ago Hybrid reigned supreme. More well-rounded towers aren't as impacted as focused towers during these updates and transitions. It's a good idea to balance.
Why does GC need so many stones?
While there are not strict guidelines for what your tower needs in order to be considered GC (for example, "Bullet GC" may refer to a tower that doesn't have SM, but tower projectiles deal most damage), to be effective as GC and make it worthwhile to farm over Hybrid, you'll need a lot of upgraded UWs:
- At least 5,000 stones into CF, for full uptime and decent speed reduction (along with about 6 months of labs)
- At least 10,000 stones into SM to start with.
- About 2,000 stones into CL to make it decent.
- At least 5,000 stones into SL with 3 lights.
- In addition to the tens of thousands of stones that all towers need in GC/BH/DW for economy.
Having these things is nice for Hybrid too, but they're essential for GC to outweigh hybrid by itself.
How can GC survive and compete if it dies to a single hit?
Death defy, energy shield, second wind, demon mode*, and nuke* (requires key investments in legend tournaments) can all protect you from a fatal blow. As long as you're killing quickly enough and only getting hit once every few waves, your energy shield will regenerate and you'll be able to survive another blow. The wall is great too, you can get it to 10 seconds of invulnerability on build and a 180 second CD time, which means your tower is invincible 5.5% of the time! Note that 180s cooldown isn't realistic for most people because it requires Defense Absolute mastery (ew) and lots of keys, in addition to ancestral sub effect on the armor mod and maxed lab. Most can get to 300s pretty easily, which is still 3.3% invulnerability.