I wanted to share some insights on how you can go about cheesing and reaching a higher tier unlock for yourself.

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While some of the strategies covered may be module dependent or specific to tier 15 - a lot of them are also applicable to any tier unlock.

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Besides the video, you can also read a Text version below.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3fRrgfNYTY

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3fRrgfNYTY

Text version

Hi everyone.

So first I had planned to just share some knowledge about unlocking tiers in my regular update videos - but since I know milestone runs, such as unlocking tier 16 - or whatever tier you are hoping to unlock - is an often asked question, I thought I’d specifically share a video with some thoughts as well as my experience of cheesing wave 300 on tier 15 this week.

And if you didn’t know, reaching wave 300 on tier 15 is a massive progression milestone - especially if you have Chain Lightning as it gets you the Lightning Amplifier - Scatter - which makes you cut into scatters like warm butter. And it also gets you Chain Thunder which helps for survivability, but especially much later on when you may have Smite (CL+) unlocked.

I’ll just first start off with some of the conventional tier unlock milestone tips, and then I’ll cover some unique ones connected to my run and experience.

And of course, it goes without saying that there may be other cheese strategies not mentioned and everyone’s tower is different - so if you have some other cheese strategies and ideas, then share them in the comments to help the community!

The Basics

But OK, let’s first cover the basics.

1. Generally speaking, if you feel like you have enough card slots for it, you should aim to use demon mode, Second Wind and energy shield in your short milestone runs to help with survivability.
   • Demon Mode Card makes you invincible for a set amount of time and increases your damage by 3x.
   • Second Wind Card basically gives you a second life as it revives you with half health and makes you invincible for a few seconds.
   • And Energy Shield Card helps block some hits - which recharges.

So they are all nice and ideally should be used if you have space for it. If you have limited space, however, you just gotta consider and try what has less impact/benefit on your milestone run.

1. Secondly, usually for our tier unlock runs it is the boss damage that is the main issue, and so there are several ways we can try to address this:
   • Firstly, the Death Penalty module can help you insta-kill bosses. It is random what enemies get the Death Penalty buff, but if you are lucky, the boss will die from a single bullet. So this can be very helpful with milestone unlocks.
   • Secondly, knowing that bosses is what tends to kill us in the short tier unlock runs, we have another strategy as well - which is to try to avoid them. And the way we do that is by using the Wave Skip Card card. But, generally speaking you don’t want to use this card all the time as you likely will want to heal up or gain more Death Wave Health in between bosses - so what you do is just to equip the Wave Skip card just before the boss wave, and then immediately after swapping back to whatever other card you were using. The wave skip won’t happen all the time obviously, but getting a lucky wave skip or two can be the difference between reaching your target wave or not.
2. And the third general advice is to turn off the Enemy Balance Card to reduce the number of enemies you are facing. However, please note that in some circumstances, using Enemy Balance card may actually be a lot better. And this is largely because it will help you earn more coins and cash, give you more enemies to earn a higher Death Wave Health multiplier, and so on - and especially so if you have a permanent Black Hole as then no enemies will anyways hit you except for Elites and bosses.
3. And fourth, if relevant, you can consider squeezing in a Death Defy Sub-Module Effect on your armor module to increase your Death Defy luck - but that means you are taking a spot from something else you may need for your tier unlock run, so consider that tradeoff. Personally I don’t use any Death Defy substat, but it’s anyways always nice to have a backup Armor module with Death Defy for the annoying Death Defy event missions, so yeah, maybe at least have one module available with it for that if nothing else.

Some additional advice - in a t15w300 context