This guide contains some tips to get Only Ballista achievement in the Rogue Tower game.
How to Obtain Only Ballista Achievement
All credit goes to Mercurial!
Requirements
Only Ballista
- Win by building only ballista towers.
Tips
General advice would be, start with resetting your upgrades, and only take the cards that you’re going to use.
After you take all the Ballista, Mortar, and Tesla skills (because those start unlocked), and all the Status effect cards, you might need one or two more weapons to meet you Buy More Cards quotas. Just pick something like Encampment, which has a lot of cards, and buy them all, then never select the Encampment card in the game (if you do, your one dud card will turn into 4). I’d recommend not taking Life Steal or Haunted House.
Once you have all the cards and permanent upgrades you can use and nothing else — you can beat it with a status and crit build, on a good map. A good map for Ballistas, is a single path that turns 4-8 tiles into one loop-around rectangle. Then, you get all your range upgrades, and build in the middle of that space with a lot of ballistas upgraded a moderate amount.
I recommend you max out the poison and bleed trees, but for burn, only get the first level of the status application (+25% burn), and ignore the burn tree entirely. If possible, don’t even unlock it. You just don’t get enough cards to max out reasonably max out ballista and all three statuses in time. Applying just a little burn will stop armor from regenerating, though. Compensate for this by creating Armor-focused Ballistas set to MostArmor MostArmor MostArmor. I chose Burn, because the 5% Crit and 5% Slow from the other two trees are more useful.
Then you basically just play normal, focusing on Banditry, Ballista upgrades, Poison+Bleed upgrades, and universities if you see shrines (get the university cards, place down all the universities and upgrade them ~6-9 times per building and stop).
Have a front line, that does all the big damage. Watch the waves move through your line, identify what type of health is surviving the longest, and react by creating ballistas focused on that type of health set to MostWhateverx3 target priority. Have a couple back lines a good 5-10 tiles past that, which are meant to catch small enemies hasting out of the front line.
what a stupid advice, to reset xp for balista only. You will lose ALL xp and will have to grind XP again …
Just finished it. Only the start is hard and you need to be lucky with map layout. I rushed towards one portal to get universities early instead of evenly spreading out the map. With so many towers the university is a great investment. I also didn’t get the “ballistas cost mana to fire” card. I don’t think the extra 3 base damage is that great. For ballistas, quantity over quality. You want many of them to keep the enemies slowed. Only a few of my towers were over level 20.
Honestly – I think the most important thing that wasn’t really touched on is to just speedrun the first ~10-12 tiles of the map, and restart if it sucks. Early split? Restart. Complete straightaway with no double-back to use as a front line? Restart.
You want two solid areas, composing a good ~8-9 tiles in total. One to do the damage, with targeted high-level ballistas, and one to do cleanup, with a lot of average ballistas. A large, winding S curve would be ideal.
Ehhh, I’m on the fence. I did not use it, no. At least, for this achievement.
The problem with mana bolts is that the mana use scales with the level of the ballista. For some napkin math …
A level 27 Ballista using MBII is using 10 mana a shot, firing every three seconds, and doing 42 base damage instead of 36. That’s using three cards(for mana bank) to give you a 17% damage boost, at the cost of ~417 gold per ballista to build mana banks. On the one hand, that’s not that bad; on the other hand, using those three cards to unlock +1 Shields Damage x 3 gives you a +11% damage boost, and opens up Crit +10%, etc.
The hard part of the achievement is the end, levels ~40-45. Specifically, the Beholder + Portal combinations, that are very tanky and also dump a lot of enemies that might make it entirely past your front line.
If you play it like I did, then you’ll have a good 50 Ballistas around Wave 40, ranging from Level 15 to Level 30, and you’d need ~15,000 to buy the mana banks.
If you’re building less ballistas and upgrading them more, it would be better.
I have done it, it is FINISHED… it took me 2 days to find a way to finally beat it with ballista’s only and it’s frustrating, you don’t need any debuffs more than basic (not even their upgrade cards), you just need them to stop all of the regenerations and that’s it, you don’t need any universities or other fancy stuff, you need all the upgrades that give you starting gold (except for the last one) the mana banks, mana syphons and tax the dead and every other blue perk you can get your hands on, and just spam ballistas, i am not even joking spam ballistas, i had the cost of a ballista go to 1420 and if i didn’t upgrade a lot of them to have 17-17-17 i would have even more ballistas (i started upgrading the ballistas along the path at roughly 750 gold), you just need a very long straight road before it splits or else you have no chance, i had a path of roughly 12 tiles before it finally split, and i spread ballista’s all across that road… additionally i got lucky and the road looped around so i was able to shoot on 2 lanes.
side note, grab all the ballista upgrades you can and don’t go above 25% burn bleed poison if possible (but you will eventually run out of options so you will pick em up anyway)
P.S: for the debuffs, you need to unlock eviscerate, trail of blood I, slow cooker, fire and flames I, creeping cough and vile consumption I. if you unlock any additional card it will just dillute the pool for all of your ballista upgrades and those first ones provide a lot of utility to your ballistas since they add +1 to all types, crit chance, additional slow and just a bit more damage for burn… which is meh to be fair… dot do next to no damage. my dots did a total of 4775k damage… compared to the 42298k the ballistas did, so barely above 10%