Hey, heroes, Kolz here.
Dragon's Tower has quietly become one of my absolute favorite events in Heroes vs. Hordes over the last several months. I've been grinding this thing hard. We're talking four to five months of runs, trying pretty much every hero I own, and I own about 47 48 of the now 72 heroes in the game.
On top of that, I've been bugging my guild and a couple people on Reddit to compare notes. So between my runs and their runs, I feel like I've got a pretty solid sense of who actually shines in Dragon's Tower… and who secretly sabotages your run.
This isn't a "I just pulled this hero, are they good?" kind of guide. This is very much an endgame Dragon's Tower look. Think:
- Heroes at 4★ levels or better
- 5★ forges on the ones that need it
- Difficulties 30+
With that out of the way, let's talk about my weird little mental model for Dragon's Tower heroes.
My Dragon's Tower Rating System: Chess Pieces
I've been thinking about Dragon's Tower like a game of chess. I'm not a high-level chess player or anything, so don't come at me with opening theory, this is just a handy way to categorize heroes.
- Queens The monsters. These are your S+/S-tier heroes. They can carry entire floors from 0 to 20 by themselves if you set them up right.
- Kings Very strong, but not quite as ridiculous as the queens. Think of them as solid anchors that can take several floors but might need help.
- Knights Good for a floor or so, or for specific purposes. They contribute but don't hard-carry.
- Pawns Their whole job is to survive long enough to get you one level. If they can walk in, live 10 seconds, and ding you a level before dying? Success.
- Worse than pawns These heroes are so bad in Dragon's Tower that they can actually make your run worse. Yes, that's a real category. Yes, unfortunately, some heroes live here.
Every piece matters in chess, even pawns. Same thing here: even a pawn hero has a role if they can safely start a floor and get you that crucial early level. But queens and kings are what really decide whether you clear 0 20 or get bulldozed on wave one.
The Most Important Part of Every Floor: The First 10 Seconds
If there is one thing you take away from this entire article, let it be this:
The first 10 20 seconds of every floor are everything.
You start the floor under-leveled. You don't have your usual run momentum. You don't have a bunch of passives stacked. You don't have a screen full of upgrades. You're just… there. Surrounded. And the game is basically asking: "Can this hero survive, kite, and stall long enough to start snowballing levels?"
That's the dividing line between pawns and knights… and between good heroes and great ones.
- If a hero can't survive those first 10 seconds? They're probably a pawn or worse.
- If they can survive and then scale into the rest of the floor? Now we're talking knights, kings, and queens.
Keep that in mind as we go through the hero rankings. Almost everything I value in Dragon's Tower comes back to: "Can they live early, and can they scale late?"
Queen Tier: The Absolute Monsters of Dragon's Tower
Astral Mage The Shielded Nuker
Let's start with one of the true queens of Dragon's Tower: Astral Mage.
A lot of people in my guild would flat-out call her the premier Dragon's Tower hero. She's in the conversation for top one, top two, top three for sure, and with the right setup, she might actually be the best.
Her whole deal is this deadly combo of:
- A massive amount of damage
- Strong shielding that lets her stay alive long enough to get rolling
There is a huge catch, though:
- At low star levels, Astral Mage is basically useless in Dragon's Tower. She just doesn't do anything.
- Once you hit 4★ levels, she wakes up and suddenly starts ramping like crazy.
With those 4★ levels, her skills scale so well that she can comfortably handle those first 10 seconds and then continue to snowball through the rest of the floor. She survives early, she ramps hard, and she has enough shielding to stay relevant even as difficulty climbs.
Put simply: once she's invested in properly, Astral Mage has all the tools to be one of, if not the, top Dragon's Tower heroes.
Warlord Pure Damage + Sustain
Warlord (I'm going with that spelling; the transcript of his name is chaos) is another strong queen-level hero for Dragon's Tower.
Why? Easy combo:
- Ridiculous damage output
- Healing from his forge
You really want:
- A 5★ forge
- At least 4★ hero levels
Once you've got that, he just pops off. He's one of those "once he's online, the whole floor melts" kinds of heroes. I'd comfortably put him in the top three to four heroes for Dragon's Tower. He's not as universally stable as the absolute top meta monsters, but he's absolutely queen-tier when built.
Shield Warden The Horde-Shredder
Now we get to Shield Warden, who has a very real argument for being the best hero in Dragon's Tower.
The thing that separates Shield Warden from almost everybody else is how absurdly well he scales with levels:
- At 4★ levels, he gets a strong special stat that is basically just pure, raw damage.
- That damage scaling lets him shred hordes in a way very few heroes can match.
On difficulty 19, a 4★ Shield Warden with no forge literally carried me from floor 0 to 20 by himself this week. I haven't even played him with his forge yet, and he's already doing that.
Now imagine:
- 4★ Shield Warden with his 5★ forge
Yeah. That's why people argue he might be the best in the mode.
The hardest part of Dragon's Tower is clearing the horde, those giant waves that flood the screen and threaten to end your run instantly if you fall behind. Shield Warden's whole identity is, "Yeah, I can handle that."
Werebeast - The Immortal Wall
Werebeast is absolutely in the top three conversation too.
What makes Werebeast special is the insane amount of:
- Healing
- Shielding
He's the only hero that straight-up gets both at the level he does. When you're inside Dragon's Tower and everything wants to delete you in two hits, having that much sustain is incredible.
The problem? Damage.
Werebeast's biggest downside is that he just doesn't have the raw damage output to keep up with the horde on his own. He can live forever, but "immortal and surrounded" is still a loss. So with him, the question becomes: how are you going to actually clear the floor while he tanks everything?
We'll talk about the solution to that in a minute, because there is an item that patches this hole in a beautiful, broken way.
Warlock The Sleeper Monster
Warlock is one of those heroes that doesn't look insane on paper, but every time anyone actually tests Warlock seriously, the hero just rocks.
With Warlock, you want:
- A 5★ forge
- Ideally 4★ hero levels
Once you've got that, Warlock brings:
- Slows that make kiting and surviving early way easier
- A ton of damage with surprisingly high ceilings
Warlock has one of the highest "upside" profiles in the entire roster. I'm still not 100% sure if Warlock belongs in the same queen conversation as Astral Mage, Shield Warden, and Werebeast, but I will say this:
Warlock is way stronger in Dragon's Tower than people give credit for. If there's a sleeper queen in this mode, it's Warlock.
Druid The Theorycrafted Queen/King
Druid is the one hero in this writeup that I don't actually own, so all of this is second-hand and theorycrafted, but it still makes a lot of sense.
People in my Discord and guild have told me that with:
- A 5★ forge (for the healing)
- 4 5★ hero levels
Druid becomes a damage monster later in the game while also bringing solid sustain.
If that holds up, I'd expect Druid to land somewhere around:
- Low queen tier or
- High king tier
I don't have my own empirical runs with Druid to back that up yet, but intuitively, it tracks. If you've run Druid heavily in Dragon's Tower, feel free to swing into the comments and either back this up or absolutely roast me.
Worse Than Pawns: Heroes That Can Actually Sabotage Your Run
Arcane Mage The Run-Doomer
This brings us to the "worse than pawns" group, and the prime example here is Arcane Mage.
Every time I've tried Arcane Mage in Dragon's Tower, two things happen:
- She cannot consistently survive the first 10 seconds of a floor.
- When she dies at the wrong time, she can actually spawn enemies that ruin your run.
Here's what I mean by that second point.
If you bring Arcane Mage in just to grab a level mid-run and then she dies really quickly, especially late in a floor, you have a chance to spawn those end-of-floor mega mobs. You know the ones: the big purple dragon guys with a ton of health and a ton of damage.
What can happen is:
- You get into a bad spiral late in a floor.
- Arcane Mage dies instantly.
- Now you're spawning basically only mega mobs.
That has almost doomed runs for me, more than once. I've watched those mega mobs completely delete heroes like Warlord or Werebeast who came in after Arcane Mage, just because the floor state got corrupted by her dying at a terrible time.
That's why I call her "worse than a pawn." A pawn at least dies quietly after giving you a level. Arcane Mage can die and then set the rest of your board up to get slaughtered.
If you want to try her at all, I'd only consider using her to start a floor, never in the middle of a run.
Pawns: Heroes That Just Need to Buy You a Level
Big Game Hunter Acceptable Cannon Fodder
Big Game Hunter is my go-to example of a pawn hero.
Again, pawns aren't useless. In chess, pawns matter. They control space, they force trades, sometimes they even promote. In Dragon's Tower, a pawn hero has one simple dream:
Live long enough to get you one level and then die.
If Big Game Hunter can start a floor, kite around, and survive just long enough to push you to that first level-up, that run with them was a success. You're not expecting them to clear waves 15 20. You're just asking: "Can you help me not get instantly deleted at the start?"
Used that way, pawns like Big Game Hunter absolutely have a place, especially if your queen-level roster isn't deep yet.
The Single Biggest Game-Changer: Heroic Wizard Hat
All right, let's talk about the secret sauce of Dragon's Tower: Heroic Wizard Hat.
This item is a straight-up game changer. It single-handedly moves almost every good hero up a tier in Dragon's Tower.
What the meteors from Heroic Wizard Hat do is simple but insanely powerful:
- They kill enough enemies early that you can survive the first 10 20 seconds.
Before I had Wizard Hat, I was seeing something like 27 30 deaths per floor in Dragon's Tower. Once I started using Wizard Hat properly?
Zero.
The meteors just buy you time. They give heroes like Astral Mage, Werebeast, Shield Warden, and others the breathing room they need to:
- Not take early damage
- Start kiting properly
- Hit that level-up snowball
This is especially important for heroes whose biggest weakness is the first 20 seconds of a floor.
- For Astral Mage, her weak spot is that initial window before her shield really ramps.
- With Heroic Wizard Hat, she gets to live through that window, build her shield, and suddenly she goes from "vulnerable" to "borderline unkillable."
The same concept helps Werebeast, whose damage is lacking, and even Shield Warden, who just wants the chance to get his levels and start shredding the horde.
My Current Top 3 for Dragon's Tower
With Heroic Wizard Hat in the picture, my personal ranking for Dragon's Tower, as of November 2025, looks like this:
- Astral Mage With Wizard Hat covering her early-game weakness, she becomes almost unkillable once her shield kicks in.
- Werebeast The sustain is absolutely absurd. Pair him with Wizard Hat and some way to clear the horde, and he's a monster.
- Shield Warden The pure damage scaling plus horde-clearing power is unreal, especially with investment.
Before I understood just how broken Heroic Wizard Hat was for Dragon's Tower, I actually would have flipped that order a bit, Shield Warden higher, Astral a little lower. But once I started seeing how Wizard Hat patches Astral's weakest moment, she jumped straight to the top.
So yeah, that's my current spoiler for Dragon's Tower. If you're wondering who to build for this mode and you've got the resources, these three are where I'd start.
Final Thoughts
Dragon's Tower is one of those modes that looks chaotic from the outside, just waves of enemies and random deaths, but once you really start digging into it, patterns emerge:
- The first 10 20 seconds of every floor are everything.
- Heroes that survive that window and scale well are your queens and kings.
- Some heroes are fine as pawns, buying you one level and then peacing out.
- And a few unlucky ones are actually worse than pawns and can quietly doom your entire run.
With good investment (4★+ levels, 5★ forges) and the Heroic Wizard Hat in particular, heroes like Astral Mage, Werebeast, Shield Warden, Warlock, and Warlord become absolute Dragon's Tower monsters.
If you've got your own experiences or spicy disagreements, throw them in the comments. I genuinely love hearing how other people are breaking this mode, and there's always some hero quietly overperforming that I haven't tested yet.
Until then, remember: always do your adventures.
