Orbless Guide

There are two questions every orbless build answers: how you stay alive, and how you kill. Neither has a single correct answer, and the options are not mutually exclusive.

For survival, the three main approaches are an eHP Wall build using Wall Fortification and Wall Regen, permanent Black Hole, and a glass cannon juggling style. You can mix them freely. A glass cannon setup might juggle regular enemies while relying on the Wall to handle bosses, or you might let BH control standard enemies while the Wall deals with bosses.

For killing, the defining requirement is a method that only removes enemies inside the Spotlight beam. Bounce shot with restricted range, Chain Lightning and Spotlight Missiles are all valid, and you can combine them as your tower demands.

## Prerequisites

Some requirements are non-negotiable regardless of which variant you run:

- A devo'd workshop, with the ability to cash max every stat you need except Rend and ELS. - Perk labs: 4 quantity, 4 bans, SPB 25 and ITO 10 are ideal. Auto perk does not work here, because you frequently need to hold off on taking perks. - Synchronised GT/BH with a second Black Hole and uptime above 50%. Multiverse Nexus can achieve the sync, but watch the uptime if yours is below ancestral. Low uptime means you will see little gain over a Max/Orb Devo build. Permanent GT/BH is highly desirable. - GT bonus of 16x or better, and the BH Coins lab maxed. - BH size that fully covers your tower range (44–48m at 30m range). Bigger is better. - Spotlight with 3 beams, at least 40° of stone-invested angle and at least a 20x bonus. More angle improves both damage and coin coverage. The SL angle substat on your Core module is highly desirable, and a higher bonus both extends your orbless phase and cuts spillage. - Be cautious with SL4. With three beams, one beam always points at a BH, but a fourth beam creates gaps where neither BH sits inside SL coverage. You want roughly 60° or more of angle before committing to SL4. - SL Coins lab maxed.

You also need a survival plan suited to very long runs, since orbless shines at 7000+ waves where enemy density is extreme:

- **Wall:** minimum Wall Regen 10 and Wall Thorns 11, with Health, Health Regen, Wall Health and Wall Fortification raised as needed. Supporting labs are SPB 25 and Def % 23. Use an ancestral Armor module with ancestral def %, plus the best health regen and wall health you can manage, and the maxed Defense card. Early in a run, if your uptime is low, you may need thorns devo'd so enemies do not die to thorns outside the kill zone. - **Permanent BH:** stops standard enemies from chipping you so you can tank bosses. Elites, especially vampires, can be a problem without the Wall, but combining both lasts far longer than either alone. The Disable Ranged Enemies card is absolutely required for this approach. - **Glass cannon:** maxed Crowd Control makes juggling trivial, leaving only rays and bosses as threats. If you have the stones for max CF, you presumably have an answer for those.

Finally, you need a kill method confined to the Spotlight beam:

- **Bullet orbless:** the most basic form. The SL bonus lets you kill at least 20 times faster inside the beam, so your bullets do the work. Damage boosters include DPM (which conveniently drops its bonus when enemies fall into your wall during BH downtime, reducing spillage), Rend Armor for an 8x bullet damage bonus, and Astral Deliverance. AD is the standout: it adds damage to each successive bounce, and a minimum bounce shot range keeps those bounces localised to the BH clump. AD needs to be mythic or better to be worthwhile. At legendary the fourth-bounce bonus is only 3.8x, versus 6.5x at mythic and 10.5x at ancestral, and the higher-rarity bounce chance substat raises the average bounce count substantially. Target Priority 2 is essentially mandatory: "In Spotlight" maximises your coin rate, while "Closest" works but causes spillage and can cost you a significant chunk of CPM. - **Chain Lightning:** the second easiest option, effectively an extension of bullet orbless. CL does enormous damage, so outside of T12 farming it will usually be too aggressive early in a run. The standard play is to start with bullet orbless and switch CL on once bullets stop killing. Ideally you want Shock unlocked with the multiplier maxed and Shock chance at 10 or better, and CL damage kept at or below 596x until you know your tower better. - **Spotlight Missiles:** the classic method, since SLM only targets enemies inside the beam. Requires the maxed SLM lab, SM unlocked, at least 34x damage, and maxed Missile Amp and Radius. Maxing the radius lab is fine: enemies outside the beam survive the hit but still get tagged with Missile Amp, so they die quickly once they enter SL. - **ILM+ (SLIME):** outside the scope of this guide. Skye's SLIME guide covers it if you want to pursue that build.

## Nice to Haves

Not required, but worth having:

- For lower-uptime builds, a mythic or better Singularity Harness and a synced Golden Bot. Golden Bot is another coin multiplier, and at low uptime, syncing it to GT/BH and running Singularity Harness instead of Galaxy Compressor earns noticeably more. Once uptime is high enough (roughly above 60%), GComp usually wins by pushing cooldowns down and uptime up. Test both to find your crossover. - Anticube Portal can extend your orbless phase by 1000 waves at ancestral. - Deathwave is yet another coin multiplier to stack and adds health for Wall builds. The cell bonus is a nice extra but not really part of the build. Ideally DW is synced to GT with the DW coin lab maxed. Quantity is the most important stone stat, since you want to tag as many enemies as possible. Limit DW damage upgrades where you can, because DW kills indiscriminately outside SL. - Landmines add damage in a small area, but cannot be your primary kill method because they need kills to spawn. Keep LM Radius minimised to avoid spillage and max LM damage. Since mines only spawn where an enemy died, minimal spillage means they only appear in your kill zone. - Target Priority 2 is essential for bullet builds and still valuable for SLM or other UW-based setups, either to trim basics and protectors or to focus fire into SL.

## Phases of an Orbless Run

An orbless run has five phases. Towers using more than one kill method may cycle through multiple orbless phases, and some phases get skipped depending on the build.

1. **Start of run.** Remove all damage-increasing cards and turn off every damage UW except DW. Even devo'd, your tower is too strong to avoid spillage at this point, which is fine: spawn rates are low and you have no perks yet. Focus on perking up (favouring PWR and coin perks as usual, plus the SL perk, which is beneficial), upgrading ELS, and maxing the DW health bonus if you use DW. Avoid damage perks. 2. **Optional DW-only Max Devo phase.** After the DW kill ring falls, Max Devo can out-earn an early orbless attempt because your killing method is still too strong to avoid spillage. You can extend this phase by equipping damage cards, as long as you remember to strip them when you switch to orbless. Whether you bother depends on uptime: high uptime favours going straight to orbless, while long stacking times favour trimming basics with target priority and tagging the full stack with the DW coin bonus. 3. **Initial orbless phase.** Your battle upgrades remain untouched apart from ELS. Enemy density and stats have grown enough that enemies no longer die instantly outside SL, so you can begin your orbless kill method (turn it on if it is UW-based). Keep upgrading ELS only, and take no perks except defensive ones your build depends on. This phase can last anywhere from hundreds to thousands of waves. 4. **Balancing upgrades.** Eventually enemy stats catch up and you stop killing efficiently. Now you add damage carefully: too much and you tip back into indiscriminate killing and spillage. Use strategic battle upgrades, perk picks and card swaps to keep damage in the sweet spot. Once you start upgrading damage, you are effectively on a timer, because there is only so much damage you can add. 5. **Optional transition to another orbless style.** When one method stops killing, you often do not need to abandon orbless entirely. A typical sequence is bullet orbless into SLM orbless, back to bullet, then into CL orbless. Transitions are usually governed by reversible damage sources: cards can carry your first bullet phase, and once it fades you switch to SLM and strip the cards rather than pushing bullet damage higher.

Eventually you will have maxed every damage upgrade, taken every damage perk and equipped every damage card. When your income drops below the run's average because kills can no longer keep pace with respawns and coin decay sets in, the orbless phase is over. You can either end the run to maximise coins, or shift into blender to maximise cells. Depending on your tower, late-run blender income may be good enough to justify continuing.

## Building the Tower

Orbless starts from a devo tower.

**Workshop:** leave these at 0 unless noted. Items marked optional can be levelled for a lazier setup. One major exception: high-level glass cannon juggling builds (usually with heavily upgraded SLM) often max attack speed, multishot, rapid fire, bounce and knockback.

- Attack Speed - Crit Chance (optional) - Range - DPM (optionally 100 levels) - Multishot Chance - Rapid Fire Chance - Bounce Shot Chance - Bounce Shot Range (especially important for bullet orbless) - Thorns (optional if using Wall) - Knockback Chance (optional) - Orbs - Landmine Chance - Landmine Radius - Free Upgrades

Set Shockwave Size to 1.35, the ideal size to tag everything with ACP and sift basics below tanks for trimming. Level damage stats to whatever is reasonable for your LTC (the guide author levels Damage to 5600 and Super Crit Multi to 100).

**Cards:** build at least two presets sharing your common farming and survival cards. The early preset strips all damage-increasing cards (Damage, Critical Chance, Berserker and potentially Attack Speed). The late preset carries them.