Attack Types: What Each One Is For

What this page helps you decide: which attack type your board is short of, given the rooms that keep beating you

Two units with the same damage number can behave completely differently depending on how that damage is delivered. Across the fifteen units with published stats, six attack types appear: AOE Burst, AOE Chain, Multi Beam, Single Beam, Single Shot and Single Hit. This page explains what each is for and how to tell which one your board is missing.

The split that matters most is area against single target

Everything else is detail next to this one distinction. Area attacks spend their damage across whatever is in range, so their effective output rises with how many enemies arrive together and falls toward nothing against a lone boss. Single-target attacks do the opposite: constant output regardless of crowd size, which makes them predictable against bosses and wasteful against groups where most of the damage lands on things that would have died anyway. The reason boards fail is almost always that they are built entirely from one half. A pure single-target board clears bosses and leaks during grouped waves; a pure area board survives every wave and cannot finish the boss.

Beams are about uptime, not burst

Multi Beam and Single Beam units deal damage continuously rather than in discrete shots, which changes where they should stand rather than how strong they are. A beam unit gets its value from time on target, so it wants a long straight stretch of path or a position near a bend where enemies stay in range. Placed at a corner an enemy passes in a second, a beam unit is worth a fraction of its listed damage. Two of the three highest per-slot damage figures among Shiny Epics belong to Multi Beam units, which is not a coincidence: their listed numbers assume the uptime that good placement gives them.

Speed changes waste, not throughput

The speed stat is already inside the DPS figures, so a fast unit is not secretly stronger. What speed changes is overkill. A slow, heavy hitter that fires once every five seconds commits its whole payload to a target that may only need a tenth of it, and the excess is gone. A fast attacker re-targets constantly and wastes far less. The fastest documented unit fires at 4.16 against 0.2 for the slowest - a twenty-fold difference in how finely damage is divided. Against mixed waves of small enemies, fast units meaningfully outperform their listed damage; against a single large health bar, the slow ones catch up because nothing is wasted.

Diagnosing your board from what keeps beating you

The room that stops you tells you which type you are short of. Failing on multi-boss waves - Toy Chest wave 19, the Mad Labs grouped spawns, the Dread Triplets - while clearing the finale comfortably means you are short of area damage. Clearing every wave and losing to the boss means the opposite. Leaking early in rooms with many entrances usually means range rather than type: your coverage does not reach the lanes. And failing everywhere at once in Horror Mode is normally neither, but curses and equipment - at those health values the multipliers on your units matter more than the mix.

What a balanced board looks like

The documented Floor 4 clear used a mix described as area, beam, long range and high single-target damage - four roles rather than five copies of the best unit. That is the shape worth copying even with a completely different roster. In practice it means one or two area units placed where lanes converge, a beam unit on the longest straight path, and your heaviest single-target damage deep enough that it only meets survivors. The exact units matter less than filling all four roles, because the failure modes of each role are covered by a different one.

Step-by-Step

1. Check whether your board has both area and single-target damage at all.
2. Give beam units long straight stretches so they get uptime.
3. Use fast attackers against mixed small waves, slow heavy ones against single bosses.
4. Losing on grouped waves means add area damage; losing on the boss means add single target.
5. Aim for four roles - area, beam, long range, heavy single target - not five best units.

Data Tables

Figures are player-reported in community video e-zsWmvflC8 by Rubenakayoshii, not developer-published. Ratios, shares and expected values are our own arithmetic on those figures. Checked 2026-08-27.

Tips & Notes

FAQ

Attack types

6

Fastest documented

4.16 (Cultist)

Slowest documented

0.2 (Robo, Enforcer)

Checked

2026-08-27