Video Game / Tower Keepers

Just another RPG

Tower Keepers is a deep and strategic free to play Auto-RPG by Ninja Kiwi that utilizes an automated battle system in which you put up to 4 Heroes against groups of vicious enemies.

The game itself has an energy system - You own a feast hall which constantly provides your heroes with food, which you use each time you enter a level. The more heroes you send out, the more food is used. The feast hall is upgradeable, with production and storage of food able to be increased. The decision is yours whether you utilize your food strategically by sending out a few competent heroes for easier missions, or go all out to conquer those harder scuffles.

The Game also has a Player vs Player with tower raids and Real-Time PvP, and guilds where you can compete for extra rewards.

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Tower Keepers provides examples of the following:

• Armor-Piercing Attack: Every damage type (and stuns) has the capability of being resisted by every entity in the game, even if the entity has a base resistance of 0%. However, one type, aptly named True Damage, is exempt - it isn't included in the list of stats as a damage type that an entity can have a resistance to, and everything automatically has a 0% resistance to it that can't be increased, whether through passives, equipment, or buffs that boost all resistances or all resistances + armor. Nothing is capable of blocking or reducing it (besides dodging) except for simply having higher defense than the attacker's attack, or by using a buff that reduces the damage of incoming attacks by a percentage.
  • The Barbarian hero has a passive that gives her a chance (with the percentage being based on the skill's level) to deal True Damage instead of the attack's regular damage type. As she only attacks with physical-typed damage anyway, the passive essentially gives her a chance to have her attack be this.
    • The October 24, 2018 (v2.0) update added in a new set of Epic rarity equipment that have negative affects and hero/enemy passives on them. One such equipment, the Wrath of the Mountain, is a fist that has the same passive on it, among others. Since both fist users also exclusively deal physical damage (besides one having their own Armor Piercing Attack), this essentially does the same thing as it does on Barbarian.
• Anti-Armor: Both versions exist. Valkyrie's soul skill, "Melt Armor", deals fire damage, and receives bonus damage equivalent to the target's armor percentage. Two heroes, Knight and Blackguard, both have attacks that have the added effect of reducing the target's armor percentage.
• Anti-Regeneration: Battle Priest, the second hero added in with an update, does this with his soul skill, "Healing Nexus". He heals an ally for a large chunk of health, and the targeted enemy is applied with a debuff (which is considered a hidden buff within the actual parameters, letting the player accidentally remove it if using an enemy buff remover, but prevents enemies in special campaigns from removing it themselves) that prevents them from being healed by any source, whether it be a natural passive, a life drain ability, or an ally using a healing move (allies using healing moves simply can't target them though, outside of cleric using cleanse to remove a debuff).
• Artificial Stupidity: The opposing A.I. in Wizard's Chosen has a tendency of selecting shoddily constructed hero teams that have lacking synergy with each other, sub-optimal weapons, and/or skill sets that don't suit their respective heroes.
• Beta Test: There was one for the PC version of this game.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: You can use gems to easily power level almost anything, such as heroes, artisans, and more.
  • You can gem attacks, hero battles, find loot, and Wizard Tower tickets as well for more rewards.
  • You can also use real-life currency to purchase more gold, gems, or even use it to buy hero packs.
• Bragging Rights Reward: There are a few in this game.
  • Earning top 1% in any guild or event yields more stuff, but the increase is not that much.
  • Beating Stage 11+ Dragon can yield more gold, but nothing more.
    • The dragon now has milestone rewards up to stage 75, but beyond that still applies.
  • Beating a boss revenge campaign gives the epic boss monster of that campaign. However, by the time they can be obtained, they're most likely not going to be useful.
  • Maxing the star levels of all your heroes. It is extremely difficult and time-consuming to get heroes to 7 stars, as each one requires 266 stones in total. Epic heroes in particular are a pain to max out, since their stones are both incredibly rare and incredibly expensive. Assuming you don't get any stones from Find Loot, chests, or golden portal stones (which is a fair assumption, since all of these have a very low chance of giving you epic stones), you can only get around 2-3 stones for an epic hero per day. Yes, to max out an epic hero's stars, you need to get 266 stones at 3 stones per day, which is around 88 days for just ONE hero. There are 6 epic heroes in the game in total, as well as 25 other heroes (which aren't as difficult to max out, but aren't easy either), so the amount of time you need to get every single hero to 7 stars is...yeah. It takes so long that most veteran players who have been constantly grinding the game for almost a year still haven't maxed all their heroes. And the reward? A stat buff and an increase in skill levels. While this buff is significant enough to make it worth getting one or two epic heroes to 7 stars, maxing all 6 is a pointless waste of time.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: The Rise of the Machines campaign rewards crafting components. The first mission rewards Hardwood, the second mission rewards Steel, and the third mission rewards both. Also, the fourth mission rewards Mystical Essence, and the fifth grants both Steel and Mystical Essence.
• Cap: Max Keeper Level in this game was once 50, but it was eventually upped to 55. This also applies to Artisans & heroes.
  • Soul Stones are soft capped if you have not promoted your hero for said time and gain too many. This, however, is somewhat subverted as you can still gain more stones by green chests, heroic missions, and Epic battle chests.
  • Artisans & heroes can only be trained to your current Keeper Level.
  • You can only have up to a max of 8 Tower Raids & 8 Hero Battles in PVP at any time.
  • The Feast Hall can be upgraded every 5 keeper levels, but are capped to level 10 by Keeper Level 45.
  • All weapons, armor, monsters, and machines can only be upgraded to a certain level before they are maxed.
    • They also have a hard cap of level 100, despite what some special campaigns would have you think. If Ninjakiwi were to grant a player an item beyond it's normal level cap, they're only able to grant an item up to level 100.
  • Enchantments for weapons and armor can only go up to +11.
  • Heroes can be brought up to 7 stars and their skills cap at level 10.
  • The food in this game is capped to the max amount you can hold, you can gain 5 additional food capacity per level and even more by upgrading your feast hall. Subverted as you can hold as much bonus food as you like from quests, rewards, and other stuff as long as you don't use it all quickly
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: All heroes, gear, monsters, and machines are split into five rarity categories, each with a different color based on how rare it is. Common is gray, Uncommon is green, Rare is blue, Super Rare is purple, and Epic is golden yellow.
• Combatant Cooldown System: The basic premise of the game is to send a formation of heroes into combat that plays out like this. Even though all combatants move automatically based on their own skill cooldown, with no player input to initiate usage of skills, the player still has pre-mission interaction in setting up their team (heroes, movesets, equipment), can select targets, and use each hero's soul skills as part of strategizing.
• Exact Words: Buffs say they grant an effect briefly, due to being temporary. However, the Overload skill found on Runed Golems and Runic Construct doesn't, because it's permanent. Whereas buffs eventually fade away, whether on their own, getting forcibly removed, or upon death, nothing can wipe Overload's attack and defense increase. It never dissipates, it can't be wiped, and if the machine has a way to get revived, killing it doesn't wipe it.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In Hero Battles, specifically Wizard's Chosen, the A.I. can be equipped with weapons or armor that otherwise aren't available at the normal level range. This is most noticeable when it can acquire Tier 2 Epic gear as early as level 43, despite said equipment only being first unlocked at level 55 for regular players.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Besides the anti-reduction skills, two heroes directly use this in their moveset. Witch has it as an active skill, hitting a single target and making them take up to +60% more damage (and has a passive that increases its effect by up to 1.25x, up to 75%). Mystic has it as her soul skill, applying it to *every* enemy for up to 65% increased damage. Sadly, a quirk with the game makes the damage increase incompatible with damage that's "tacked onto" a skill, such as weapons that add their damage as a special damage type, skills that add damage as a special damage type, and weapon damage on damage-over-time skills, making the debuff only affect the attacks base damage.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The guild boss is this, especially ever since his HP has been doubled.
• Early Game Hell: Early on the game can be tough, due to lack of gear, resources, very low stars, and the lack of a lot of heroes.
• Disintegrator Ray: Archmage has a move called Disintegrate, and Zaluss has an attack called Disintegrating Breath. Both deal huge damage, and are the only moves in the game (other than another of Zaluss's moves, Cage of Bones) to use *stun* as a damage type, meaning the target's stun resistance, which is normally only used to shorten the length of stunning moves, is what lowers their damage. Archmage's is the strongest move in the game numerical-damage-wise, at least for hero characters (monster and machine skills increase in damage as the entity itself levels up, so high level enemies can end up having higher base damage on their skills), whereas Zaluss's is the second-strongest attack he has, only out-damaged by the Purposely Overpowered Wave of Death, technically third when taking into account Endless Pain dealing damage 15 times.
• Forced Level-Grinding: You will have to grind a lot for the resources to craft high tier gear, and most importantly soul stones in order to do well in many areas of the game. These range from PvP, the Guild Boss, 7 day special campaigns, and even some 2 day rotational camps.
  • Averted for Catacombs, Wizard Tower, and especially the main campaign, as these are beatable even with "average" hero star ratings and gear.
  • Inverted in the fact that some aspects of the game actively encourage you to increase your overall level as slowly as possible—the reason being that as your level increases, so does the difficulty of PvP-related modes. Thus, most players can get an advantage by grinding soul stones for heroes and getting their stats up, all while accumulating as little experience as possible so they’ll be overpowered relative to their level. In addition, the Find Loot feature of the game punishes players who go through the campaign quickly. After a mission is completed, a Find Loot can spawn randomly on that mission, and you can replay it to get a chance at finding a soul stone for the hero. By playing too far into the campaign, Find Loots will appear on levels that are harder and require you to spend more food to complete (which also increases your XP). In short, by playing higher difficulty campaign levels, Find Loot becomes more annoying to utilize. This is not helped by the fact that Find Loots have a higher chance of spawning on harder levels.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Quite a few.
  • The save screen bug can cause issues, especially when it pops up in the middle of a battle and can potentially freeze the game. If you pick the wrong save by mistake, you could lose weeks of data.
  • Hero Battles is full of disconnection bugs.
  • In the mobile version, there is a glitch that can roll back a lot of data; sometimes you could lose weeks or even months of data.
  • There was once a bug that froze the game in a loop if you had too many items in your inventory. If you weren't careful about cleaning out the vendor trash before it reached that point, the only way to recover your data would be a rollback. However, this has now been patched.
  • The game has major memory leak issues that can cause crashes, broken timers, and wasted resources.
  • Sometimes, the screen will become blank or a different color making it impossible to see anything.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Some campaigns or specific missions within campaigns have special properties on enemies that aren't inherently obvious. For example, in Item Quest 7, unless you read the "uber stage notes" on the discord or forums, you might not realize that the Suits of Arms have the guild boss's Excruciating Aura passive, which reduces enemy (your party's in this case) healing strength.
  • The Wizard Tower uses Catacomb modifiers on floors 20 to 31, but doesn't tell you, nor does it state which one enemies receive at the start of the floor. In fact, in order to make it harder for the player to notice, they only use the ones that influence the enemy's stats (such as increased health, increased attack and/or defense, or increased resistances), just so the player won't realize what's happening when their healing is randomly blocked for no reason or the enemies randomly start with bonus health.
  • As stated under Scrappy Mechanic on the YMMV page, upon unlocking enchantments, the game fails to mention that enchanting equipment increases in strength every time you unlock a new enchantment level (every 5 levels after unlocking enchantments), and that enchanting something locks it into the lower strength if you enchant something below keeper level 51. You'd most likely have to read about the fact somewhere online to realize it.
  • In order to unlock the Ninja hero, you need to earn the in-game achievement for beating 50 player towers. The only other heroes that have strange requirements to unlock outside of either randomly finding through portal stones or hiring from the hero shop are Pirate (who you hire from the hero shop during the tutorial to introduce the mechanic), Barbarian (who you gain from a portal stone upon completing the tutorial), and Valkyrie and Battle Priest being bought for either gems or real-life cash. Nothing in the game mentions or otherwise indicates that you must do this do unlock Ninja, so it isn't unreasonable to think you might randomly find him from either form of portal stone or find him in the hero shop to hire are are just extremely unlikely to not be getting him. What makes Ninja an even weirder case is that some other heroes can be obtained by special methods too, such as Paladin being unlocked for the 10 tower attacks achievement, but don't explicitely require such methods to obtain them like Ninja does.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Most of the Tier 1 Epic Weapons which are unlocked around the late 30s to mid-40s fit this bracket. Interestingly enough, a fair number of them are preferable to their Tier 2 counterparts depending on your build, due to possessing alternate stats or special properties. The Wand Of Endless Suffering is the most notable example, while Ambusher's Hacker, Dark Defender, Earthquaker, and Rod of Ruin remain perfectly viable options even at level 55.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Many of the Tier 2 Epic Weapons are quite significant upgrades over the previous Tier 1 Epics in terms of stats or special properties. Among them, the Piercing Blade is the highest crafting priority.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Some monsters have the Defy Death skill which has a 50% chance for a normally lethal attack to bring them down to 1HP instead. However, it’s taken further by the fact that Defy Death can happen multiple times in a row, effectively making the monster temporarily invincible. This can be triggered an annoyingly large number of times or not at all, depending on completely random chance.
• Life Drain: Numerous entities have attacks with this property.
  • Warlock and Blackguard both have their own ranged shadow-damage active skills that will heal them for 100% of the damage the move deals. (Note, however, that Warlock has weapons with special damage types that separate its damage from the attack itself, and doesn't contribute to the healing.)
  • Necromancer also has a shadow-damage active skill, but his is a melee attack and the percentage is based on the level of the skill (although it caps at marginally above 100%). His soul skill, however, is not only ranged like Warlock's and Blackguard's, but also hits every enemy, allowing him to fully heal from near death with enough targets even if he doesn't deal much damage, although it naturally has a lower percentage than his active skill (capping at 62% of the damage dealt).
  • Vampires, Shikar, and Shikar's Degraded Boss variant have the Vampiric Strike skill, which deals physical damage and heals the user based on damage dealt. This is in addition to a passive Healing Factor on Shikar and normal vampire lords.
  • Berserker is an odd example; not only is his life drain a passive (meaning it can apply to any damaging move), it's a drain on kill move, meaning he has to deal the killing blow to heal. It also only has a chance to activate (capping at 78%), but it also heals him based on his maximum health, rather than how much damage he dealt, and heals for a signifcant portion of it (capping at 55%), capping at a full heal in only 2 kills. It also applies even if an enemy activates their Last Chance Hit Point, allowing him to repeatedly "kill" the same enemy multiple times and get healed multiple times.
• Item Crafting: Weapons, armor, and machines. As such, the Random Drop system only drops common and uncommon rarity items in these item categories. Naturally, higher rarity items cost more gold and components to craft.
• Money Grinding: Once you reach Super Rare and Epic gear, you'll be grinding a lot for both the gold and crafting materials to be able to craft them, especially once you reach 55 and start aiming for Tier 2 Epics.
  • You'll also need to grind a lot of gold for stone buying in the hero store as well.
• No-Sell: Due to the way the game is coded, entities with comparatively tiny attack stay will still deal a few points of damage to entities with a high defense stat. However, complete no-sells are possible.
  • An Immune Potion will make the hero take 0 damage from a number of incoming attacks, depending on the tier of the potion. Good Anti-Frustration Feature for a Luck-Based Mission.
  • The Parry skill reduces the damage of the next attack the entity receives by 50%. If this gets stacked twice before being hit, it will reduce the damage received by 100%, this guaranteeing 0 damage.
  • Amazon’s Cover Allies ability reduces the damage that all of her allies (except herself) receive by a percentage. If this stacks high enough, she can reduce the damage received by 100%, which again results in a guaranteed 0 damage received.
  • Am enemy that dodges will receive no damage from an attack, no matter how strong. Whether you dodge or not is determined by the Random Number God, so dodges can sometimes make or break a game. There are hero combinations that can increase the chance, but luck is still a major factor.
• Oculothorax: The Demonic Watcher, being a Beholder Expy from Dungeons&Dragons, which the game is primarily based on. Unlike the Beholder though, it only has 5 eyestalks instead of 10, and 4 attacks rather than one for each eye (which would result in a total of 6).
• Play Every Day: This game has a number of elements and timed events to entice members to keep logging on for extra rewards. Daily rewards, daily tasks, emerald chests, feasts, heroic missions, the 24 hour tower soul stone reward, tower raids, and two day rotational campaigns just to name a few. There's even weekly leaderboard rewards for Tower Raids, Hero Battles, overall Guild prestige, and the Catacombs.
• Player Versus Player: This applies to tower raids & defense where it's Asynchronous PvP, and Hero Battles where it's Synchronous PvP.
• Status-Buff Dispel: Spellsword's soul skill, and unique ability (and most defining feature). She removes any positive buffs on enemies, and deals a bit of damage per removed buff.
• Underground Monkey: A number of enemies are recycled for different things.
  • Bastian The Demonologist (the World 6 boss) is recolored and given different skills to form the "Wizard".
  • Many enemies in the normal campaign are given modified skill sets in special campaigns. They are not given new animations when they use these moves, so their move animation can look a bit out-of-place as a result.
  • In fact, a lot of the rotational campaigns copy each other. Enemy formations will be shared across two or three campaigns without any change in skill sets or stats.
  • There are degraded boss versions for 5 of the bosses in the normal campaigns, and 4 of them are very similar in design.
• Time-Limit Boss: Combined with Damage-Sponge Boss for the guild boss. This prevents players from dealing too much damage to the boss per attack, especially after an exploit was discovered that allows massive damage to be dealt per attack.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: A downplayed variant; it's a catacomb modifier, so it only affects a single catacomb mission before changing to a different modifier.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Oh, where to begin?
  • Food is needed for almost everything, from playing missions, catacombs, and feasts. It also does not help that some things require so much food 300+ that you'll run out very quickly.
  • Gold is needed for almost everything that needs to be bought and crafted. The cost of gold also goes up when your artisans level up more on crafting stuff.
  • The materials cost for crafting items (aside from Celestial Orbs & Void Cores) also goes up when you level up your artisans.

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