Waves
How a wave is built, what can be done to it, and when each enemy joins the pool.
The shape of a wave
Enemies spawn over time rather than all at once, against a cap on how many can be alive together. Both the count and the cap ramp with the wave number and are scaled by the difficulty. Clearing the field ends the wave and opens the upgrade screen.
They arrive from just outside the camera's view — the real view, which stops at the map's edge, so nothing pops in on screen when you fight near a border. One left far out of sight for a few seconds is brought back to just off screen, ahead of where you are heading; a boss never is. Once the wave has nothing left to send and three or fewer remain, arrows at the screen edge point to them.
A wave can also carry one event: a modifier, or a designed roster. Never both — two banners at once is two things to read and no time to read either.
How enemies scale. Each wave adds +13% health and +8% damage to every spawn, of its wave-1 figures. Speed starts +8% above an enemy's listed speed and adds +1.4% a wave, stopping at ×1.8 of the ramp (wave 58 on medium). The difficulty's scaling rate stretches all three ramps, and a wave's event multiplies on top: Blood Moon, Frenzy and The Hunt are the fast ones.
Your orb grows too. Its damage adds +6% of its base a wave (×1.54 at wave 10, ×2.14 at wave 20) on every difficulty, and so does everything that deals a share of it, such as Static Charge, Storm Front or Reckoning. Cards still have to carry the rest of the climb.
Bosses compound. Every boss carries ×1.3 health and ×1.15 damage, and the Nth boss of a run (wave 10×N) also gets ×1.75N health and ×1.15N damage on top of the ramp, so each boss keeps pace with a build that grows a card a wave. A boss wave sends only 15% of its normal count as an escort, and no more than 5 enemies are alive at once, the boss included. No boss summons help. Bosses keep a gentler speed ramp (+1% a wave) so the Revenant can always be outrun.
When each enemy appears
New types stagger in rather than arriving together.
| From | Joins the pool |
|---|---|
| Wave 1 | Mushroom (weight 4) |
| Wave 2 | Bat (weight 3) |
| Wave 3 | Bomber (weight 3), Toadstool (weight 4) |
| Wave 4 | Vampire (weight 3) |
| Wave 5 | EvilWizard (weight 2), Frog (weight 3) |
| Wave 6 | Sporeling (weight 3), Wisp (weight 3) |
| Wave 7 | Brute (weight 2), Slug (weight 3) |
| Wave 8 | Bulwark (weight 2) |
| Wave 9 | Nosferatu (weight 2), Siphon (weight 3) |
| Wave 10 | Witchdoctor (weight 1) |
| Wave 11 | Archmage (weight 1), Bonecaller (weight 2) |
| Wave 12 | Hivemind (weight 2) |
| Wave 13 | Broodmother (weight 2) |
| Wave 14 | PlaguePriest (weight 2) |
Wave modifiers
A named rule change on a single wave, announced by a banner before it starts.
Special waves
A hand-picked roster instead of the usual weighted table. They start from wave 6 and roll at about 17% on an eligible wave, so they stay an event rather than a rotation.
The same two safety rails as an ordinary wave still apply: members are filtered against their own unlock waves, and the concurrent caps hold — so THE CONGREGATION cannot put four healers on the field however its weights fall. If every member of a rolled composition turns out to be locked or capped, the spawn table falls back to the normal one, because a wave that spawns nothing never ends.
They are events, not a per-wave roll: never two waves running, and never on a wave that already carries a modifier. Two banners at once is two things to read and no time to read either.
Elites
The health bonus is not one number. Base health across the roster spans twelve-fold, so a flat multiplier would charge every type the same percentage and a wildly different absolute price: an elite Brute would take most of a boss fight to kill. So the bonus falls off with the type's base health on a square root: quadruple the base and the bonus halves, with a floor so a tank is still meaningfully tankier. It is read off the row rather than off the scaled figure, so the shape is identical on every wave and elites do not weaken as a run goes on. Anything at or below the reference keeps the full multiplier, so elite trash gets the whole bonus.
Boss waves
Every tenth wave, in a fixed order: wave 10 is DREAD SOVEREIGN, wave 20 is PALE REVENANT, wave 30 is THE COLLECTOR, then it cycles.