Halls of Torment is one of many games that have followed inVampire Survivors’ prodigious wake. It’s an indie actionroguelitethat has you obliterating waves of enemies as you steadily get more powerful, in this case with aDiablo 2style.
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This game features a cast of characters reminiscent of those classic games, each capable of reducing thousands of enemies to piles of goo, ash, or bones. However, some of them are simply better than the others at monster hunting and if you want to know which of these characters stand upon the tallest piles of corpses, here they are, ranked.
Note: Halls of Torment is currently in early access. The information in this article may change in subsequent updates or when the game is fully released.
7Warlock
The Warlock is composed of a bunch of cool concepts that sadly, are just too under-tuned or impractical for him to be very powerful. His main attack is to summon homing demons that go from enemy to enemy, dealing low damage that can quickly ramp up in power as you level up. These ghosts are also affected by duration and attack speed, lasting longer, and traveling faster, respectively.
His upgrades focus on empowering summons like Imps, Skeletons, and the Golem, andhe suffers from weak health regen scaling. Theoretically, his upgrades empower both his main attack and summon items/abilities, but most of his best upgrades tend to favor one style over the other, often clashing.
Slow and squishy, the Warlock’s true stumbling block is that his damage will fall off in the late game. With a lack of bursty damage, the endgame for the Warlock often ends with a tide of enemies you can’t stem.
6Exterminator
The Exterminator specializes in the cleansing power of fire, wielding a rapid-firing flamethrower that can afflict enemies with Burn, dealing more damage over time. His weapon pierces through enemies, allowing you to burn many opponents at once and making him scale especially well with range upgrades.
Unfortunately, the Exterminator suffers from similar problems to the Warlock in the damage department. While the Exterminator can build up damage over time, his main weapon’s actual damage is piddly, meaning you’ll be spending a lot of time dodging enemies in the late game while you wait for the fire to do its work, and without a good suite of upgrades, you’re liable to get mobbed.
5Cleric
Similar to the Swordsman, the Cleric fights at close range, which is seemingly at odds with his slow movement and attack speed. However, this old man hits like a truck. You’ll find quickly that the long delay between attacks the Cleric has is balanced by the big damage his double-sweep cone does, outright destroying weak early mobs and chunking down most bosses.
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His main attack has some flexibility in its usage, dividing its big damage across all targets hit, meaning you can do less damage over more enemies, or nuke one particularly pesky foe. Just make sure you plan your Range and Area/Projectile Size upgrades carefully so you can make the best use of your attack.
4Shieldmaiden
As her name might imply, the Shieldmaiden is a defensive powerhouse. She has the best base defense and defensive growth in the game and is pretty hard to kill if you set your mind to it, shrugging off damage that would shred all the other characters.
However, just because she’s got good defense, doesn’t mean her offense is weak. Actually, she’s quite the hitter too, only edged out by the higher-ranked characters. She attacks with her mace, which uniquely to her, does not hit in a cone shape but instead in the area where her mace impacts.
She also has a shield bash which periodically hits in a wide area, knocking back enemies. It has low damage, but scales on her Block stat, synergizing her offense and defense.
3Sorceress
Mistress of the arcane arts, the Sorceressscours the battlefield with electricity. Of the ‘gimmicky’ attackers (Exterminator, Warlock), she’s the most effective. Unlike the others, her attack starts powerful and stays powerful, only possibly falling off in the hordes that come right before the 30-minute timer is up.
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Her main attack has her zapping enemies in a roughly cone-shaped area, successful hits chain off to other enemies, with additional chain hits dependent on your Piercing stat. These hits have a high chance of applying Electrify, which, unlike the Burn status effect, deals its bonus damage in big bursts as opposed to a little over time.
2Swordsman
Though he’s the first character you get, and a bit basic, don’t think that this means the Swordsman is weak. Sure, some characters excel at what the Swordsman does, like the Shieldmaiden having a more robust defense, the Exterminator moving faster, or the Cleric hitting a bigger area, harder. But the key to his success is that the Swordsman isn’t weak in any area either.
The Swordsman hits decently and often, albeit only in a short-range cone, but has a pretty strong base defense and good defensive growth. This means he can scrap and usually come out ahead. He also has a decent movement speed, so you may bob and weave out of fights if you need to recover.
1Archer
The Archer is, bar none, the most powerful character in Hall of Torment. She’s simple, with no gimmicks, just an endless supply of arrows to pincushion. Her main attack is to fire arrows in a cone shape in front of her, which travel long distances and pierces through to hit multiple enemies.
Initially, her damage is low, and she only fires two arrows at a time, but she does so at such a rapid pace that the early game presents no trouble. Once you put some modest investments in attack speed, damage, and critical hit improvements, she becomes a machine gun that mows down hordes of enemies with impunity.
Her offensive prowess is tempered by having low defensive stats and the worst defensive scaling in the game. However, she is also the fastest character in the game with the strongest movement speed upgrades, meaning she’s only in danger if she’s completely surrounded. And with her damage output, she can often just shoot her way to an exit.
