Nineteen units sit at S+ after Update 4.0, and what a returning player should do first
Pro Game Guides' post-4.0 tier list puts nineteen Universal Tower Defense Z units at S+. Here they are, what they have in common, and an honest account of what a tier list is: compiled opinion, not measurement. No stat numbers, because we have none to give you.
Update 4.0 landed on 9 July 2026, renamed the game from Universal Tower Defense X to Z, and rewrote the top of the roster in one afternoon. If you last played in June, the ceiling moved without you.
Pro Game Guides' post-4.0 tier list, checked on 14 July 2026, places nineteen units at S+. That number is the useful thing here, and so is where it came from, so let us be precise about both before anything else.
What a tier list is, and what it is not
It is compiled opinion. Pro Game Guides is reading the roster, the community, and the patch, and forming a view. Destructoid, which we cross-check against, is doing the same. Neither of them is publishing a spreadsheet of measured damage, and neither are we.
We did not test any of this. We do not play this game. What we can honestly say is: this is PGG's S+ band as of 14 July, it survives a cross-check against Destructoid's coverage of the same patch, and we have transcribed it without adding to it. If someone hands you a tier list with per-unit DPS figures attached, ask where the figures came from. Ours has none, because we have none, and inventing them would be the easiest lie on this entire site to tell.
The nineteen
Pro Game Guides' S+ band, post-4.0:
- Visionary (Unrivaled) — Gremmy
- Trickster (Phantom)
- The Fatality (Ascension)
- Symbiotic Alien (Apex) — Venom
- Moonless Sky
- Light Prince (Ascension)
- Ice Queen (White Haze) — Rukia
- Human Spider (Responsible) — Spider-Man
- Flame Captain (Ember) — Yamamoto
- Feline (Phantom)
- Drill Hero (Spiral)
- Cranium (Phantom)
- Bloody Captain (Healer)
- Azuron (Wrath) — Asura
- Ashen Valkyrie (Ignition)
- Anne (Phantom)
- The Almighty King — Yhwach
- Iron Billionaire (Genius) — Iron Man
- Neko Captain (Lightning) — Yoruichi
Full entries for all of them, plus the other ninety-odd units, are on the roster, and the complete banding is on the tier list.
What the list tells you before you read a single unit page
Two things jump out, and neither requires playing.
The 4.0 crossovers took the band over. Marvel and Bleach names dominate. Human Spider, Symbiotic Alien and Iron Billionaire are the Marvel intake; Flame Captain, Ice Queen, The Almighty King, Neko Captain and Visionary are Bleach. Four Persona-flavoured units — Trickster, Anne, Feline, Cranium — all carry the (Phantom) bracket and all landed in S+ together. When four units from one crossover all arrive at the top on the same day, the honest reading is that they were tuned as a set, and that this is a patch-fresh list rather than a settled one.
S+ is not a role. The band spans Ground DPS, Hybrid DPS and at least one Support — Bloody Captain (Healer) is not there to do damage. Nineteen units out of 116 is a broad top band, and "it is S+" is therefore a weaker statement than it sounds. A team of nineteen S+ units would be a bad team. You still need the roles to fit.
Brackets are evolution stages, not rarities
Half the names above carry a bracket: (Unrivaled), (Phantom), (Ascension), (Apex). That bracket is the unit's evolution stage — the output of the Evolve system — and not its rarity. Rarity is a separate field entirely.
This matters to a returner because it changes what the list is telling you. A unit in S+ with a bracket is a unit at some evolved state. If you own the base version and have not evolved it, you do not have the thing on this list; you have the raw material for it. That is good news, on balance — it means several S+ slots are reachable through a system rather than a pull.
We have written this up separately in rarity is not evolution, and it is worth reading if you are about to spend anything. Rarity is its own column in Pro Game Guides' unlock table, and it runs Mythic, Legendary, Epic, Rare, Secret, Exclusive. One honest limitation: we have read the values out of that column but not transcribed it row by row, so no unit page here carries a rarity. A blank field beats a guessed one.
If you are coming back after the rename
A short, unglamorous order of operations.
Redeem first. Codes cost nothing and several of the live ones are substantial — WeLoveUTDZ! alone gives Fern, Fern evo items, twelve Mythic Etherealization Shards and Kenpachi EVO, per four independent trackers. Do that before you plan anything, because it may change what you are planning with.
Then check what you own against the nineteen. Not to chase the whole band — to find the one or two units you already have that sit near it. Evolving something you own is almost always cheaper than acquiring something you do not.
Then rebuild the team around roles, not badges. The S+ band is nineteen deep and contains a healer. Filling six slots with the six highest-ranked names is a worse plan than it looks.
Then ignore anything promising exact numbers. Nobody credible is publishing per-unit DPS for this game a week after a patch that added two dozen units.
What we do not publish, and why
No drop rates. No pity or summon thresholds. No per-unit stats or DPS. No farming rates. No wave or stage tables. No evolution material costs.
Every one of those is a number that a guide site can generate a plausible-looking version of, and that a reader has no easy way to falsify. They are the most-searched numbers in this niche and the easiest to fake, which is precisely the combination that should make you suspicious when you find them stated confidently and without a source. When we can attribute them, they go up. Until then the gap stays visible.
FAQ
How many units are S+ after Update 4.0? Nineteen, per Pro Game Guides' post-4.0 tier list as checked on 14 July 2026. The site as a whole carries 116 unit pages.
Did you test these rankings? No. We do not play this game. The band is Pro Game Guides' compiled opinion, cross-checked against Destructoid's coverage of the same patch. It is a transcription with sources named, not a measurement.
Why is a healer in the top band? Because tiers rank a unit against others of its kind and against the current content, not against a single damage yardstick. Bloody Captain (Healer) sits in S+ as a Support. It is a reason to read the band as nineteen separate judgements rather than one ordered ladder.
What do the brackets like (Phantom) and (Ascension) mean? They are evolution stages, from the Evolve system. They are not rarities. Guides that treat them as rarity bands are making a common and expensive error.
Which S+ unit should I aim for? We are not going to pretend to know without stats. The defensible move is to look at what you already own that is one evolution away from the band, and start there. The roster shows what each unit's element and role actually are, which is a better filter than the letter.
Where are the DPS numbers? There are none here. We have no sourced per-unit stats for this game, and we do not publish numbers we cannot attribute.