The systems that decide your damage

Every unit you pull is a base version of itself. It has a level, it has whatever traits and relics rolled onto it, and it has a name with no bracket after it. Three separate systems change that unit, and it helps to know what each one is actually for before you spend anything.

Level is the XP layer. Units gain XP by being placed in runs and surviving them, so levelling is a by-product of playing the modes you were going to play anyway. It costs no premium currency. This matters more than it sounds, because it makes levelling the only free layer in the game, and free layers should always be exhausted first.

Etherealize consumes Etherealization Shards. It is the paid power layer, the one where a unit stops being a body on the board and starts carrying a wave. Shards do not come back. There is no refund, no unequip, no way to strip an etherealized unit and get the material out. Everything about how you should approach this system follows from that single fact.

Evolve is the transformation. It turns a unit into a new named variant with new art, and that variant name is what shows up in brackets on tier lists. Evolving is the top of the stack, not a shortcut around it.

Community consensus, and it is unusually consistent for a Roblox tower defense community, is level before you reroll heavily and level before you etherealize. The reasoning is not mystical. Levelling is free and reversible in the only sense that matters, which is that it never punishes you. Everything else in the stack is a one-way door.

The failure case looks like this. A player pulls a unit that is sitting high on a tier list, immediately dumps shards into it, spends forty trait rerolls chasing a good roll, and then finds out two days later that the unit is a specialist they cannot fit into their team. The shards are gone. The tokens are gone. The unit is on the bench. Meanwhile the unit they actually field every run is still sitting at a level they never bothered to push, and that unit is the one failing the wave.

A workable rule: a unit earns your shards by surviving your rotation for a week, not by surviving a tier list. Play it, level it, watch whether you keep picking it when you are not thinking about it. That is the unit worth investing in.

The second half of the ordering rule is that Evolve comes last. Evolving does not skip the levelling requirement and it does not refund the etherealize step. It is the capstone. Players who read the bracket labels as rarity tiers sometimes reach for Evolve first, expecting it to promote a unit into a better rarity. It does not touch rarity at all. Rarity is a separate, fixed property. What Evolve changes is the evolution stage, and that stage is what gates a Synchro pairing, which is a much better reason to care about it.

A unit carries two descriptors, and guides routinely mash them into one column.

• Evolution stage. The bracket after the name. Human Spider (Responsible). Symbiotic Alien (Apex). Iron Billionaire (Genius). It tells you which version of that character you are holding, and it is something you do to a unit through the Evolve system.
• Rarity. A separate property, fixed by what the unit is rather than by anything you do to it. Pro Game Guides' UTDX unlock and evolution table carries a rarity column, and 6 values appear in it: Mythic, Legendary, Epic, Rare, Secret, Exclusive. Mythic is the most common of the six by a distance; Epic and Rare are the thinnest. Some rows in that table read "Rarity TBA", which is the table admitting it does not know yet.

So Ascension is not a rarity and Mythic is not an evolution. When a guide writes that Ascension is the highest rarity, it has taken a word from one field and filed it under the other, and the summoning and shard advice built on top of that is unsound.

This is not pedantry. It has teeth. Every Synchro pairing our sources document names a specific evolution stage on each side, Mimicry Sorcerer (Cursed Love) and Jane Juliet (Larper) among them, so a player who reads brackets as rarity has no reason to care which version of a unit they are holding, and walks straight past the pairing. The Evolve page pulls the two fields apart properly, including every bracket label that actually appears on the roster.

Traits and Relics both roll onto a unit and both can be rerolled, but they draw on separate token stocks. Traits use Trait Rerolls. The stat side uses Stat Rerolls, also called Relic Rerolls depending on where you read it. Running dry on one does not lock you out of the other, which is the single most useful thing to know about them, because it means you can keep working on a unit even when one token type is at zero.

The trap in both systems is the same and it is psychological rather than mechanical. Rerolling is fast, it is satisfying, and there is always one more roll. Set a budget before you open the panel. If you cannot say out loud how many tokens you are willing to spend on this unit right now, you are not rerolling, you are gambling with a currency you will want back later.

Synchro Clash shipped in Update 2.5, not in 4.0, and the distinction is worth holding on to because a lot of coverage bundles it in with the 4.0 rename. It is a team-composition system rather than an upgrade system, which is why it sits apart from the three-layer stack, and it is the only power increase in the game that costs no currency at all.

Our sources use three words for it, and they are not interchangeable. Pro Game Guides distinguishes a Synchro Clash from a Synchro Drive, and separately describes units merging into a new one. In a Clash and a Drive both units stay on the board and fire together; a Merge produces a single unit. Between Pro Game Guides and Deltia's Gaming there are 7 sourced pairings: 2 Clashes, 2 Drives and 3 Merges.

Both sources set out the same four conditions for a Clash, which makes this the best-corroborated thing on the site:

• Both units must be placed on the same field.
• They must be within each other’s attack range.
• Both must be fully upgraded, or at least upgraded equally.
• The clash then fires automatically, with no button to press.

Two Clashes come with published numbers. Jane Juliet (Larper) with Mimicry Sorcerer (Cursed Love), per Deltia's Gaming: 500% of the average damage between the two units, on a 60 seconds cooldown, as a Water (Ground) attack. Pirate King (Voyage) with Quake Warlord (Destroyer), per Pro Game Guides: hits the entire map for massive averaged damage, on a 300 seconds cooldown. The cooldowns differ by a factor of five, which is exactly why we attribute each one rather than averaging them.

The Merges are the part people get wrong. Pro Game Guides names the pairs but names the resulting unit for only 1 of them, Super Goku (Third Ascension) with Limit Breaker Prince (Marked) producing Vegito Super. The others produce something the sources do not name, so neither do we. Every pairing, with its kind and its source, is on the Synchro page.