When building Ryan in Dark War Survival, you have some important choices to make in order to get the biggest bang for your buck as you simply can’t upgrade all heroes at the same time but you need quite a bunch to build your squads.
By fine-tuning the way you upgrade Ryan’s skills and gear, you can save yourself quite some Skill Books and Universal Shards in the process and as not all skills have the same amount of impact but have the same amount of costs leveling up, fine-tuning them is worth it in the end.
Important! If you want to check how well Ryan does in the current meta of all heroes in Dark War Survival, please check out my current tier list of all heroes here.
Tier S+Here is a quick overview of the rankings of Ryan for the different modes of the game. Please refer to the full tier list linked below to see the ranking of all heroes in Dark War Survival and full evaluation and priority.
Ryan’s Optimal Skill Upgrade Order
Upgrading skills is possible after you get Ryan to 1-Star and then you will be able to upgrade each skill in 5-level increments. While the first skills are rather easy and cheap, it will start to eat quite a bit into your Skill Books and as you can’t produce them, you might end up with half-built heroes. So, here is the order you should work on the skills for Ryan so you only spend the Skill Books where they actually provide good value:
Skill 1
Skill 2
Expertise

Level 5
Level 5
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Ryan’s Optimal Gear Setup
Now we have to take a look at the gear setup, as it takes a lot of time and resources to craft higher rarity gear and not all gear is as impactful as the other one and you have to gear a couple of heroes in Dark War Survival. Also upgrading gear gets very expensive and you simply can’t just pump all your Upgrade Material randomly on gear.
Minimum Build
This is the build you really should have to use this hero decently considering when you get access to it and where your account is at this point
The levels for each gear item here is:
- D5-Rider Submachine Gun: Level 20
- D5-Rider Commander Helmet: Level 20
- D3-Rider Battle Armor: Level 40
- D3-Rider Battle Boots: Level 40
- Bramble Blaster: 1-Star
Sweetspot Build
We know the best build is the one that is maxed out but unless you spend a ton of money on the game this is not realistically. This build here uses the best value of all the gear and the required goals you should have with this hero in the meta to be viable while trying to limit your investment as much as possible
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Optimum Build
This is the optimum build looking at the diminishing returns of your invest where it makes sense to take this hero in terms of gear. Max is great, I know, but realistically everything beyond this is just very expensive and wasteful in terms of resources at this point
The levels for each gear item here is:
- D6-Slayer: Max Level
- D6-Helmet: Max Level
- D5-Rider Guardian Armor: Level 40
- D5-Rider Doomsday Boots: Level 40
- Bramble Blaster: 3-Star
Ryan’s Exclusive Weapon
His Exclusive Weapon is such a force it is easily one of the most powerful ones in the whole game
Conclusion
I hope this guide helped you to build your Ryan without just pumping your manuals into the skills. I assure you this will make your progress in Dark War Survival a lot faster and get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of making the skills rock that really make a big impact espcially as costs get higher and higher.
