Gearing Up Guide – What Mode Works Best?

Gearing Up defenses is a new feature for your Home Village that was introduced in the May 2017 Update.  These upgrades are unlocked through your Builder Base.

Here I will be showing you what the geared up defenses can do, how to use them and if it’s worth it to upgrade.

Gear Up Defenses in Clash of Clans

The Builder Base offers great new defenses that work similar to the good old defenses we know and love, but with a few differences. There’s a Double Cannon that shoots bursts for massive damage. Archer Towers that can switch modes for either faster shooting or longer range shooting. A Multi Mortar which shoots 5 projectiles instead of one single projectile.

Now you can also unlock these cool new features in your Home Village if you have upgraded to a certain Level of the Double Cannon, Archer Tower or Multi Mortar in your Builder Base.

Once you reach that level, you’ll be able to select the Gear Up option in your defense and the Master Builder from your Builder Base will come over to your Home Village and upgrade it.

Please note! During that time you won’t be able to do upgrades in your Builder Base as your Master Builder will be busy in your Home Village!

I know that very few have been doing the gearing up so far. Many of us simply focus on upgrading the Builder Base and not having the Master Builder there for 2 days is simply too much of a sacrifice.

Also, you’ll only able to Gear Up one single defense right now.  In other words, you can’t gear up all your Cannons to become Double Cannons, only one of them. So make sure that you do it on the Cannon with the highest level you have!

Attention! Gearing up will allow you to switch the defense, that doesn’t mean you can’t use a geared up defense in the original way!

Double Cannon Gear Up

The first defense you can gear up in your Home Village is your Cannon to become a Double Cannon.

I don’t think that anybody out there will say that this does not look pretty cool, but is it as cool as it looks?

The investment of 1.5 million Gold is not that much, but that doesn’t mean it will bring you such a big advantage. Let’s have a look at the stats compared to a regular Cannon:

  • It shoots 4 Bursts instead of a single shot (each one deals the same damage as a regular Cannon)
  • It shoots every 1.6 seconds (instead of 0.8 seconds, so only shooting half as often)
  • Range goes down to 7 (from 9 the regular Cannon has)

So bottom line it deals 4 times the damage, half as often – giving it a DPS that is DOUBLE the regular Cannon.

On paper, this should be worth the gearing up, but the longer time between shots and lower range is a problem. You know the Double Cannon from your Builder Base as being a strong defense, but there it has to deal will a lower number of troops compared to attacks in your Home Village.

The conclusion here is that the slower shooting rate doesn’t make it that much more powerful and it’s often times not able to deal more damage than the regular Cannon. What I can definitely say is that it’s nothing you want to have on the outside of your base as the range is a real deal breaker.

I really recommend this video that will show you all the details in direct comparison. You’ll get a fast idea that the Double Cannon is a “nice-to-have right now, but

I’m sure that it will become more powerful in the future” when Supercell brings in more gearing up into the game.

Archer Tower Gear Up

Gearing up the Archer Tower is a lot more effective than the Double Cannon as it will add a lot of DPS by shooting faster at a lower range. This will help massively by protecting the center area of your base against many smaller troops.

The fast mode for the Archer Tower will change the stats this way:

  • Range goes down to 7 tiles (from 10 tiles)
  • Shooting speed will be double as fast (0.25 sec instead of 0.5 sec)

On paper, this means double the damage output and only 30% range reduction. *Edit (thanks to Christophe for pointing that out): The area covered by the fast shooting Archer Tower is a little bit less than half of the normal Archer Tower with double the speed making it the same DPS on paper

I still like this option on an Archer Tower on the inside of my base where I can appreciate the faster kill rate against cleaning troops. Applied in real defenses this works great for an Archer Tower located on the inside of the base where it will not be destroyed that fast.
Unlike the Double Cannon, this is a very good defensive option for your base so you should do it – despite the fact that it will take 7 whole days for your Master Builder to complete the gearing up process.
I recommend you to do it if you’re focusing on your Home Village, for those who switched over to prioritize the Builder Base the 7 days downtime for the Master Builder is too much.
You can watch some live action on the effectivity here in the beginning of this video:

Multi Mortar Gear Up

You need a Builder Hall Level 8, a Multi Mortar Level 8 and you need to be Town Hall 10 or higher to gear up your regular Mortar to become a Multi Mortar.

The Burst Mode of the Mortar will shoot 3 shots of Mortar shells (the Multi Mortar in the Builder Base has 4 guns and fires 4 bursts).

Now here comes the deal – the damage of the Multi Mortar is the same as the regular Mortar and all other parameters are also the same – basically it will just split the damage of one Mortar shell into three ones.

How is this helpful? Short and brief, it’s not at all!

The Multi Mortar can’t take down a Skeleton with full health with one hitpoint and the pushback will often enough also push troops out of range of the next shell so the chances of dealing less damage than a regular Mortar are higher than you would think.

In this picture you can see the proof that Skeletons survived all 3 hits from the Multi Mortar just because the 1st hit pushed them out of the damage radius of the 2nd & 3rd hit!

This makes it to a cool-looking waste of time and resources and you shouldn’t gear it up before you have done everything else with your Master Builder…

Conclusion

Gearing up is just a nice gimmick right now, but it has the power to become a mighty part of your base defense in the future. Supercell already stated that they were intentionally underpowering these for the start as they want to slowly introduce this into the game, but I hope they will at least give them a little more power to make it worth the trouble 🙂

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