That sound complicated? Well, It’s not but let me walk you through how Evolution Skills work in Survivor!.io and then also talk about my recommendations what skills you should pick first.
Important! Please also check out the active gift codes list we have here, it’s frequently updated and there’s normally always a couple of active codes available.
Best Evolution Skill Tier List
Before we talk about the different ones, here you can see a full overview of all weapon evolution skills in Survivor!.io So, to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, if you want, let’s say, to get the Demon Blade, you will need to get katana to 5-Star and also get at least 1-Star Ronin Oyori to be able to pick up the Demon Blade.
But let’s now talk about which Evolution Skills are great and which ones are rather meh…
Important! If you check your stats at the end to see the total damage done by each one you need to mind that the skills you pick first will automatically deal much more damage and they are not cumulated right – also, they seem to take overkill in account, meaning that a mine that deals 5x enemies with insane damage get the full insane damage accounted instead the net damage they dealt… so don’t trust that chart too much…
As the state of the skills is right now, there’s no real ‘bad’ one, but there are differences and I think we mainly need to classify them into two categories – single target and area target skills.
Best Skill Picks
So, you will still find the old general skill pick list below, but in 2024 the skills your pick depend on your character, the weapon you use and the gear build you run. But no worries, this sounds now very complicated but we have your back. We created ideal gear guides for all characters and give you a clear skill pick recommendations for the popular weapons there:
General Skill Picks
New: Please also check out the new ranking of the survivors here.
Hot takeIs Survivor Instinct really S+?Drag our heroes where you think they belong and share your list. 30 seconds, no account.Fight us on itGeneral EVO Skills
These skills can be picked up no matter what survivor hero you run.
Tier Spacks a nice punch and also help when dealing with single-target bosses when there's nothing else on the map, but doesn't shine too much early as you still need area damage and single-target damage. Once you have the tech part that gives +2 bolts to all levels, it really should be your go-to first choice skill and will also carry early on. Fully maxed with all EVO maxed, it will strike fast and deal area damage and simply be the skill that deals the most damage across the board. Attention! Read the Modular Mine description below if you want to EVO the Mine with Thunderbolt Mine!.
Tier Sas your primary weapon also has a evolution ability and it already blocks one weapon skill slot, getting this evolution skill is also very important and something to go for in all situations. None of them is terrible and some even extremely good, please refer to my weapon guide linked below for deeper information as this would be too much here at this point to add.
Tier A+Durian was added in the 1.4 Update and is quite effective, especially when EVO with a huge size, dealing massive damage and also shooting more projectiles. Also against bosses it snowballs quite well and ramps up a good punch. With the tech part on Epic, you will also reduce the spread so it becomes much more viable early and makes more area damage that will actually protect you, the full tech part with the bleed isn't that much of an impact which makes it even more viable as you don't need to invest that much to make it awesome.
Tier A+Quantum Ball is quite a nice skill and has been growing more and more on me, also with the increased damage the tech part adds for it. It hits reliable and deals its damage from start to finish and even gets some bonus from some passive skills, so not a bad one.
Tier A+A very powerful version of the mine, dealing so much damage that even bosses will feel it and the size and spread is large enough to cover big parts of the map, really useful.
Tier AThe Whistling Arrow is working great and once you got some on the map and the improved speed, it will take out some mobs as it will pierce and take out any mob it touches on the way. Although the Epic tech part only improves speed, you will feel the improvement and once EVO, it will become a targeting arrow. Works effectively and homes into mobs and with the maxed tech part you will get even two of them. Also a great pick that I most of the times get.
Tier Awith the release of the tech parts I ranked this up to a higher tier now as the homing effect that will make it target mobs in your surroundings make it so much more effective, even on the lower levels. Also the fact that you will free up one slot once EVO with the two drones merged into the Destroyer makes it a great pick and one that I enjoy. You can also use it against bosses when you get into range and it will start shooting all bullets on the boss.
Tier Acan be squishy at the lower levels and is borderline for me know between A Tier and B Tier... deals efficiently with mobs but can be tricky until you get it to a higher stage or EVO. Then you can even catch incoming bullets with it and once spinning fast you can basically run through mob waves. I think as a rule of thumb you should pick it if you have troubles at that stage with mob waves, especially early to mid part of the stage. If not, take one of the above to get more damage in as it will become less effective when it comes to scale damage compared to skills like Thunderbolt.
Tier AA huge fire area that will burn everything on the map. Nice area damage and also decent as mobs and everything will be permanently in it for the reason of its size.
Tier B+The EVO version of the regular mine with Thunderbolts coming out of the side spreading some more area of effect damage when they go off, less effective than Inferno Mine with less damage.
Tier B+deal massive damage, especially against bosses and also is helpful against mobs as well. I personally don't like the EVO mechanics, though. At 5-Star, it will be thrown at the boss and deals good damage, while the EVO version starts going in 6 different directions but without targeting. But I take it to damage a boss.
Tier B+can be quite cool, but the early levels are annoying with randomly hitting targets and not dealing too much damage to make a huge impact. After the recent update it will directly favor bosses it has gotten a lot more viable and is a useful one to use as well.
Tier Bis super convenient and I had a hard time ranking it. Especially in earlier stages great and early with low stars you can run through mobs without minding much but the damage falls off later and also combining it with other area abilities doesn't work that well. It you can use it to slow down mobs, which can be useful, but I personally appreciate more damage.
Tier Cadded in the 1.4 Update and can be annoying. Deals okay-ish damage but the targeting should be in place and is best used in vertical maps. With the evolution it has a circle around you that turns inwards so goes well with mobs running towards you, but lacks some final damage to make it really strong and I hate how it cloaks up my view. One of the ones that you CAN make work well with very many other conditions in place - or you pick a better one above and have less issues.
Tier Cmy least favorite area damage pick, tbh. It's not really area damage before EVO and after that it will float out and not hit the closest enemies that makes it unreliable for dealing with zombie waves, I actually like the non-evo version almost better before it changes into the weird area mechanic.
Special EVO Skills
These skills can only be used when you run a certain survivor hero.
Tier S+Easily the best skill out there, adding more crit rate and even crit damage when EVO with only one downside - you have to run King as survivor hero or you can't get it. The additional crit just scales with every other skill and all damage so well, it's hard to compare any other skill to it.
Tier S+Great overall in terms of damage and once leveld up Master Yang, this becomes incredibly strong with all the benos and the 6_star increases crit damage incredibly.
Tier Sis basically a Moonhalo Slash that slows down enemies that will enter your radius down a little bit.
Tier S
Tier A+With the Moonshade Slashes, the exclusive skill for Tsukiyomi, you will get slashed in front of you that deal nice damage and grow in size and deal more damage as you start them up. With the EVO version, this turns into a 360 degree pulse around you which is pretty effective.
Tier AThe Divine Destroyer is the combination of the Destroyer Drone with the Medi-drone without any additional benefits than just combining them so you free up a slot, there no added damage or healing.
Tier A
Tier B+Nice damage and absolutely nice overall, but the cooldown is quite long and the EVO get you even more damage but also more cooldown, this is why I don't rank it higher.
Tier B+The targeting is not bad as you will attack the nearest enemy, but it replaces the abilities of your primary weapon and only keeps the stats.
Tier B+increases range and scales all damage taken in that range to up to +50%. Kind-of cloaks up a slot in an general feels like just designed around Enders Echo.
Tier C+Area damage but bad against bosses and it will replace the abilities of your primary weapon and only keep the stats.
Tier C+Creates a healing area aroun you. I'm really not excited about it as you get the same healing for running the Energy Drink passive skill and you can only run it with Catnip.
Evolution Skills in Survivor!.io…
Okay, the basics first. Every time you pick up these small crystals, your EXP raises and once the bar is full, you will be able to select one of 3 skills.
This also happens randomly once you beat a boss, but let’s exclude that from this guide to streamline the process. So, you can either pick weapon skills (like Katana, Drill, Guardian, etc.) and also level them up themselves until they reach their full 5-Star potential.
But here’s the thing, 5-Star is not the maximum potential and you can Evo them by picking the according support skill. What skill fits what weapon is shown below the selection where you see the small ‘EVO:…’ printed
So, once you have the skill then at 5-Star and you have the Evolution Skill activated as well (Level 1 is enough), you will be able to pick up the Evolution, as you can see here:
This is, in short, how you can get the Evolution Skills in Survivor!.io and they are the strongest ones to have. The only problem… well, you can’t get all of them. So, in my next section we’ll be taking a look which ones you should favor.
Important! Do not randomly pick all skills you see and think ‘oh, well, I will evo them by the end anyway…’! There is a cap and you can never have more than 5 weapon skills and 6 support skills, after that you will only get healing or gold bonus skills offered:
Your primary geared weapon, of course, is the 1st mandatory set weapon skill.
Best Strategy To Pick Skills
So, it can happen that you will have to pick skills you don’t want so you need to be a little strategic, especially in the beginning.
Pro Tip!
If you have a chest and you have the Evolution Skill and the Weapon Skill at 5-Star, you#re guaranteed to get the Evolution Upgrade 🙂
So, my tip is to also let the boss chests sit for some time until you can take it for the guaranteed Evolution Skill instead of getting some random support skills!
Conclusion
I hope you see that it’s important to understand not just to pick what skill seems good in that situation or randomly; it’s also a lot about planning ahead in terms of picking support evolution skills for weapon skills you want to max and so on. I’m pretty sure we will soon see more skills to be added to the game and it will get a lot more interesting in terms of options you will have.
Best Skills Guides for similar games:
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Great guide! The tier list is super helpful for figuring out which survivors to focus on. I especially loved the detailed evo and skill breakdown for each character. Can’t wait to see how some of these strategies play out in my next game. Thanks for the insights, AllClash!
Great guide! I really appreciate the detailed breakdown of each survivor’s skills and the tier list. It’s super helpful for planning my strategy in Survivor.io. Looking forward to trying out some of the recommended survivors!
Great guide! The tier list is super helpful for planning my team. I especially appreciate the detailed skill breakdown for each survivor – it really clarified some of my choices. Looking forward to using this info in my next gameplay session! Thanks, AllClash!
This game is fun, the only complain I have, as a free player, is the costs to obtain a new caracter and the extreme difficulty to obtain caracter pieces. If the prices weren’t so high I would buy the caracters or the battle pass, because I really enjoyed this game. By the way, thank you for this skill overview!
If you play the limit timed events you can get character pieces quite easily. I’ve gotten enough to unlock Catnip and one other character of my choosing with my legendary character piece chests just in the past few weeks.
I do appreciate this their list, but everyone has their own opinions. The more and more I look at teir lists it seems that everything was created to be equal. It overall seems to depend on you playstyle, are you competitive and focused on damage or do you play the game for fun and just want to pass another level. Anyway great teir list! It’s always fun to see someone’s opinions and test out if you like it more than yours.
Forcefield needs to be higher up on the list. It may not be the best “damage dealer” per say, but it’s an instant win when picked up early. It instakills lower level mobs making the rest of the game super easy to stack whatever synergies you want on top of it making you “near untouchable”.
Some of the S tier skills here is useless without proper skill combination and lower tier skills are best
paired with proper lower tier skills. For example durian and super cell is just garbage if you don’t pair them with matrix and the rocket one. They don’t have enough damage and won’t help you to keep away stronger mobs when swarmed.
Defender, force field, fuel barrel, matrix , lightning , shuriken plus 50% damage passive is the best skill set for me. It’s the best combination there is keeps away mobs enough damage for bosses .Every time I get those skills its already over.
Tu dit vraiment n’importe quoi là foudre évoluer avec la pièce thec rouge fais énormément de dégâts de zone
Il a dit “The epic tech part adds +2 bolts while the legend parts adds additional splash damage”.
Tu dis vrai, mais il l’avait dit aussi la même chose que toi. Tu lis de l’Anglais????
*sorry I meant the drone not the guardian
Just something to add:
Guardian’s knock-back and bullet erasure feature is extremely useful. There are a lot of stage with huge mobs that could be knocked back, or with lots of erase-able bullet. Guardian save you from these.
Fuel Barrel is extremely useful in several stage with lots of high damage toxic on ground (e.g. thrown by boss). Toxic on ground will be covered by fire which makes you easy to move around.
Seriously
Forcefield should be S Ranked
Pressure Field is more or less either an A- tier or B+ tier since it technically doesn’t actually kill mobs, it takes nice chunks of HP off for sure but it usually takes the higher tier abilities to actually do good damage and deal finishing blows. I’ve tried several scenarios where I had very different abilities along with Pressure Field but the other abilities ended up dealing more damage overall in the “Total Damage” tab in the pause menu.
Usually best to just focus on getting one or two really good abilities and main the passives as much as possible.
Well I pretty too much disagree with everything that was written in this “guide”. Katana is the best weapon that Ive had experience using, simply because usually the issue is not the bosses but the infinite waves of mobs. Soccer ball is a s-tier as it kills bosses in seconds. Durian is f****** useless, as it does not do anywhere near the same amount of damage. Lightning cell is crap because it only targets random area and not the zombies that are attacking you. Guardian is F-tier, I don’t know why he’s it even in the game. It does not do anywhere near enough damage to kill anything. On the other hand force field is great because he does more damage and more importantly it slows the enemies.
So I don’t know what game were you playing but it’s clearly not survivor.io
Although I appreciate comments that initiate a discussion in a constructive way, your comment was actually not only in facts wrong, I also don’t appreciate the attitude how you state your own opinions without facts by disrespecting the effort and work I put into my ‘guide’. Mike, I want to put out helpful content and I do that by sacrificing my free time, do you think comments like yours are helping to get useful content out for the community? You like the Katana, great, no problem with that but it’s not the best weapon just because you invested heavily into it and if you run the other weapons at the higher rarities you will see the difference, but as you’re cleary not up for a fact-bases discussion here I will not start telling you where your opinion lacks evidence (especially the part about the Force Field). Please also don’t swear on my website or I will remove further comments.
Thanks Tim for the guide you made, it really changed my game and overall experience, it’s the best guide for survivor.io. The only skill I disagree is Durian, because it really doesn’t do much damage against mobs, and against the boss I personally find it difficult to hit it even with the upgrade part. The best one damage wise for me with the tech part is the brick, but while it does great damage without the final evolution, in later stages it doesn’t kill the mobs. Guardian with the tech part is unstoppable, specially after evolved, it is now my primary skill against bosses and mobs. Ps: Mike up there really is still a newb in the game, thinking katana is the best weapon. With the void gun out there, mobs are the easiest part and you don’t even have to evolve it.
This guide is somewhat misleading. The meta isn’t to pick all the best individual skills, but to find synergies. Take these skill tiers with a grain of salt. The best builds I find are ones that are flexible and leave room for passive skills like the high power bullet which is an essential skill to have in all builds in my opinion. 50% atk damage is something you can’t even achieve with the best gear.
Nice information, thank you😊👌🏻 I have a question, should I invest money to evolve the equipment or to the character evolve (that green capsule in the right)? Which one is more important/effective?
Depends what level you are, tbh. When you hit level 50+ your character evolve will slow down dramatically so you can catch up with equipment. But I don’t see one significantly more important than the other
Hi, machine gun in this guide is S tier, while in the (Best Weapons in Survivor.io (Tier List) – with Void Power) guide, it’s C tier
Hi, sorry if that comes accross confusion. This is just about evolving your weapon as one of the most important EVO skills (no matter what weapon you run). If you run the weapon for Machine Gun it’s one of the best skill choices among the skills, although it’s not a good weapon. I should updated the description and icons probably 🙂
I was hoping you would have a description of the modular mine with a list of its combinations – it’s probably only from the newest version. I have been able to combine it with molotov and lightening successfully, but it does not combine with drill, soccer ball, rpg, brick, durian, force field, laser, either drone, nor guardian. To combine, the molotov or lightening needs to be level 5, and when I have combined them, I did not have the evo support skill (gold-molotov/CD reduction-lightening).
Also I’d argue the soccer/quantum ball should be A tier. Movement speed is very useful for avoiding boss attacks and can be the difference between life or death if you are surrounded and overwhelmed but there is a small opening to run through (ideally you could just stand still and melt everything, but that doesn’t always happen). And if you run the soccer/quantum ball it is always going to provide one of if not the highest damage, even if the damage is random. The balls will also target bosses when they spawn and then do random damage to bosses while you dodge without needing to target the boss.
I would also put destroyer in A tier assuming you are able to get both drones. It consistently does a lot of damage and if you get the tech that allows destroyer to target enemies in range, it’s excellent. But B tier is fine with me because there is so much risk: if you go for one of the drones but can’t get the other, it can be near worthless.
A tip: One good reason to go for the drones is that it provides a free support slot (you don’t need a support skill to evo them). I’ll always go for the magnet because experience is critical and it is a hassle to collect everything without it. By the time you evo to destroyer, the boomerang can be a good choice to fill in the extra weapon skill slot that gets opened up when you evo to destroyer. The evo from boomerang to magnetic rebounder is actually very solid once you get to the end of a stage and the zombies really start swarming. The rebounder thins out/weakens mobs very well so that your primary weapon(s) can finish them off, and it usually ends up doing a fair-to-large amount of damage.
Thanks for your comment, I updated with the new Modular Mine 🙂
Also, I put Destroyer in A Tier now with the tech part that apply homing of missiles.
The Quantum Ball is not bad, for sure, but if you look at the total damage statistics at the end you will see that it deals so much less damage although it ‘feels’ more while playing it.
Thanks!
Do you happen to know how the damage percentage is calculated?
I.e. is it adding up all the damage each of the weapons are doing over the course of the whole stage? Or is it doing averages over the past 60 seconds or something like that?
Because I have repeatedly found the ball is doing more than 20% of damage by the end of the stage, but maybe it is just because I don’t shy away from it, sometimes the soccer ball is my first non-primary weapon pick.
Unfortunately, I don’t, but I think it’s throughout the full stage but you can try to monitor it and pick the ball up early and late in the same stage and then see how the difference is. I personally have played around with it and believe that it’s a total (also from the developer side easier to implement)
Thanks for the reply. After some observation I agree it’s probably keeping track of total damage throughout the stage.
I noticed an interesting thing which is that the modular mine (and its evos, especially) often ends up doing the most damage. However, the damage is overinflated because of overkill. E.g. if the modular mine does 50k damage but monster dies after 20k, that extra 30k is still counted for the damage chart. Of course, every weapon will have at least a small amount of overkill for practically every kill, the effect is just greater with the mine.
I honestly never go for magnet support skill, even if I grab boomerang I treat it as my “ok this is my extra support skill slot.” Instead what I tend to do is find a magnet early on, lure an elite towards it and kill it nearby without picking up the chest, then go off and collect exp normally until first boss is about to spawn and work my way back towards the chest since there’s an indicator saying where it is, as soon as boss spawns I pick up the magnet and chest, then when boss dies I rinse and repeat with the chest and magnet it drops
That is a good tip, but they removed the chest indicator. 🙁