How to Unlock Hard Mode Towers: Requirements and Boss List

Hard Mode towers are the endgame rematch ladder — the same eight tower bosses you already put down, rebuilt in the level 70s and 80s with multipliers that turn a comfortable win into a five-minute race against a health bar. This guide covers the single unlock condition, every rematch's level and multipliers, which fight is secretly the longest one on the board, the Pal checklist that decides whether an attempt is worth starting, and the hats and legendary schematics waiting at the end.

Hard Mode Tower Unlock Requirements

There is only one gate, and it is a completion check rather than a level check: beat all eight tower bosses on Normal Mode, one clear each. Zenara and Astralym sit outside that count and are not required, which is the part most people get wrong — you can unlock the whole rematch ladder without ever touching the World Tree fight. The difficulty your world was set to when you cleared those eight doesn't matter either, and an unfinished story objective won't hold the rematches back.

Nothing new opens up on the map when the gate clears. The rematches run at the same eight towers you already have fast travel points next to, so the only travelling involved is going back to a door you've already used.

Every Hard Mode Tower in Order

The rematch levels don't scale evenly with the original ladder — they compress. Grizzbolt jumps from level 10 to 72, a 62-level leap, while the back half of the ladder all lands flat at 80. That means the four late towers (Shadowbeak, Selyne, Bastigor and Shaolong) share a level, and the only thing separating them is their multipliers and their element. Pick your first rematch by weakness coverage, not by where it sits in the list — check any pairing on the element matchup chart and counter finder before you commit a team.

Boss	Element	Weak to	Normal Lv	Hard Lv
Zoe & Grizzbolt	Electric	Ground	10	72
Lily & Lyleen	Grass	Fire	20	74
Axel & Orserk	Dragon / Electric	Ground, Ice	30	76
Marcus & Faleris	Fire	Water	40	78
Victor & Shadowbeak	Dark	Dragon	50	80
Saya & Selyne	Dark / Neutral	Dragon, Dark	55	80
Bjorn & Bastigor	Ice	Fire	60	80
Auri & Shaolong	Dragon / Water	Ice, Electric	68	80

Two elements cover four of the eight on their own. Dragon damage answers both Shadowbeak and Selyne, and Ground answers both Grizzbolt and Orserk — so a party built around one Dragon attacker and one Ground attacker clears half the ladder without a rebuild. Fire handles Lyleen and Bastigor, leaving only Water for Faleris and Ice or Electric for Shaolong as one-offs.

How Much the Rematch Multiplies Each Boss

Every tower boss is an ordinary Pal wearing multipliers, and the rematch rewrites all four of them. In the first battle each boss deals ×1 damage and takes ×1 damage; in the rematch they hit for 8 to 13 times as much and absorb 75% to 90% of what you deal. That damage-taken column is the one people underestimate — dropping from ×1 to ×0.1 doesn't make the fight 10% harder, it makes it ten times longer, and the clock does not move. The full multiplier set for both phases lives on the tower boss list.

Boss	HP ×	Damage ×	Damage taken ×	Cooldown ×
Zoe & Grizzbolt	×100	×13	×0.1	×3
Lily & Lyleen	×100	×10	×0.12	×3
Axel & Orserk	×110	×10	×0.15	×2.5
Marcus & Faleris	×110	×8	×0.15	×2.5
Victor & Shadowbeak	×100	×12	×0.25	×2
Saya & Selyne	×93	×9	×0.2	×2
Bjorn & Bastigor	×75	×10	×0.18	×2
Auri & Shaolong	×88	×12	×0.2	×2.5

Grizzbolt is the hardest hitter on the board at ×13, and Faleris the softest at ×8 — but read the cooldown column alongside it, because Grizzbolt also has the slowest rotation at ×3. Bigger hits landing less often is a fight you can armour through; Shadowbeak at ×12 damage on a ×2 cooldown is the one that actually threatens to kill you. Bastigor carries the smallest health multiplier at ×75, which is why it's the usual first rematch people clear.

The Longest Fight Is the One You Beat First

Combine the health multiplier with the damage-taken multiplier and you get the number that actually predicts how long you'll be in the room. A boss with ×100 health that only takes 10% of your damage is effectively a ×1,000 health bar. Run that for all eight and the rematch ladder comes out almost perfectly inverted: Zoe's tower, the very first one in the game, is the longest grind in Hard Mode, and Victor's — halfway up the original ladder — is the shortest.

Boss	HP ×	Damage taken ×	Effective health
Zoe & Grizzbolt	×100	×0.1	×1,000
Lily & Lyleen	×100	×0.12	×833
Axel & Orserk	×110	×0.15	×733
Marcus & Faleris	×110	×0.15	×733
Saya & Selyne	×93	×0.2	×465
Auri & Shaolong	×88	×0.2	×440
Bjorn & Bastigor	×75	×0.18	×417
Victor & Shadowbeak	×100	×0.25	×400

The practical read: start at the bottom of this table, not the top. Shadowbeak and Bastigor are the two rematches a freshly-geared level 60 party can realistically time out, and clearing them funds the Large Pal Souls and radiant gems you need before Grizzbolt is even worth booking. Going after Zoe first because it was the easy tower in the early game is how most first attempts end in a timeout rather than a wipe.

Where the Towers Are

All eight towers are already pinned on the tower boss layer of our interactive map — one pin each, spread across the main landmass from the Rayne Syndicate tower in the starting grasslands out to the Sakurajima and Feybreak towers. Three more tower pins sit in the World Tree region, which you can switch to on the World Tree view of the map. Turn the layer on, take the nearest fast travel point, and you're at the door.

Minimum Requirements Before You Try

This is the gate that matters more than the unlock condition. Hard Mode does not punish a bad team with a wipe — it punishes it with a timeout, which costs you five minutes and teaches you nothing. Every entry below is something you can fix before you walk in, and a party that ticks all of them will out-damage the clock on the bottom half of the ladder even without a perfect element match.

Requirement	Target	Why it matters
Pal level	80	Under-levelled attackers lose damage to the level gap on top of the ×0.1–0.25 reduction
Condensed	4 star	The single biggest stat swing available to a Pal you already own
Pal Souls	+20 HP, +20 Attack, +20 Defense	Fed by Large Pal Souls the towers themselves drop
Trust level	7 or higher	Unlocks the top of the partner-skill payoff
Awakened	Yes	Radiant gems by element — farm them before the run, not during
Weapon	Legendary tier for your level	See the best weapon by tech level
Armor	Best available tier	See the best armor by tech level

If a Pal falls short, the fix is not a different Pal — it's condensing and ranking up the one you already have, and raising its trust. Both are cheaper than levelling a replacement from scratch. Bring backup as well: the boss fights alongside allies around level 70 — Pals or humans depending on the tower — and none of them can be caught, so every sphere you packed is dead weight in there. Co-op is the honest answer for the top four rematches; two players roughly halve every effective-health number in the table above.

What Hard Mode Towers Drop

The guaranteed payout is cosmetic: each boss hands over its owner's hat the first time you clear its rematch, so the opening run at every tower is never wasted. They're all identical statistically — 20 defense, 60 HP, 5,000 durability apiece — which puts them below anything in the late-game helmet tiers, so wear them for the look and the collection rather than the numbers. The Zenara Hat is the odd one out, flagged in-game as something only the luckiest survivors walk away with.

Hat	From	Defense	HP
Zoe Hat	Zoe & Grizzbolt	20	60
Lily Hat	Lily & Lyleen	20	60
Axel Hat	Axel & Orserk	20	60
Marcus Hat	Marcus & Faleris	20	60
Victor Hat	Victor & Shadowbeak	20	60
Saya Hat	Saya & Selyne	20	60
Bjorn Hat	Bjorn & Bastigor	20	60
Auri Hat	Auri & Shaolong	20	60
Zenara Hat	Zenara & Astralym	20	60

The reason to keep running a tower after the hat is the legendary schematic on each boss's table, which lands at roughly one clear in ten and is different per tower — Heat-Resistant Ancient Armor off Axel, the Plasma Rifle off Saya, Cold-Resistant Ancient Armor off Victor and Bjorn. The legendary schematics guide ranks the whole pool by what it actually crafts, and the schematic upgrade guide explains why the duplicates you'll pile up are still worth keeping. The rest of each table is material: Large Pal Souls, element-matched radiant gems, Training Crystals and stat lotuses.

Zenara and Astralym Sit Outside the Ladder

Astralym is the World Tree tower and it plays by different rules. It's the only tower boss with no element at all, so there is no weakness to exploit and no counter team to build — raw damage is the entire plan. Its rematch multipliers are in another bracket too: ×405 health against ×0.45 damage taken works out to roughly ×900 effective health, second only to Grizzbolt, and it's the only rematch on the board that lets more than a quarter of your damage through.

The trade is that Astralym hits softest of anything in the tower class, at ×5 damage where the rest of the ladder runs ×8 to ×13. Beating it is a damage-per-second problem, not a survival one — which makes it the clean measuring stick for whether your endgame build is actually finished. It also has the highest HP, Shot Attack and Defense of any Pal in the game once you catch it, so the fight is worth repeating for reasons beyond the hat.

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