19 months in: 600-650 waves in Legend with only the 3 permanent packs (no stone or premium packs or event boosts)
I thought I'd share my current build and the path I took to get here, mostly to give an example of how far you can progress without whaling on stone packs. I feel frustrated when people post achievements without detailesd builds that can be used as targets, so I will try to provide relevant data.
To be clear, this is not F2P. I started this account in January 2025 and played my first month without any packs. After that first month, I bought the no ads pack, then about six months later I bought the other two coin packs.
That's all I've ever spent on the account: no stone packs, no premium passes for milestone bonuses, no event boosts, and no other purchases.
The screenshots show my full build as it stands today.
Playtime and gems
One thing that probably matters a lot: I click a lot of gems.
Basically, the only time I'm not clicking them every 10 minutes is during the 5-6 hours a day I'm asleep. I've also been running the game 24/7 pretty much since the beginning.
Very early on, I deliberately arranged my farming around 11:30-12h runs. That lets me start one in the morning before work and another in the evening before making dinner for the kids, and then I only have to click gems during the run.
Shorter runs might sometimes have been more optimal, but this setup made it possible for me to keep the game running consistently without having to actively manage it all day.
UW progression
My UW progression was:
DW -> GT -> CL -> BH -> SL
Build progression
I started with a defabs build on T1, up to roughly wave 6-7k, and then played blender for basically my entire progression after that.
I maxed Lab Speed and Shatter Shard as soon as I could, without gem rushing them.
When I reached Platinum, I picked up CL and invested into it until roughly its current state.
After that, I focused heavily on econ. I brought GT/BH/DW to 140s cooldown, then took BH to 50s. I've always farmed using MVN + BHD.
That combination of econ investment and CL let me progress in tourney with a hybrid build: SF for tanking, AS/PF/DC for damage. I kept pushing that setup until I was reaching top 5 Champion. I never relied on pbh, and reallly love UW dur BC (and even now since competitors also rely on CF).
At that point I saved and picked up SL4.
That led my econ to be ready to sustain masteries, taken in that order:
RPC, IS, ST, DMG, Berzerk
These last three masteries are what pushed me from ocassionally getting to legend, to staying there 3/4th of the time.
Then, to move my farming setup to min range, I took FU mastery, mainly so I could lock orbs, shockwave size and EALS.
Where I am now
I'm currently doing around 600–650 waves in Legend.
For tournaments I've moved to a full damage build. I replaced SF with ACP, run at 160m range, and my results currently depend quite a bit on Berzerker mastery RNG.
So that's basically where all the screenshots attached to this post are coming from.
Where I'm going next
My next big stone investment will probably be around 7,000 stones to get DW cooldown to 50s and BH duration to 38s.
With MVN, that should move my sync from 65s to 50s and let me farm with pBH.
I'm hoping that will be enough to move my normal farming from T11/T12 to T13, while also letting me make more progress on the dissonance labs.
After that, I'll probably start unlocking the remaining assmods and work toward getting bonuses/submods to 20% across the board.
Then I'll fill in more masteries, probably something along the lines of:
DM, EN, UWC, WA, EB, EO, Cash, Coins
After that, assuming I get lucky with my UW pulls, I'll go for CF, which I'm expecting to cost another ~6–7k stones.
Then the plan is to finish buying the remaining UWs without investing much into them initially, so I can start working toward GT+, CF+ and SL+.
Realistically, I think all of that is probably another year and a half of progression.
Conclusion
The main thing I've noticed is that my progression has actually been pretty steady.
At basically every stage there were a ton of players who seemed massively ahead of me, some of them buying stones, event boost and premium packs, but I've still been able to keep moving upward without buying anything beyond the three permanent packs.
There are definitely points where progression gets gated by module RNG, especially when you're waiting for specific modules or enough copies to reach Ancestral. But when that happens, I've usually been able to adapt the build around what I actually have without losing too much competitiveness, for very long.
And ultimately, virtually nobody has a perfect build order anyway.
So for anyone wondering how far you can realistically get without regularly buying stones: this is where 19 months of very active, 24/7 play with only the three permanent packs has gotten me.