Best Hades Weapon Types TIER LIST
New to Hades and trying to figure out which Hades Weapon Types are the best? This Hades Weapon Types Tier List is the guide for you so you can know which weapons to focus on.
If you’re playing the wonderful new aRPG Hades, you’re going to want to learn everything you can about the various Hades weapon types so you can know which weapons you want to focus on leveling up with your Titan Blood.
Hades itself is a fairly well-balanced game, so what mostly separates the Hades weapon types is their playstyle. Additionally, each weapon type has its own variations that differ in power and playstyle. For that reason, it’s important to note that even if a weapon is not the ‘best’, it may be the best for you.
With that said, with all things considered, it’s fair to say that some weapons are, generally speaking, better than others, especially early in the game before you’ve maxed out any of their aspects and unlocked the powerful unique abilities that really differentiate certain aspects from the pack.
Another thing to keep in mind is that this is not necessarily about playstyle or preference. My personal favorite Hades weapon types to use are the Rail and the Fist, but I don’t think those are objectively the best overall Hades weapon types even though they’re the ones I like the most.
This is the Best Hades Weapon Types Tier List.
S Tier – Best Hades Weapon Types
Heart-Seeking Bow
Generally speaking, I think the bow is the Hades weapon type that most players will beat the game with first. It’s powerful, its playstyle is incredibly safe thanks to its range, and as you continue to unlock and upgrades new bows, it continues to be among the most powerful and safest weapon types in the game.
A fully upgraded Aspect of Chiron bow feels like setting the difficulty level of the game to a lower level, and even a completely non-upgraded Zagreus bow can dominate the game easily in the hands of a skilled player thanks to the sheer damage output that’s possible to achieve by shotgunning the standard bow special at close range.
Unlike many other Hades weapon types, the legendary bow isn’t far and away the best bow, which is both a pro and a con. On the one hand, the bows you get early game are competitive throughout the entire game. On the other, unlocking the Aspect of Rama isn’t that exciting. Chiron and Zagreus/Hera (purely for their special attacks) are the real winners.
Even the zaniness unlocked by other weapon types’ best aspects like Guan Yu among spears or Chaos among shields struggle to come close in damage potential and safety to even a completely non-upgraded default bow, not to mention the ease-of-use the bow playstyle (especially the Aspect of Chiron) offers to less seasoned players.
For those reasons, I think if one of the Hades weapon types is going to be ranked as the best overall, it’s going to have to be bows.
Click here for the full Best Hades Bow Aspect Tier List
A Tier – Best Hades Weapon Types
Eternal Spear
As with bows, the Spears are a very safe and versatile Hades weapon type. Because they have both a decently long-range melee attack and a fully ranged special attack, you can easily stay out of harm’s way and also make good use of whatever boons you find.
Because you can choose whether to focus on the ranged special or the melee attack, you can simply base which attack type you’re going to focus on based on what boons you find in the wild.
This is in stark contrast to most other weapons which have a handful of boons that work well on them and, if they don’t happen to appear, you’re gonna have a bad time.
The early spears are fairly underwhelming in terms of their unique bonuses (although the Zagreus Spear has a pretty good one), but comparing the non-upgraded moveset of the spear to the non-upgraded movesets of the other weapons, the spear has a lot going for it.
When you unlock the Aspect of Guan Yu, which will always be the first legendary aspect you unlock, the spear really takes off and stands out as one of the best weapon options thanks to Guan Yu’s incredibly powerful special and spin attack.
Click here for the full Best Hades Spear Aspect Tier List
Stygian Blade
Swords are pretty standard among the Hades weapon types. They’re decently fast, decently powerful, have decent range, etc. They don’t particularly excel in any category, but they’re well-balanced and easy to get through the game with. Early on, before you get good at the game, the lifesteal hammer upgrade available for swords can really help you get through a run.
Once the upgrades start becoming a factor, what makes the sword aspects stand out is that each one is different from one another. Zagreus is for speed, Nemesis is for damage, Poseidon is for casting and Arthur is for damage reduction. This gives swords some build versatility that other Hades weapon types lack.
As far as those aspect specialties go, they’re typically A-Tier or at least B-Tier in terms of the playstyle they’re designed for when compared to aspects from other weapon types that accomplish the same thing.
Poseidon for instance, is arguably the best casting weapon. That alone makes swords worth of a spot in A-Tier, but when you combine that with how fun Zagreus, Nemesis and Arthur are, the deal is clenched.
Click here for the full Best Hades Sword Aspect Tier List
B Tier – Best Hades Weapon Types
Twin Fists of Malphon
The basic fist special does a lot of damage and you can move while it’s executing, making the fists a very mobile weapon. That makes plowing through the game with fists very easy. Later aspects have a little more focus on dash attacks, like Gilgamesh and Demeter, but at least when you’re first using fists, spamming specials is probably the way to go.
What I think puts fists a little bit behind the weapons higher on this tier lists is its lack of build versatility. There are only a handful of special flourishes that really feel strong on fists, like Poseidon and, potentially, Artemis. If you don’t get one of those, you don’t have a secondary attack to fall back on like spears.
Fists also have a bit of a higher skill cap than most other Hades weapon types. The amount of in-game knowledge and skill required for fists to perform on par with bows is pretty significant. To really make Gilgamesh or Demeter sing, you’re going to have to have specific duo boons in mind and have the tools to manipulate the RNG via Fated Authority/Persuasion to achieve those builds reliably.
Talos is a little more user friendly and is essentially a straight upgrade of the base fist (which only has an almost useless dodge bonus), and even that will require some extra skill and knowledge about casting boons, duo boons and enemy attack patterns, whereas with the bow you can pretty much just go ham from start to finish.
Click here for the full Best Hades Fist Aspect Tier List
Adamant Rail
Rails are great, but the reloading mechanic takes from getting used to and they lack some of the mobility that other weapons have. For that reason, Adamant Rail might be difficult for inexperienced players, even though you’d think the long range would make them one of the safer weapon options.
The rail also has a build versatility problem, like the fists. Basically, no matter which rail aspect you’re using, you’re going to want to go full Zeus or maybe Artemis. For that reason, the rails don’t feel terribly different from one another, and playthroughs with the rail can start to feel a little repetitive and tedious since you’re just doing the same build over and over again.
At a high heat level, that also means you have to equip Zeus’s keepsake all the time instead of the Pom Blossom or the Distant Memory.
Still, the Adamant Rail has some of the most game-changing and fun hammer upgrades of any weapon and blasting through the game with a machine gun is a fun playstyle any way you slice it. But I think we’d all be kidding ourselves a little if we said the bow wasn’t better than the rail in most circumstances.
Click here for the full Best Hades Rail Aspect Tier List
C Tier – Best Hades Weapon Types
Shield of Chaos
The Shield of Chaos takes some getting used to. Like spears, shields have multiple different attack options so you can generally make a good build out of whatever boons you find. If you’re finding more Dionysus or Zeus boons, focus on the bouncing shield flourishes. If you’re finding more Ares, Athena or Poseidon nodes, maybe focus more on dash attacks.
So, the shield doesn’t have the same problem the rail and the fists do. The real problem with the shield is that even if you get great boons, its damage output tends to be lower than what you can achieve with most of the other weapon types.
Now, at a high level of play with a variety of maxed out weapon aspects change the story a little bit. The Aspect of Chaos with Dionysus special/Ares attack can melt rooms and bosses easily, Beowulf with Trippy Shot and the Zeus duo can wreck bosses, and Aspect of Zeus can also be built to be pretty strong. The problem then changes: each of these aspects has basically one very specific build that’s incredibly good, and if you don’t get it, you’re going to feel weak.
There’s also the problem that it takes a lot of blood to get to the point where shields start feeling powerful. Aspects of Chaos and Beowulf, probably generally considered to be the best shields, aren’t good almost at all until they’re at least level 4 or 5. Compare that to bows which don’t require any blood investment at all to turn the game into easy mode.
Also, almost all of the shield aspects rely on making use of the shield’s Bull Rush mechanic which, without the hammer upgrade that speeds up the charge time, encourages a very slow paced kind of playstyle.
I don’t want you to think the shield is bad, because it’s certainly not and, like I said at the beginning of the post, personal preference is a big part of weapon selection and Hades is pretty balanced overall, so the difference between C Tier and A Tier is not huge, but even if you love shields, they’re not going to feel terribly strong until at the very least you’ve maxed out one of the aspects completely.
Click here for the full Best Hades Shield Aspect Tier List
That about covers it when it comes to the best Hades weapon types tier list. Be sure to check out more Hades Game Guides, check out the Main Page for everything the site has to offer and click here to subscribe to my new Bright Rock Media YouTube channel where I’m posting game reviews, site updates and occasionally some other types of content.
