Breaking down Marvel Contest of Champions’ new Towers mode, how its Class and Challenge Towers reshape progression and roster planning, and whether it finally gives veterans a real long-term PvE goal.
What Is Towers Mode in Marvel Contest of Champions?
Towers is a new permanent solo PvE mode in Marvel Contest of Champions built around climbing stacked Floors and Blocks of increasingly brutal fights. Instead of chipping away at defenders over multiple attempts, you must beat each defender from full health within the time limit or try again. There is no revive-and-chip safety net here. Either your champion dominates the matchup or you go back to the start of that fight.
Each Tower is divided into Blocks of Floors, with rewards paid out as you clear Blocks and push higher. Kabam has split the feature into two flavors. Class Towers are more straightforward, focusing primarily on specific champion classes. Challenge Towers are stricter, layering class gates with tags and other roster restrictions so you cannot just spam one overpowered meta pick all the way up.
The result is a mode that feels like a hybrid of a traditional progression ladder and a curated challenge gauntlet. It is also explicitly framed as a test of account growth rather than a short, time-limited side quest. Towers are meant to be a long-term target you come back to as your roster improves.
How Towers Changes Progression
For years, MCoC’s progression flow has been driven by Story, Variants, Acts, and then by cyclical event content. Towers alters that rhythm by dropping a permanent, climbable structure into the middle of everything you do. It quietly asks you a new question every time you pull or rank a champion: will this help me push a little higher?
Because defenders must be beaten from full health, raw stats and rank matter more than in modes where you can brute force with revives. It is not enough to own a good champion at a low rank. Towers pushes you to consolidate your upgrade resources into a smaller pool of champions that can comfortably meet tight timers and punishing node combinations.
Class-specific and tag-specific requirements also redirect progression goals. Previously, you could get away with hyper-focusing on a handful of dominant Science and Skill champs for most solo content. In Towers, a Block might require a Cosmic Avenger, a Spider-Verse Tech, or a Mutant with a specific tag you ignored for years. Those niche pulls you left at rank 1 suddenly become relevant projects.
For newer and midgame players, this has two important effects. First, Towers becomes a visible barometer of account health. You can gauge your roster against the early Floors and immediately see which classes or archetypes are holding you back. Second, it soft-gates higher Blocks behind the depth of your account rather than just your ability to grind consumables. That nudges progression toward deliberate roster building instead of burn-through-item stints in one piece of content.
Class Towers vs Challenge Towers
Class Towers are the more approachable side of the feature. They generally focus on one or a few classes at a time and are closer to a traditional difficulty ramp. If you have a solid spread of ranked champs in that class, you can rely more on comfort picks and fundamentals. For many players, Class Towers will function like a new permanent ladder to climb steadily as they grow their accounts.
Challenge Towers are where Towers becomes a serious endgame gauntlet. These runs stack class gates with tag and trait requirements, forcing you not only to own a wide variety of champions but also to understand their kits deeply enough to apply them in narrow, node-driven roles. You might be required to bring a defensive utility specialist alongside a damage-focused champ in the same Block simply because of how the requirements are structured.
These constraints are what give Towers a different identity from things like Incursions or standard story quests. Challenge Towers do not just ask whether you have a strong roster. They ask whether you have a wide roster, whether you bothered to rank non-meta champions for their niche tools, and whether you can swap playstyles on the fly between Floors.
Roster Strategy: Depth Over Just Power
The most meaningful strategic shift that Towers introduces is the renewed emphasis on depth. In a revive-heavy meta, it has often been optimal to push a small pool of god tiers to absurd ranks and lean on them for almost everything. Towers punishes that tunnel vision. Once you hit Blocks that demand specific classes, tags, and roles, that narrow focus leaves you stuck.
Account planning now benefits from thinking in terms of coverage grids instead of pure tier lists. You want at least a few strong options in every class. You want redundancy in critical utilities such as power control, heal reversal, immunity coverage, and debuff shrugging. You also want to identify sleepers that match quirky tags used in Challenge Towers.
Rank-up decisions become less about who is technically strongest in a vacuum and more about which rank will unlock a new slice of the Towers ladder for you. Taking a solid but unfashionable champion to a higher rank might be worth more than adding yet another rank to a prestige darling if that unfashionable champ opens a gated Block. Towers effectively turns your roster into a puzzle piece collection, and your job is to make sure you can assemble any shape the mode demands.
There is also a subtle economy angle. Because you cannot cheese your way through with revives over multiple attempts, you save on consumables but face a heavier demand on long-term upgrade resources. Catalysts, ISO, and gold become the gatekeepers of your Towers progress. That encourages players to think about resource allocation in terms of years, not weeks.
Difficulty and Design: A True PvE Stress Test
Towers is unapologetically a stat and skill check. Defenders being locked to full-health kills any lingering notion of slow, attritional progress. Timers and stacked nodes mean you must pilot efficiently. Mistakes are punished, not just by losing health but by being forced to restart the fight entirely.
At higher Floors, this turns Towers into one of the purest tests of both roster and mechanical skill in MCoC’s PvE landscape. Unlike Alliance War, there is no alliance pressure or draft mind-games to worry about. Unlike Battlegrounds, there is no opponent to outwit. It is you against Kabam’s sandbox and the limits of your account.
How fair this feels will depend heavily on how the team tunes later Blocks. If they lean too hard into rare, narrow tags and extreme node stacks, Towers can feel like a roster FOMO trap where older accounts with wide collections have a permanent advantage. If they balance around a mix of broadly accessible champs and a few niche requirements, it lands closer to a healthy long-term chase.
From what has been shown so far, the intent seems to be a mix of both. Early stretches are relatively generous and highlight well-known workhorses. The higher you climb, the more your dusty bench and off-meta pulls matter.
Endgame Value: Does Towers Deliver for Veterans?
For veterans who have already cleared Acts, Variants, and most one-and-done challenges, MCoC’s PvE endgame has often felt like a rotation of finishing new story chapters once and then living inside cyclical event grinds. Towers directly targets that gap by being permanent, progression-scaled, and roster-gated.
The mode absolutely gives veterans something meaningful to chase: taller and taller Blocks that many accounts simply cannot brute force on day one. Because Towers is designed to be returned to as your roster grows, it provides a rare sense of continuity in an otherwise seasonal content ecosystem. When you pull or rank a specific champion and suddenly clear a Block that stopped you months ago, the payoff feels tangible.
It also refreshes the value of long-time collection depth. Players who have spent years accumulating off-meta champs now find that investment paying dividends. New whales with narrower, meta-focused accounts may have raw power but lack the weird tags and niche utilities that make certain Floors manageable. That is a welcome inversion for long-term free-to-play and light spenders who have been building breadth rather than just chasing the latest top-tier drop.
The open question is whether Towers’ rewards will keep pace with its difficulty curve over time. If Kabam continues to scale rewards to new rarity tiers, rank materials, and account titles, Towers can function as a living endgame pillar, similar to how other gacha titles maintain tower and abyss modes. If rewards stagnate, the mode risks becoming a one-time climb that veterans complete and move on from.
Right now, Towers sits in a promising place. It respects veteran accounts by actually asking them to use their full collections, not just their top 5 champs, and it adds a fresh, evergreen goal that connects directly to every crystal opened and every rank-up button pressed.
Final Verdict: A Smart, Roster-Driven Endgame Step
Towers is one of the most meaningful structural changes Marvel Contest of Champions has seen in years. It reorients progression around sustainable roster growth, broad coverage, and clever rank-up planning. It pushes players to value depth as much as power, and it gives veterans a permanent staircase to climb instead of another temporary event to burn out on.
If Kabam continues to tune requirements carefully and keeps rewards relevant, Towers has the potential to stand alongside Story and Battlegrounds as a core pillar of the game. For anyone invested in their roster, this is content that finally makes that investment feel seen.