Free-for-all is the default and it's what most people learn on. The team modes change the game more than the name suggests, mostly because of what the bases do.
Everyone against everyone. No bases and no safe ground. The arena grows as more people join, so a busy server is a physically bigger map than a quiet one and farming space scales with the crowd.
What that means in practice: on a quiet server you'll run into the same few players over and over and grudges form fast. On a busy one you can farm a corner for minutes without being found.
Blue against orange, or a four-way. Friendly fire is off, so fights are bigger and messier, and a bad position gets punished by three people at once instead of one.
Each team owns a coloured region. Yours is safe ground. Every other team's base will kill you if you go in. Not hurt you, kill you. The drain starts the moment you cross the line and speeds up the longer you stay, so a full-health tank dies in about a second and a half.
Clipping a corner is survivable. Committing isn't. No build beats the drain, because it scales with your maximum health instead of dealing a flat amount. A Recruit and a fully-levelled Dreadnought die in the same time.
Bases block more than tanks. Bullets die on entry. Traps can't be placed inside. Drones get pushed back out instead of destroyed. You can't shoot into an enemy base at all, so chasing a wounded enemy home means letting them go.
This cuts both ways, and it's the main thing to learn about team modes.
A boss belongs to no team, so every base is hostile to it. Bosses avoid them on purpose, which means you'll never find one parked in a base. It also means a boss fight always happens in open ground where anyone can join in.
Bosses show up on a timer, are worth a lot of score, and will kill an unprepared level-45 tank. Six of the seven telegraph their big move with a coloured glow first. That wind-up is your whole warning, and the colour tells you which move is coming. Wraithspire is the exception: it has no big move to warn you about, because the swarm is the threat.
| Boss | What it does | How to handle it |
|---|---|---|
| Warden | Fires a focused lance. Blue wind-up. | Get off its facing line. The lance is narrow, so sidestep it instead of trying to out-range it. |
| Conjurer | Summons, then surges. Green wind-up. | Clear what it spawns first, or you're fighting the boss and its escort at the same time. |
| Bulwark | Floods the area with traps. Red wind-up. | Keep moving and keep an exit open. It wins by taking your ground away. |
| Juggernaut | Closes distance and slams. Orange wind-up. | Never let it reach you. It's a ram boss, so distance is the entire fight. |
| Wraithspire | Commands a swarm that grows while it's left alone. No wind-up, since it has no big move. | Pressure it early. Leaving it undamaged is how it gets out of hand. |
| Nemesis | Spins constantly firing eight ways, with a periodic radial nova. Yellow wind-up. | There's no safe angle, only safe distance. Back off when it charges the nova. |
| Leviathan | A carrier. Deploys threats instead of fighting you directly. Pink wind-up. | Kill what it launches first, then commit. Ignoring the escort loses the fight. |
Below half health a boss enrages. It speeds up, its abilities come faster, and the ground around the fight degrades. Most people die to a boss after they've already won most of the fight, because the second half is faster than the first. If you were only just surviving at full health you won't survive the enrage, so get out while you can.
In free-for-all, the player waiting at the edge of a boss fight isn't helping. They're waiting for you to spend your health, because the score from killing you is worth more than the boss. If you're taking a boss with other players nearby, take it fast or don't take it.