Dungeon Settlers Weapon Tier List: Every Skill Tree Ranked

Damage in Dungeon Settlers splits into physical and magic, and every settler’s combat identity is a main skill tree — a weapon or a magic school — plus sub trees for specialization. This tier list ranks the trees with week-one tier data for four-person parties in the v0.4.19 meta — the spear tree, live but unrated, gets its own section below.

S Tier — carry tools

Shield — how permadeath stays theoretical

Provoke, doorway holds, and surviving named fights — the entire boss prep checklist assumes someone brought a shield. Lizardmen carry the aptitude. Craft a real shield, not a leftover buckler at 8% durability.

Bow — safe damage from crafted ammo

Converts settlement production (wood arrows) into damage that never enters melee range and preserves armor durability. Elves want this tree; Humans can shoot. The caveat is logistics — an empty quiver is an untrained tree, so pack arrows and keep auto-pickup on.

Fire — the straightforward magic button

Direct magic pressure with no summons to manage. Humans carry a small fire aptitude. It drains the caster’s energy (Willpower) — pause and recast deliberately rather than auto-attacking with a dry gauge.

A Tier — excellent with a job

Sword

The Human default: reliable physical damage, no extreme downside, easy to gear from early recipes. Still wants a guard ahead on named fights.

Greatsword

High swing damage, weak when surrounded — place behind a shield-user. Lizardman-friendly; Elf greatsword aptitude is negative, don’t force it.

Water

Summons (Bubbleling, Bubbletoad) that scale off the caster’s magic attack — Intelligence-talented casters scale twice, personally and through pets. Summons soak hits in doorways; energy-hungry. The community’s pick when you already have a shield and want a fifth body without a fifth slot.

Nature

Elf-coded control and backline support — lower raw kill speed than Fire, higher expedition survival, if you actually use the control skills while paused.

B Tier — works, needs a reason

Blunt

Stun-adjacent physical; the Lizardman blunt aptitude is real. Suits a second frontliner alongside sword or greatsword — it does not replace the shield tree.

The spear tree — live, unrated

The spear tree is in the live game — it did not wait for the Lycan race it was announced with. Player loadouts reported in the game’s Steam community before v0.4.23 (September 9) already ran “Bow/Spear” Elves and archers with the spear sub skill tree (its Initiative node grants opening attack speed — buffed 25% → 35% in v0.4.23), and the official v0.4.23 notes balance seven spear skills — including Spear Basic Attack 75% → 90% — as live content.

No tier placement yet: no week-one tier list rated the tree, and post-v0.4.23 play has not produced a consensus placement. The Lycan race it was announced with is a separate availability question, tracked in the race tier list.

Not ranked — not live yet

The cross-cutting rules

• Gear slots: seven — main weapon, off-hand (shield or ammo), helmet, body, two accessories, plus one more wear slot
• Durability: weapons wear on hits, armor when hit — repair at camp, carry a backup weapon on long pushes
• Crafting order: Cloth → Bone/Carapace → the current region’s metal (crafting guide)
• Build rule: one primary tree plus a backup that shares a resource — shield + blunt, bow + nature, fire + sword on a Human. And match the race: a −2 fire Lizardman should not be your pyromancer (race tier list)

Where to go next

• Race Tier List — the aptitudes behind every ranking here
• Party Comp Tier List — combining trees into rank-scaled expedition parties
• Crafting & Gear — where those tiers of gear come from