Ranked wars are a popular faction activity in the MMO Torn. They’re a great way for factions to earn money, points, gear, and more, while also testing the strength of its members. Find out some of the best tips and tricks for winning your ranked war in Torn so you can get the best rewards!
It’s worth mentioning that I’m an active player who occasionally does ranked wars primarily in Platinum and Gold. I’ve learned a decent chunk about the tactics players use throughout my warring. Aside from ranked wars, I also participated in the island war of 2023 which involved large alliances.
Stack Energy Before Your War Starts
This is a simple tip that many players will know but not all new Torn players will understand. Stacking energy is when you use items or stock dividends to increase your energy up to 1,000. Most people will use Xanax since it gives 250 energy each. However, you need to do this before a war starts if you want 1,000 going into it. Especially if you don’t want the cooldown debuff.
This basic strategy makes it so your faction can hit as much as possible to get your score up. It also makes it easier to keep a chain going, as our later tips recommend. In addition to stacking, players can use daily point refills to regain energy too.
Turtle to Avoid Giving Away Score
Ranked wars are a constant tug of war where you’ll need to attack to gain respect/score but also prevent them from attacking too. The way to do this is via turtling or self-hosping so the enemy faction can’t attack you for respect. Some methods include:
- Bounties
- Using the wrong blood bag type
- Flying to other countries
- Using the SED item (expensive)
- Turning off revives so you stay in the hospital
How to Get More Respect Per Hit
The way ranked wars work frequently changes, including how scoring works as well. However, the main idea is that increasing your respect gain per hit will give you more score. Here are some quick tricks for getting the most per hit:
- Attacking players who are above your level
- The Fair Fight bonus revolves around attacking someone with stats close to yours. A good rule is to aim for half your stats.
- Attacking players overseas provides a 1.25x multiplier.
- Retaliating against a player within five minutes of them attacking your faction (and winning) provides a bonus. You have to hospitalize them for this bonus.
- Winning a fight with teammates assisting provides a group bonus. They don’t need to attack for this to apply, so it works well for low-stat players to contribute too.
- Chains provide a bonus as they increase in streak.
- Don’t mug as this provides a negative modifier.
- Using weapons with the Warlord trait.
Hospitalize Active Enemies to Increase Their Medical Cooldowns
Wars are often won by whoever uses their energy and medical cooldowns more efficiently. Or the more obvious, whichever side is more active since that plays a significant role as well. Regardless, putting active players in the hospital forces them to use their medical cooldown if they want to keep fighting.
It’s tough to balance if you’re trying to farm a player for respect as opposed to putting them in the hospital if they don’t plan on getting out. Then, you’ll essentially have made it easier for them to turtle. With that said, hospitalizing high-stat players is almost always worth it to prevent them from becoming an issue.
Group Up to Defeat Strong Players
Ranked war matchmaking can be hit or miss where one faction may have a large advantage. With that said, you can still win with better tactics. If you have a heavy player with a massive amount of stats that you can’t beat, you can work together with your teammates. Multiple people can throw temporary weapons with debuffs like Tear Gas, Smoke Grenades, etc. These debuffs will stack and reduce their stats further.
In addition to using temporary weapons, you can use the distraction mechanic to lower a player’s defense and dexterity. Since there aren’t any temporary weapons for defense, you’ll have to rely on distraction to get through it.
Hit Chain Bonuses on the Enemy Faction
Chains are a great way to increase your respect modifier, but they’re also powerful for bonus hits. For example, the first bonus at 10 hits provides 10 respect. This isn’t that huge, but it continues to add up as you reach higher bonuses. Aside from gaining respect for your faction, these hits make a massive difference in winning.
Just make sure you get the bonus hit on someone in the enemy faction. This is why it’s important to coordinate with your team and not accidentally hit someone outside the war. Otherwise, it won’t count towards the war and you’ll have wasted the bonus. However, you can build the chain with outside hits aside from the bonus hit.
Coordinate Hit and Run Tactics
If you’re in a low activity window for your faction, you can still do hit-and-run attacks to gain score. You’ll have to be wary of the other side’s activity since they may see it coming. However, planning a time to hop out of the hospital with others will make it tougher for enemies to counter.
The goal is to get a hit or a few and then return to turtling before they can put you down. You’ll gain score and potentially prevent active enemies from continuing to farm your teammates who may not be turtling well.
Take Advantage of the Faction War Mode
This Torn tip primarily applies to faction leaders who can activate a separate upgrade tree for war buffs. Faction leaders can create a separate war mode loadout of upgrades for when participating in ranked wars. This is a good way to temporarily replace training upgrades that you won’t need.
You can instead use faction upgrades like increased health, high medical cooldowns, increased stats, etc. This gives you a huge advantage or at least balances the odds if you have the right upgrades in place.
Wrapping up this Torn guide, there are plenty of other tricks you’ll learn over time. Even some fun ones like paying for revives so you can farm someone repeatedly. And you may even run into faction leaders setting terms before a war starts. Some people prefer to avoid turtling, to end wars in the first 24 hours, to prevent getting help from outside factions, etc. It’s a complicated system where everyone’s looking to make money.
Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, idle games, roguelikes, and more.