This guide is outdated, please refer to the updated TH9 guide

Here is the place where you finish up all your defensive upgrades and keep on maxing heroes. Diligent rushers who have followed the guide since the beginning would have high enough level heroes that working on them in TH9 just doesn’t make sense anymore. Good rushers would skip this phase and move on straight to TH10.

For players who maxed too many Townhalls or prefer to max TH9 (for war mainly), then this is the guide you’ll need. For this guide, I’ll assume that you’ve completed every single TH9 elixir upgrade (not including lab troops), finished all collectors and have at least 10/15 heroes.

First priority upgrade:

1. AQ. It is still AQ that you need the most. Trust me, when she’s maxed you’re all set to relax the entire game afterwards. Always keep a builder on her and always farm DE to make sure she can be upgraded within the first possible moment.
2. Xbow. If you haven’t built your xbow, do it now. Adding 50 dps and 1500 hp is huge and would greatly help you more than any other defense. We can upgrade this a little later.
3. BK. Any excess DE you farm is poured into BK, try to make sure you have 190k DE before starting him so that AQ wouldn’t suffer in her progress.
4. Tesla. The king of defenses for a rusher. The trick we rushers always use is to appear weak but surprisingly stronger than we look. Teslas fit this role nicely and I recommend you to keep teslas upgrading all the time.

Second priority upgrade:

1. Traps. Same reasoning as why we’re doing teslas. But since traps are more situational and usually cannot change the outcome too much, they’re here at 2nd priority upgrade. Work on skel traps first, then springs and giant bombs. Everything else is up to you.
2. Air defenses. Time to push up those weak ADs and stop those annoying dragon attacks on us. These take a very long time to upgrade so you can start them now.
3. Xbow. Time to max xbows, 2 levels and their Dps rises from 50>90. With the Crows base that I always use, set them on ground and let them pound away at ground troops circling the core.
4. Wizard towers. Best splash defense before infernos, upgrade them since their hp is quite high now and they’re a good defense against barch, hogs, loons.

Third priority upgrades:

Every other defense. Slowly work on all the other defenses and finish them up. There is no particular order here, just do it all.

Walls:

Since you have no more elixir upgrades, its good to dump all elixir you earned into walls. If your heroes are lagging, it is a good idea to keep a builder free for walls. This way you can dump loot into walls and not worry about losing loot. Read the following link:

Free builder for walls and its advantages (coming soon, still writing this)

Lab:

Assuming you’ve maxed barb, arch, giant, goblin, loon; do the following:

Healers to max > catch up heal and rage to max > valks to max

I hope you learned something from this guide. There really isn’t much to it here as you’re catching up your neglected defenses or just doing heroes. TH10 is a much better place to be, and unless you really really like war, TH9 doesn’t really offer much.