Cuphead Weapons and Charms Tier List (November 2024)

When you’re on call for the literal Devil to do his bidding or forfeit your soul, you can’t really afford to be taking half measures. No sir, you need the best equipment money can buy, including both your weapons and the charms that empower you. To help you pick the best stuff in your mission fraught with dread, here’s our Cuphead weapons and charms tier list.

Cuphead Weapons and Charms Tier List

The ideal way to play Cuphead is to mix up your weapons and charms as the situation demands, carefully tweaking your kit as you learn more about the boss fights and their various quirks. That said, there are definitely some weapons and charms that are objectively better than others, so if you’re making choices, you should definitely start with those before you start experimenting.

Generally speaking, we’ll be determining these tiers based on how universally useful an item is and, in the weapons’ case, how easy they are to get a handle on.

Weapons

• S Tier
  • Spread
  • Roundabout
  • Charge
• A Tier
  • Crackshot
  • Lobber
  • Converge
• B Tier
  • Peashooter
  • Chaser
• C Tier
  • Twist-Up

Generally speaking, you want to be dealing as much damage as possible at any given time. This is why Spread and Charge are your best friends, even if the former is a bit situational and the latter takes some practice. Roundabout is a good middle ground, as it deals solid damage once you get a handle on the weird shot pattern.

On the bottom rung of things is Twist-Up, which is an extremely circumstantial weapon that isn’t even all that useful in its ideal circumstance. There’s no real reason to employ an average weapon with a curved trajectory when you can just use a stronger weapon that shoots up and diagonally.

Related: How to Get the “Hearty” Achievement in Cuphead

Charms

• S Tier
  • Smoke Bomb
  • Astral Cookie
  • Coffee
• A Tier
  • P. Sugar
  • Heart Ring
• B Tier
  • Heart
  • Twin Heart
  • Divine Relic
• C Tier
  • Whetstone

The Smoke Bomb is the standby of choice for the majority of Cuphead’s playerbase, and for good reason. The extra invincibility frames from that brief moment of disappearance can mean the difference between life and death. Once you get good at reading foes, though, the Coffee is good for expediting your special charge rate. Of course, we can’t forget about Ms. Chalice and the Astral Cookie, which provides a new moveset with several abilities baked in.

On the bottom of things is the Whetstone, the application of which still mystifies me. It turns your parry into an attack, but the whole point of parrying is to knock away projectiles, not get right in a boss’s face. If you’re close enough to hit them with the Whetstone attack, you’re doing something wrong.

There’s our tier list for Cuphead’s weapons and charms. Don’t forget to check out our guide on how to get the Divine Relic. It may not be the best charm, but it’s still cool enough to warrant the effort.