The Dragon Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

Okay, so if you’ve been following this series, you can probably guess that this isn’t going to be quite what it sounds like. I do tier lists for builds in Outside, and you can’t actually play as a dragon in that game. So rather than ranking literal dragons, what I’m going to be doing is ranking the creations of players who’ve used the names of these legendary beasts to make their builds sound cooler. To put that in shorter terms, this is a tier list for animals that have “dragon” in the name.

F Tier: Seadragon

At the bottom of the dragon… err, “dragon” tier list are the seadragons. These are a group of seahorse-like fish which put most of their points into stealth, typically being covered in long, leaf-like protrusions that allow them to easily camouflage against seaweed. As interesting as this is, the fact remains that seahorses are among the lowest-ranked fish in the game, having very low mobility due to their tiny, weak fins and no real combat abilities against any opponent larger than a plankton. I don’t think the seadragons’ camouflage does enough to make up for the general weaknesses of this sort of build, so I place them in F tier.

D Tier: Dragon lizard

While the “dragon” designation has been adopted by builds in a variety of different guilds, it’s by far the most popular among lizard mains, and especially among those who play for the dragon lizard guild. Also known as agamids, the dragon lizards encompass over 300 lizard builds, most of which are predators that feed primarily on arthropods. Their most iconic members are two Australian-server exclusives, the bearded dragon and the frilled dragon. Frilled dragons are named for the large frills around their necks, which can expand when flushed with blood in order to grant an intimidation bonus during fights. The bearded dragon is named for the underside of the throat, which can similarly be puffed up to form a pouch called a “beard” when the lizard is frightened. Joining the dragon lizard guild can also give you access to a wide variety of other neat abilities depending on which build you choose, including walking on water and asexual reproduction. While these abilities are interesting, I generally don’t see dragon lizards as particularly strong builds in the current meta. Their base stats tend to be mid-low, and most of the abilities they spec into seem kind of gimmicky and not really strong enough to compensate for their weaknesses when it comes to the basics. With some exceptions, they also typically lack access to one of the lizard faction’s signature abilities, [Autotomy]. Autotomy is an ability that allows lizard mains to drop their tail if a predator grabs onto it and then grow a new one. I’ve spoken about autotomy a few times in my previous tier lists, and while it’s a pretty risky play that I don’t recommend players rely on as their primary defence, it nevertheless does have the potential to be a real life-saver. So, all in all, I’d say the dragon lizards generally average around the high end of D tier. If you’re interested in a lizard that’s similar to the dragon lizards, but in a stronger position in the meta, I’d suggest checking out their close relatives, the iguanas.

C Tier: Dragon millipede

In C tier, we have the dragon millipedes. These are a subset of millipedes that spec into spines and bright colours in order to warn predators not to approach. If a predator decides to ignore the warning and attack them anyway, that’s when the dragon millipede activates its signature ability: emitting toxic cyanide. Toxic emissions are a pretty common strategy for millipede players, and if you want to read more about them, you can check out my previous tier list of centipedes and millipedes. I noted in that tier list that millipede builds don’t really go higher than C tier, even with poison, thanks to their generally mid-low stats and being easily countered by many other builds both in and above their weight class; dragon millipedes are no exception to this.

B Tier: Blue dragon sea slug

In B tier, we have two marine “dragons”, the first of which is the blue dragon sea slug. This is a species of slug that fills its stomach with air in order to float upside-down at the surface of oceans, and generally travels by letting the winds and currents carry it. It can swim under its own power to an extent as well, but only very slowly.

Blue dragons are vicious predators, with serrated teeth and strong jaws for grasping prey. Their main prey targets are a group of jellyfish-like marine invertebrates known as siphonophores, a group whose most famous members include the bluebottle and the Portuguese man-o’-war. Like jellyfish, siphonophores have venomous stings, so blue dragons have had to spec heavily into venom resistance in order to hunt them. After digesting a siphonophore, the blue dragon stores the toxic stinging cells inside its own tissues, essentially co-opting the siphonophore’s venom for its own defence. This playstyle has made the blue dragon fairly successful within the ocean meta, as it has a substantial presence all over the Earth’s oceans. I place it at the high end of B tier, kept from going higher by its generally low stats and lack of defences against any other predator that can resist its venom.

B Tier: Barbeled dragonfish

Also in high B tier, we have the stomiid fish, also known as the barbeled dragonfish. This placement is a little bit speculative, as barbeled dragonfish are a deep-sea server exclusive, and there’s not a whole lot of good information out there about that server’s meta. Among deep-sea fish, the barbeled dragonfish stands out for a few special abilities. Firstly, it has a special organ called a photophore, which it uses to produce a glowing light and lure in prey. Almost all deep-sea predators have something like this, though, so this isn’t that much of an advantage. Their more notable special ability is their jaws, which are enormous, filled with giant, sharp fangs, and can be opened to over 100 degrees to swallow prey up to 50% larger than their own standard length. Barbeled dragonfishes have risen to the top of the food chain in the deep-sea meta and have no known predators. This is quite a rare achievement for a build in such a low weight class, and it earns them an above-average rating. The main reason I’m not placing them any higher is simply out of caution, because there’s not enough information about them to definitively place them among the best builds in the game.

A Tier: Dragonfly

In A tier, we have the dragonfly. For a while, I was actually planning to give dragonflies a whole tier list of their own, but despite there being around 3000 variants of dragonfly available in the current meta, I found there really wasn’t enough variation in their abilities or playstyles to make it interesting. So, instead, I’m just going to cover the entire guild here.

Dragonflies were one of the earliest insect builds to be introduced to Outside, having first appeared in the Carboniferous expansion. They’re primarily optimised for mobility, with great speed and agility in the air owing to their strong wings; a dragonfly in flight can easily cover over 100 times its own body length in a single second. And unlike most insects, dragonflies have their wing muscles inserted directly at the wing bases, which are hinged so that a small downward movement of the wing base lifts the wing itself upward, kind of like rowing through the air. This means that each of a dragonfly’s wings can be operated independently of the others, which gives them finer control over their direction and speed in flight than most other insects.

Dragonflies are easily one of the most underrated powerhouses among predator builds in the current meta. A lot of high-tier insects take some time to grow into their power, but dragonflies are tiny terrors pretty much right from the moment they hatch. It might take a while to grow their wings and learn to fly, but other than that, dragonfly nymphs are pretty similar to the adults. Both have toothy jaws adapted for biting and extendable lower lips, called labia, for rapid prey capture. The nymphs mostly use these abilities to hunt freshwater invertebrates, though they occasionally take larger prey, up to the size of full-grown frogs. but it’s once they get their wings and become adults that they become true menaces. On average, dragonfly players score successful kills on between 85 and 95% of their hunts – not only the single highest hunting success rate recorded for any insect, but the highest of any animal, period.

Dragonflies are an extremely successful guild, having established a presence on every major land server except Antarctica, and have remained some of the highest-ranked lightweight predators in the game for over 300 million years. However, they do have a handful of weaknesses that keep them from being top-tier. Firstly, as I discussed in my post on cockroaches, most insects nowadays have the ability to fold their wings back over their abdomen when not in use. Because they’re still working with a very old build design that hasn’t been updated in a long time, dragonflies’ wings are too stiff for them to do this, which makes it difficult for them to fly in areas with dense cover – not a great trait to have for a guild that is primarily clustered in tropical forests. They also can’t walk, meaning their only effective way of getting around is energetically expensive flight through open air. One consequence of this is that they don’t really have the ability to access hiding places the way that other insects do so well, which is unfortunate for such a small build, as it puts them at constant risk of being snatched out of the air by birds. These weaknesses haven’t been enough to prevent dragonflies from being hugely successful, but they do keep them just out of S tier.

S Tier: Komodo Dragon

You probably all knew this was coming. The best “dragon” build in the game, and the only one truly worthy of the name, is the Komodo dragon.

Komodo dragons come from the monitor lizard guild, by far the highest-ranked lizard guild in the current meta. Unlike a lot of the lower-ranking lizards, monitor lizards don’t generally put many points into unlocking special abilities, instead investing into a solid, well-rounded base stat distribution, with intelligence, power and defence all being a good bit above most lizards. While monitor lizards have been part of the meta since the Late Cretaceous, the path that would lead them to develop the komodo dragon build began when they first found their way onto the Australia server in the Miocene. Monitor lizards in Australia had a leg up on lizards elsewhere because they didn’t have to compete with the dominant groups of carnivorous mammals; the only mammals they had to compete with were marsupials, which as I discussed in my post on them, tend not to be as powerful or versatile as their placental counterparts. In the relative absence of competition, monitor lizards quickly grew much larger than their relatives elsewhere, and became some of the dominant predators of the continent. When humans found their way onto the Australia server, they wiped out these giant monitor lizard species along with almost all of Australia’s other native megafauna; however, a few million years before this, there had been a collision between Southeast Asia and Australia that had allowed some of these giant monitors to spread out of Australia and into Indonesia. And so, while their Australian cousins were being slaughtered into oblivion by humans, the Komodo dragon player base on the islands of Indonesia was able to remain dominant into the present day.

If you’ve followed my previous tier lists, you know that I don’t generally recommend playing builds that are exclusive to small island servers, but given that the Komodo dragon is the single most dominant predator on every island it inhabits, I’m going to make an exception. The Komodo dragon’s exceptional success can be attributed partly to taking the already-high stats of the baseline monitor lizard build and pushing them to extremes, and partly to augmenting these stats with a variety of special abilities.

The Komodo dragon is the largest lizard in the current meta, reaching lengths of up to three metres and weighing up to seventy kilograms. Unsurprisingly for such a large predator, its attack power is by far the highest of any extant lizard. Before going further into why this is, I should clear up one misconception. For a long time, many game guides claimed that the Komodo dragon’s kills were actually attributable to support bacteria. The belief was that the dragons didn’t kill prey with their bites directly, but rather their mouths were so dirty that they could hunt large animals by biting them and then following them around until all the infections in the resulting wounds brought them down. This is complete nonsense – Komodo dragons’ mouths are no dirtier than those of any other large predator. There have been a number of recorded instances where water buffalo escaped from Komodo dragons only to later die from infections in the wounds received, but this is not the dragons’ typical strategy, and the infections were typically actually acquired while bathing in dirty water after the fight rather than directly from the bite itself. The dragons’ actual killing method is pretty simple: they use their serrated teeth to lacerate their targets, wait for them to die of blood loss, and then eat them – and contrary to what the aforementioned old guides claimed, when a dragon succeeds in killing a target, it’s generally not a slow process.

A powerful bite isn’t the only advantage Komodo dragons have in a fight. Like the dragon lizards, Komodo dragons and other monitors have given up the [Autotomy] ability, but unlike the dragon lizards, they’ve replaced it with a much better defence. Their tails are big enough that they can be used as whips to stun opponents. They have glands in their jaws that secrete venom as well, although the practical utility of this is a matter of some debate; having the venom doesn’t really make their bites any more lethal than they already were, and might just be a relic inherited from their smaller ancestors. On defence, their skin is reinforced by scales containing tiny bones called osteoderms that function as natural armour. While most lizards and many other reptiles have some form of osteoderms, as do some amphibians and even a few mammals, most of them only have one or two kinds of osteoderms and only in select areas. The Komodo dragon is unusual in having a pattern composed of four different shapes of osteoderm covering nearly their entire body, essentially forming an all-natural chain-mail plating. More unusually, dragons have also invested a large amount of points into defence against pathogens. Like their fellow giant killer reptiles, the crocodile, Komodo dragons have all-natural antibiotics in their blood, and almost never die from infections despite the filthy environments they live in.

Komodo dragons are the uncontested kings of their islands, being apex predators across their entire range. There’s almost nothing on their server that can pose a challenge to them, excepting another, bigger Komodo dragon. This is by far the best lizard build in the game, and easily ranks at the top of the “dragon” tier list.