Tesla Coil in Sir, We Have an Orc Problem: Full Breakdown

Last reviewed: 10 September 2026 · Newest game update reflected: 2026.08.18.12.05 (18 August 2026). The tesla coil is the one turret in Sir, We Have an Orc Problem that doesn't need a direction. It fires in a full 360°, chains across 12 targets per shock, and shows up as the go-to answer in nearly every hard-level thread on this game — not as the turret that wins the level, but as the one that catches what everything else missed.

The numbers

Per the player-measured stat sheet by the Steam user Mrlazy, self-dated 31 July 2026 — the same source behind our all turrets page, since Mumpitz Games has not published official turret stats:

Two things stand out against the rest of the roster. The 360° arc means it has no blind side — every other turret in the game has a facing, which is why placement direction matters for a cannon or laser but is close to irrelevant for a tesla coil. And the 12-jump chain means one shock event can hit far more targets in a single tick than its 28 DPS figure alone suggests, provided the orcs are clustered rather than spread thin.

Why it keeps showing up as "the last line"

Look across the level-specific threads on this site and the tesla coil appears in almost every winning setup, always in the same role. On 4.2, a player named Broseidon put one tesla coil behind each of the level's eight chokepoints. On 5.2, Sulphuric_Glue placed tesla coils on the small circular platforms behind both lips specifically to catch stragglers. On 6.1, a player wrote that "lasers/motar/grenades etc thinning out the numbers going into the chokepoints" fed into a tesla-and-gunner backstop. And in the 6.2 damageless challenge covered on our 6.2 damageless page, players report a small, expected trickle of leakers that gets cleaned up with a saved ability rather than a turret — the tesla coil is what's already doing that job for every non-perfect run.

The pattern is consistent enough that it isn't a coincidence: the tesla coil doesn't need to be aimed correctly to be useful, so it's the one turret you can place late, adjust rarely, and still trust to do its job as your build evolves.

The mistake: putting it on the front line

Our all turrets page already flags this directly: "The mistake most people make early is putting the tesla coil on the front line. It has good damage and a fast rate, so it feels like a main gun — but with 12 jumps and no pierce to speak of, it burns its output on the front of a wave instead of on the survivors it is meant to catch."

That's worth restating in its own words because the instinct is understandable. A turret with a fast rate and full-circle aim looks like it should anchor your defence. But its chain count is fixed at 12 regardless of how many orcs are actually in range, and on the front line those 12 jumps are spent on orcs that a cannon or laser would have killed anyway. Set back behind your damage line, the same 12 jumps are spent on the handful of survivors — which is a far better use of a capped resource.

The achievement that names it directly

One of the game's eleven achievements is called Elemental Carnage, and per the global unlock data on our all achievements page, it sits at 18.5% and requires clearing a level using only the flamethrower, tesla coil and cryo beam — no other turret types, no other abilities. The player itsuno, whose guide is cited across several pages on this site, documents this and the other no-ability achievements directly.

That achievement is a useful lens on what the tesla coil actually is: paired with a flamethrower (which per our all turrets page adds a damage amp and a pierce-retention chance to whatever it burns) and the cryo beam ability, the combination covers exactly the three jobs a full defence needs — softening, damage-through-effect, and a chain-based cleanup — with one turret standing in for the entire cleanup role by itself.

Where it's weaker than it looks

Two limits are worth knowing before you plan around it. First, it has no penetration figure listed the way the cannon (31) or gunner (3) do — its damage comes from chaining a shock between targets, not from a projectile cutting through a line, so it behaves differently against a dense single-file column than against a spread cluster. Second, its 28 DPS is mid-table against the cannon's 34.5 and the mortar's 32, so it is not the turret to reach for when the problem is raw volume rather than a leak that needs cleaning up.

Neither of these is documented as a deliberate design tradeoff anywhere we could verify — they're read directly off the stat table, which itself carries the caveat that it's player-measured, not official, and that the 2 August update already changed at least one other turret's behaviour (the laser's sway) without a public changelog. If a future update touches the tesla coil specifically, we have not seen that documented, and this page will be updated when it is.

A simple placement rule

If you take one thing from this page: cannons, lasers, and gunners go where the wave is thickest; the tesla coil goes where the wave has already thinned. That single rule matches every player-reported setup we found across four separate hard levels, and it is the opposite of what the turret's stats make it look like it wants.

What we have not confirmed

The idea that the tesla coil is simply the best turret because of its 360° aim is one of the most common misreadings this site tracks — see the FAQ and myths page for why that read gets it backwards. We do not know how the tesla coil's chain count or shock damage scales across upgrade tiers — none of the threads we read give tier-by-tier numbers, and Mumpitz Games has not published an upgrade-cost table (see our upgrade grind page for what is and isn't known about the tree generally). We also could not confirm whether the confusion effect from its shock does anything beyond a cosmetic stagger, since no source we checked measures it separately from the damage.