First things first, the tower is definitely not P2W anymore, the level skipping has taken that out the equation.
But.
At the very top levels of the tower you hit a wall. A wall that can only be bypassed by a very specific set of monsters. I feel like this in itself is a sort of very teeny tiny paywall blocking people off from the top spot.
I’m not suggesting nerfing the combos used in the tower, but I think the nature of having extremely buffed teams makes it difficult to avoid only a few teams working.
So my suggestion is to instead use MORE MONSTERS. There is no limit to how many you can go against in a team, so I feel like we should utilise this. At high levels you have the same team compositions but repeated, twice, three times, even four.
I honestly think it might make the high floors a little more skill based rather than if you have these monsters you can do it, otherwise nope.