Forums → Games → Chasing Shadows for mere mortals

here's the thing: only people who REALLY like this game are going to bother writing guides. People who REALLY like this game are naturally going to be very high level, and have probably been high level for some time. So you're not going to find a lot of people discussing the first 100 levels or so.

Thanks, psorek! I'll give that a try. I very much want to like this game as much as I like its predecessors.

There is manafarming for on premium even at low levels. Get orange mastery from B5, max it. Add some points into beam. In a battle make a G3-5 gem in a tower set random. One beam enhance will pay it back.

Am starting a nonpremium savefile, will let you know how it goes!

anger them by g1 to armor at least equal your killing gem min damage

I can beat the game in 2 days with no grinding and not going into the endurance. If you don't want to grind, just instead of calling waves early anger them by g1 to armor at least equal your killing gem min damage - it gives you giant ammount of addidtional XP and mana, where this last one allows you to upgrade your gems and anger even more.

Not to mention GC0....I lost only 3-6 battles after not playing it for 3 years by doing that....(I'm Takiza the newbie GC0 master on Kong lel remember me Fractal?)

Here's my very rough attempt at an early-game guide.

First off, I'm not going to be of any help to you if you don't have premium, because I have ZERO experience in that environment. As soon as the option became available, I bought it.

Secondly, strategy. I wouldn't attempt an endurance manafarm until you're at least level 80 (I didn't do mine until well into the 200s but that was due more to not knowing what to do than anything else), so until then you're going to need a different strategy.

Granted, I was playing on version 1.0.0 when doing this, but I cleared about half the game on no-traits Looming just by making 3 or 4 pure red gems along one path and using buildings to force the monsters down that path. PLEASE DON'T DO THAT. AT LEAST combine a slow or mana leech or crit or SOMETHING to the red. You won't always be able to bind your gems until very late in the game, so worry about making smart decisions with your gem combination instead of focusing on "gotta add black to everything because black component is best component, wait black isn't available on this map, wat do".

You can literally add chain hit to basically anything and it'll suddenly be a better gem. I'd stay away from healing suppression and poison unless you think you know what you're doing. Armor shred and slow can be fun in traps. Mana leech isn't very good in general, but you can't mana farm without it, so it at least has that. Crit is amazing in traps, most of the pros swear by it, but until you're working with high grade gems, you'll want to leave it in a tower.

Once you unlock poolbound, you can try out one of my former favorites: the patriot gem. Red, white, and blue. VERY good low-grade gem because poolbound > bloodbound at lower levels, it's got chain hit in it, and the slow gets maxed fairly quickly. The problem is that its usefulness falls off HARD after a certain point, so you'll want to start using it immediately after unlocking poolbound, then ditch it for something else once it stops working.

You will not be able to get amplifiers for a good portion of the game. Until then, here's your plan: make multiple gems in multiple towers (no more than 3-4 or you won't be able to keep them all upgraded) and keep your gem towers close to each other. Use walls and towers to block off all potential paths that the monsters could use to reach your orb without going near your towers and to keep them in range of your towers as long as possible.

Once that's set up, pause the game if it isn't already paused and hover your cursor over your towers to see how their ranges overlap. Is there any individual spot where ALL of your towers' ranges reach? If so, that's a killzone. Stick a chain/slow trap there and upgrade it until you notice it helping, then stop. Slow maxes at 90%, but you won't want to get it that high early on, nor will you have the mana to get it that high.Somewhere between 40-50% should suffice for now. If you've unlocked the "barrage" spell (which I think actually comes AFTER amplifiers, but I'll mention it anyway), your slow trap will LOVE it. Focus your tower gems on damage and armor shred (you usually only need one tower with armor shred), with the gem at the very back being your strongest (probably RY plus whatever binding you have available, THIS SHOULD ALWAYS BE YOUR HIGHEST GRADE GEM). Everything should be set to "nearest to orb" unless you're leaking (monsters are reaching your orb and getting banished) a lot, in which case you switch your armor shred gem to "highest armor" and your power gem to "least hit points", because at that point your biggest concern is to kill what you can (to make sure you still have an income despite having to banish so much) and weaken what you can't (so you can kill it eventually).

Sidenote: I've lost track of how many failed runs were won with this strategy. Once I cleared out all the mana-burn reavers and sprinting swarmlings that had been banished 8 or 10 times already, I had about 100 mana left and nothing on the map besides a few batches of slow giants that had been banished MAYBE once. Once you've reached that point, the map's won. Spam your spells, spam your enchants, maybe add a couple low-grade mana leech gems in traps if you think it's worth it. By the time they need to be banished, you'll have regenerated enough mana that you can afford to do so, or you'll have already killed them.

If there is no killzone with your setup (there won't always be one; every map is different), you'll need to either dedicate a tower to slowing, make multiple slow traps, or give up on slowing entirely. My recommendation is to dedicate one tower to slowing (that patriot gem I mentioned earlier is great for this) and put that in the middle of what's probably an extended path-hugging chain of towers. Set it to "random" priority so it slows as many monsters as possible. Your back tower is still the strongest, front tower is armor shred, everything else is whatever. If you're leaking, change your priorities as explained above.

My current plan, which I picked up around level 70 when I was stuck on X2 (VERY close to the end of the game), and which you can imitate once you have amplifiers and ROY components unlocked, is to open with a ROYBlood gem (Blood can be replaced with Pool if you have Pool but not Blood, or ignored entirely if you have neither) of at least grade 5 amplified by at least four grade-3 YBlood gems. If some of the amps are directly adjacent to your orb (providing the banishment cost reduction), even better. What you'll want to end up with is a 3x3 block of amplifiers with a tower in the middle. THIS WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE ON EVERY MAP.

Miscellaneous Tip #1: USE MORE WALLS. I already mentioned this, but I'm saying it again because it's VERY IMPORTANT. The more time monsters spend in firing range of your gems, the better. The more distance between the monster spawn and your orb, the better. When you're in a situation where monsters are leaking left and right but you're not dying immediately, that extra 6-7 tiles of travel time WILL save your butt.

Misc. Tip #2: SAVE YOUR SKILL POINTS. Instead of trying to max everything and having no starting mana, sit on most of your skill points until you're a higher level. My personal strategy was to max Mana Stream, Gem Creation/Combination cost, and True Colors, set Chain Hit component to ~10 or so, and leave everything else unleveled. At some point I went achievement hunting and used the extra points earned from that to bump building cost up to 10 or so.

Misc. Tip #3: When leveling your skills, FOCUS ON MULTIPLES OF 3. If you pay attention when putting points into your skills one level at a time, you'll notice that every skill does two different things. One of these traits increases at every level. The other only increases every third level (so at 3, 6, 9, etc.). To make the most of your skill points, level your chosen skills to the highest multiple of 3 that they can reach, and NO FURTHER.

Misc. Tip #4: OPEN EVERY TOME CHAMBER ASAP. Again, I was playing on 1.0.0 for most of this, but I was able to open every tome chamber in the game on my first successful run of the level by playing on Looming with no traits and no angering (I had to start over on several of them, multiple times on some, but I did pull it off in the end). To do that, you need to make opening the chamber your #1 priority. When you reach a tome chamber map, the first thing you need to do is check the opening requirements and range by hovering your cursor over the chamber. See the range? Build your defense around getting the monsters in there and killing them before they get out. Slow traps are your friends. Angering waves is your friend (I didn't anger at all, but I was aiming for bragging rights more than anything else~). When you get farther into the game and the requirements start getting ridiculous like 273 cursed and frozen swarmlings while doing a triple flip and meowing, you may need to resort to... unorthodox strategies in order to make it happen.

Example: There's one tome chamber that was something like 55 frozen giants or something on this one cave map. About halfway through the map, I was really far behind on opening it because my gem kept killing everything way before it got in range. I noticed a huge block of giants waves coming up, so once I had cleared out all the monsters ahead of it, I took my gem out of the tower, called all the giants waves, then waited for them to go around my little wall setup and get armor shredded by the other tower, which was several grades lower than my main gem so it wasn't going to kill them. Once they were all in range, I paused the game, used both my freeze spells to get the entire block of giants frozen, put my main gem back in its tower, added a bolt enchantment so it didn't need to resocket, then unpaused and suddenly the tome chamber opened. Frozen corpse explosion chains are a beautiful thing...

Misc. Tip #5: DON'T BE AFRAID TO START OVER. If you reach wave 3 and immediately see three shadows, a specter, a spire, and the Forgotten freezing your screen, just open the menu and hit the restart button. Quicker and easier than trying to figure that mess out. It's tedious to have to go through your pre-map setup over and over, but it's better than struggling against the RNG's bull**** and losing in the end. And there is a light at the end of the tunnel; once you're level 1500+ and farming up unnecessarily large amounts of mana with each wave, you can respond to the bull**** by waiting for the screenlock to wear off then making a RYBlack gem with all your mana then putting it in a tower somewhere and watching it kill three shadows and a specter in about 0.01 seconds. Bonus points if you then build a tower under the spire, move it over there, then give it a beam enchantment

Misc. Tip #6: KNOW HOW TO COUNTER TRAITS. This is a section I think everyone should read. Even though a lot of this is incredibly obvious, I don't think anyone's gone and made a comprehensive list of the different ways you can make traits not matter. This is rather important, because if you can pull it off, then using the traits becomes little more than free XP. And it's not even that hard.

Adaptive Carapace: Kill the monsters in one attack. Importance? Medium-Low; the damage reduction isn't that big of a deal unless you're using a high trait level.

Mana Lock: No counter. All this does is make mana management more difficult. From what I've read, if the pros leave any trait at level 0, it's this one.

Corrupted Banishment: Do not let monsters reach your orb. Importance: REALLY HIGH! Optimal play in GC2 is not letting monsters leak in the first place. In Chapter 0 you wanted as much leaking as possible because that meant the monsters would go through your way-more-powerful-than-the-banishment-cost mana farm again. That's not the case here, with scaling banishment costs and orblets and especially this trait. If you start getting leaks with this trait maxed, you can kiss your run goodbye.

Haste: Kill monsters quickly. Importance: Very Low. In fact, you might not even want to counter this trait later on, because more monsters means more monsters stuck on your mana farm, which means more mana.

Beacon Storm: Build walls/towers all over the map such that no 2x2 block of non-path land remains open. Importance: Medium-High. Beacons can be a pretty good source of XP in some cases... and then you get into pro runs where we're angering with 30 or 40 gems per wave (resulting in summoning beacons) and the last thing we want is displacement beacons with 80 bajillion health popping up next to all our stuff. It's worth mentioning that countering this trait also prevents mana shards and shrines from spawning; you might want to use your demolitions wisely in this case.

Giant Domination: Use stronger gems. Importance: Medium. This one's just a straight stat buff to giants. Not much else to say.

Swarmling Domination: Don't rely on spells to kill swarmlings. Importance: Nonexistent. If you have chain hit in your gem then these will die regardless of what spells you do or don't use on them.

Orblets: Do not let monsters reach your orb. Importance: REALLY HIGH! The difference between this and the banishment one is that this one gives you a benefit (higher mana income). If all your orblets get stolen, you should probably start over because otherwise you're going to die a slow painful death from having almost zero mana income.

Chasing Shadows: This is an interesting one, because there's always the possibility that it might not do anything at all besides add seven waves to pre-endurance. Anything that counters shadows to begin with (armor shred towers near the orb for low levels, an amplified RYBlack gem in a tower that can kill it in one attack for high levels) works for countering this trait.

Misc. Tip #7: KNOW HOW TO COUNTER RANDOM EVENTS.

Apparitions: Ignore them unless it's safe to kill them. You can try to be ballsy with these if you want; I usually do try to kill them even if it might get me killed, but if you're only concerned about making them not matter, then just ignore them.

Specters: If you can't just kill them outright, give them a decoy gem to swipe. Wait until they're right next to the gem they're about to steal, then pause the game, remove all your gems, put a grade 1 decoy in the tower, unpause, then once it's swiped the gem, put everything back, using enchantments to skip the resocketing time if possible. Be liberal with your freeze usage here, and remember that just killing it in the first place is the best option.

Shadows: This is one case where the low-level strategy is very different from high levels. High levels can just one-shot these with their killgem and move on, no problem. Low levels, on the other hand, need something a bit different. What I always did was I'd build 3-4 towers adjacent to my orb and fill them all with grade 4 armor shred gems. I'd then ignore the shadow until it went after my orb in order to burn my mana (it takes a very distinct shape and starts "slithering" toward your orb when it's going to do this), and when it was in tower range, I'd pause the game, freeze the shadow, and put both my beam enchants on my armor shred gems. Then I'd unpause and laugh as the thing's armor just melts. After that it's just a matter of using freeze to keep it in range of your towers long enough for them to get rid of it.

Spires: These can be a bit weird. If you're really early in the level and one shows up, you can make a good slow gem (no chain hit this time; it's only shooting the spire) and stick it in a tower near the spire, switch it to "spires" priority, then ignore it. Or add a beam enchant and watch the fireworks. Your call. Either way the slow gem will take care of it without much additional thought on your part, after which you just X the gem for a nice refund. Later on, however, you'll need to start dedicating some of your killgem's firepower to dealing with them, which may or may not be a problem. Lots of variables here, so I'm going to leave it at this and let you play these by ear.

Forgotten angering: Don't anger waves. One level of anger isn't going to get you killed (if it does, you were probably going to die three or four waves later regardless). This is actually more problematic for pros than it is for noobs; pros will be trying to get as precise a level of anger as possible, and if the Forgotten shows up and bumps it up another level then it could potentially end the run then and there.

Forgotten freezing: You can't counter this one. I've already said my peace in regards to this from a development standpoint in other places, so I'll leave that out here. The best you can do is hope that it doesn't happen at a crucial moment.

Misc. Tip #8: KNOW HOW TO LEVEL GRIND

This is the last one. If everything discussed above does not help you, then you might need to grind a bit. There are two ways to do this. One is to set up a mana farm and go off on a huge endurance run and shoot up 500 levels in one go. This can take several hours and several attempts and may not be what you're looking for, so I'll give you my pre-farm method too.

Go to hex F, any field. Set the difficulty to Glaring, max all the traits you have available, then just play the level normally. Give it a few attempts, try different strategies. If you absolutely can't do it then drop the mana lock trait and try again. If that still doesn't help, drop the difficulty to Looming. If you're STILL stuck, then pick a different field and go from the top. I know that F3 in particular seems to have stronger monsters than the other F fields for some reason, even though that's not what you'd expect when looking at the starting health...

If you're still early in the game, winning even one map like this should bump you up 10 levels or so, making it easier to do the same thing on the next one... and then the next one... and before you know it you've replayed all of hex F on the hardest settings you can handle and in doing so you doubled your wizard level. You can keep doing this with other maps as well (just be warned that I1 seems to have the same difficulty problem that F3 does) until you're ready to either do a mana farm or go beat new levels.

That's about all I got for now. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

A Guide on Non Premium Advancing.

I'm playing non premium now, and will give tips and hints as I go along.

Rule number one: Don't underestimate traps. I always end up with 2-4 grade 4-6 poison traps enhanced with bolt, that one hit almost all swarm monsters and slice most reavers to half or less hp. This lets your bolted towers focus mostly on giants(flick targeting if need be, I do it often and have yet to encounter much difficulty)

My stats-

Wizard Level: 26
Fields Explored: 24
Skillpoints: 270
Unlocked skills: True Colors, Bolt, Mana Leech, Poison, Traps, and the 3 initial ones.

Skills distributed - 6 true colors, 0 bolt, 0 leech, 6 poison, 6 traps, 6 in fusion and mana stream.

Starting mana from skillpoints: 1,155

Hextiles Unlocked - A, B, E, F, H, I, M.

My strategy for most maps-

Without Chain Hit-

Create a poison grade 1, and a grade 1 of another color, whichever is available and the best.

Add grade 2 poison to the dual G2.

Add grade 3 poison to the dual G3.

And so on....dual gem bonus damage, extra poison damage.

That's the tower.

ASAP I create a trap at the place all monsters go through, make a grade 2 poison, set swarmling, and bolt it as soon as I can.

Duplicate once or twice, place 1-2 traps near it, add them, bolt them when you are able to. Prioritize upgrading tower but keep traps close behind...Eg, all 3 traps should not be more than 1 grade lower than tower at all times.

If monsters die with ease - Anger 1x grade 1 gembomb for next 3 waves. Still easy, continue. Generally, I don't bother, I haven't found much need to level up yet.

With Chain hit-

Dual equal poison chain, + pure poison traps. Easier than non chain maps, ofc.

ArchlordPie, thunderrider,
Thank you for taking the time and trouble to write those excellent beginner-oriented guides. My enjoyment of the game, as well as my scores, improved noticeably as a result of your thoughtful efforts.

what can i say.

wizzard level 81
skills used bolt 8, beam 7,fusion 10, mana stream 10, freeze 5
starting mana 4.294
talismans:
+45% damage to swarmlings
+ 6% damage to reavers
+ 32% damage to giants
+ 18% xp gained
+ 322 initial mana
+ 24% tower bem damage
+ 10% tower bolt damage
+ 16% tower barrage damage (already not available ...)
+ 8% freeze duration
+ 34% maximum freeze charge
+ 34% maximum curse charge
+ 69% maximum bolt charge
+ 35% maximum beam charge
+ 19% mana for starting waves early
+ 15% faster orblet rollback
+ 76% mana shard harvesting speed

and i still can't beat P2,P5, R1
and can't open chambers D5, K6, N4, Q5 and P3

some of the fields i opened at least 20 wizzard levels earlier and
still i can't beat them .....

normally i should be "overpowered" for the mentioned fields, but it still
doesn't work. maybe i need the red gems on some fields (but without the pouch that's not possible).

and regarding the pouch: clicking on the "Get" button doesn't work ....
if it would work, is it possible to purchase with paysafe ?

thanks for some tips which i maybe can understand. sometimes i think:
"What are they talking about ?"

excuse my ignorance: how do you anger waves and how does this effect
the outcome ? (XP !!!)

the fields i have discovered so far, most of them i have replayed with
xp values 3x-10x but now it's getting harder and harder to reach a higher
wizzard level (which at least improves the attack power of your gems, doesn't it ?)

and another stupid question:

what are orblets ?

i thought the mana orb (which you have to defend all the time) is the one ?

orblets - premium battle trait. Gives bonus mana gain until stolen(3-9 of them), then if carried out by monsters you get large penalty.

angering- drop gem bomb on wave. Shift+B to drop gems from inventory one by one. B+Shift to use topmost gem as prototype bomber and uses mana value of gem to anger.

thanks for the input. level 82 now and i still don't know if i should
try the open fields once more, too much frustration when you are killed
after 50+ waves .....

btw: the navigation on the hex map is ****.

Mouse scroll to zoom out. Helps.

To level, replay battles in F1 all traits you have but mana lock maxed, glaring, and enrage. Loads.