Forums → Games → GemCraft CS: Let's talk about nerfs... (Peter, read this)

yes, that's right.

x1,x2 and y1 cleared in the meantime.
hard stuff.

more practically, level 130 is NOT enough to beat redless X-fields

i just was killed in the last wave on X4.
now i need a break, that was so hard.

but i have now my new favorite gem:
o4+r4+b4 and later just "U".

i had more mana than ever, but even with 100.000+ at the end it was not
enough .... very close.

Towards the end I saw monsters that burn close to 95% of your max mana. Doesn't matter how much mana you have if a couple slip by. (Not sure whether this is X4, but it will happen)

Since no one mentioned (as far as I know) this, I thought I'd say this... one little consolation that came out of this v1.0.16 update is that the forgotten no longer engages (locks up user interface) after beating the field X5. I don't know if this change came out of listening to the community outcry or not; it doesn't matter - but Thank you, Peter, for the update.

it was a bug that she engaged after finishing the game.

I agree, especially as a casual player that never read any guide or tried to break the game

everything that was fun was taken out of the game,
you could have rebalanced the curves to not be super op for high lvl players instead of just removing everything from play or super nerfing it,

early leveling is now super horrible, no bloodbound gem amplification etc., afterall there is barely story between the stages, and if the stages are not creative anymore to new players, where is the game aka as the fun left ?

i made it to level 170 and fields x5/x7 *) without traps, amplifiers and manafarms.
i don't know exactly which changes were made but i think most of the leveling
i did after them.

i still think it's a great game and was there any story in previous titles ?

*) that's where it gets really hard.

Gemcraft's usually pretty skimpy on the story. You'll get an intro, maybe a panel or so whenever something interesting happens, and nothing beyond that until the plot twist at the end of the game.

I love the story. Imo just the right amount(tho I'd like more epic battles...with story tidbits that lead you into a cliffhanger that makes you want to quickly get to the next revealing bit) and it's a well crafted, quite believable story of a magical world....

Ofc, forgotten effects help with that.

rangedfighter, agree that early leveling can be both tedious and frustrating. When you combine that with vision fields, wizard towers, tome chambers, and the compass (What the heck am I supposed to do with that?), you get a game that may send newcomers to the Gemcraft series hurrying back to Kingdom Rush or Cursed Treasure. I'm hanging in there, but then I worked my way well past wizard level 1000 in Labyrinth twice - not every gamer is that patient.
It's a great game, a masterpiece of the TD genre, no doubt about it. To me, a bit of re-curving might enable more people to appreciate it.

So I've been out of town for about a month with no real way to play, and I come back to 3 or 4 version updates that seem to have crushed the game. I have some questions.

- I saw it mentioned (guessed) that shrine sparks might not give gem enhancement shrines, and the bunches of games I've played since I got back seem to support that - a whole lot of shrine sparks, not a single gem enhancement shrine. I haven't loaded any maps that had them at map start (can't remember which field/map has GES)... Is this true? No more GES from sparks? Seems to be.

- White was nerfed before I left and now black seems to be nerfed. Unfortunately for me I didn't experiment with trying to quickly add hits to black gems until I got back. (The answer is mega-angered waves and then 1:8 red:black gems in a tower so you fire 70+ times per second with a large chain value - I've built gems with hit numbers of 100,000,000+ by farming this way, but again, kinda pointless now?) So is black better, is white better, or are both better? I've made some pretty interesting rw gems, but don't have the patience for long term experimenting with ratios and colors. =/

- Mana pool: I'm having a really hard time north of pool level 45. In GC0 you didn't want to invest skill points into initial maximum mana pool size because that made upgrading mana pool harder, but there doesn't appear to be a parallel in CS. Maybe it's because I don't speedhack like I used to in Chapter 0, and just play at the normal speed instead of ultra-slow for maximum efficiency. Consequently anything higher than a ~52 - ~ 54 gem is very hard for me to reach, and I can't do much better than ~390ish on endurance. I still get a lot of shadow cores but I feel like I'm doing something wrong, or just haven't realized some key mechanic.

Also for the record I agree with a lot of the complaints and observations about nerfs. I feel like some of them were made to curb the gulf between the dedicated/hardcore/obsessive player type and the casual... but here's the thing: who cares? Casuals are more concerned with just finishing the game and getting achievements/badges/whatever. If they want to truly excel like other players (and I'm not even in the running for that, personally) they need to invest the time and use the stuff that works, just like *anything else in life*.

I feel like a lot of these nerfs are sort of like "V1.017 of Chasing Soccer/Football: Widened goal nets by 100% to make scoring easier for children." ...except you turn on the World Cup and there it is - they have the new wide goal nets too. Casualties of 'balance'.

Red orange black best. Black still > white.

I usually switch over to black when I can make a gem with 5m hits at least, but I've been looking at the specials value and it seemed like some combination of white/black was pretty strong. I guess I just need to do the experimentation.

Black > White

To find out exactly when it > white, look at the amount both increase per level(example: (+0.54 per hit level/pool level))

When black > white, its better. For me, that happens at grade 1. Poolbound: +0.14 per level, Bloodbound, +0.32 per level.