ForumsGamesGCCS: Thoughts on getting from level 200 through 1000

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yroeht
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yroeht
4 posts
Shepherd

Hey, all! Everything I've read is geared toward newbies or >lvl1000 players. What sort of strats work for mid-level players like me regarding anything from the best traits to the best maps for farming xp, fragments, etc.?

Thanks, all!

  • 43 Replies
psorek
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psorek
447 posts
Jester

Have you seen this subject and this guide? The second guide is quite rough, but contains key information.

thunderrider
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thunderrider
641 posts
Peasant

Rough because I was rushed and also made it in like May or something.

Actually only April 19th or 15 days after release so cut it some slack

psorek
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psorek
447 posts
Jester

Well, you can improve it now (edit option still aviable)

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

Premium or non-premium?

In either case, early field with max banish and giant, a couple beacon. Add the other easier ones at 7 swarm and shadows if prem. Glaring at least, haunting if you have (try for at least a 20x multiplier).

Duh skills a little below max. A bit of slow helps. Hopefully you can make 3 or 4 grade 2s (red + blue + traps to hold them) and grade 6 to start. You have red + white available, otherwise it's going to be really hard Field has a good path length to get to orb, ideally one entrance or choke point that'll take a row of 5 traps with amps all around. If premium it's going to be really easy, mana farm first, kill gem with mana gathered from first waves. If not, you won't make enough mana on the first 3 or so waves before they hit your orb and end you, how much you anger and how you play means we need to know whether prem or not...

Mana gem starts 1:1 red/orange. If prem with 9 or 12 skill, mix in white at gem level 7 (5Or + 5W join with 6W join with mana gem), otherwise 8 (same ration one higher). With a level 6 or 7 mana pool, that'll be better than upgrading without the white, and far better later. With monsters on it, that'll spit out it's own cost every couple seconds as long as you keep feeding monsters to it. Red/Yellow kill gem, built the same as mana gem suffices for me. You can use the 64 gem combo stuff if you want, it doesn't pay off until way higher gem grades than you'll get to following my advice--grade 30 by level 40 or so.

Prem it'll take one map Non-prem a few. In either case, there's random elements that'll heavily affect the outcome: xp sparks (use most of your mana to make 36 gems as high grade as you can for these) and beacon summoning monsters (with multipliers, one of these angered to 1k monsters is 20 mill xp or way more depending on talismans and sparks).

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

Got another chance with premium, and threw my level 120 save in there then grabbed pool. With 20 worth or hardeners, I got a billion on F1, that's halfway to level 1k

No fancy gem building besides ratios above, just upgrade or dupe/combine. 2 sparks, only one at a useful time and only one good beacon spawning wave too, not sure how many billions a full run could be worth or with better xp luck. Called it quits at level 35 kill/farm gems with 33 in amps, they were ok up to 10^18 hp, and creeps hit that at wave 225ish. Took a little longer than an hour to do, sometimes with indifferent attention.

Forgot to mention above you can add white later to your slow traps. A couple mana pool levels and they'll do 7 second 90% slow, so the problem becomes angering enough to keep the creeps alive on your mana farm long enough to be useful.

For white gem madness, do something like below, just towers wherever to pick off the first few leakers plus some slow traps along the way. For black you want to leave a little space in front for places to farm hits on gems to abuse that (and it's much more abuseable than white).

It's not this easy if non-premium. I can easily get millions on lots of fields with red + white, but not sure how crazy it can get there yet.

http://i.imgur.com/ux8xz4r.jpg

thunderrider
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thunderrider
641 posts
Peasant

White lol....ah the good ole newbie days!

Edit: Psorek after 30min after posting for me atleast, the edit button vanishes...

All I can do is "Report" it.

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

You need to remember things are different now than when you guys started. You can't just put a w/b/o in a tower, amp w/b, call 5 waves, beam, upgrade several times then repeat til the stage ends or a trillion xp wraith wafts by

At 18 skill b and 3 skill w, and 1kk hits on a black gem, white's still the better option grade for grade up to 30ish and only mana pool level 27. It'd be nice to know at what skill level black surpasses white now (you said it does for you grade for grade with no hits iirc), but I don't think it's a viable option at the OP's level in 1.19.

bilboCGL
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bilboCGL
323 posts
Peasant

Black overpowers white somewhere between g30 or g40. I use white for core-farming and black for everything else I expect a gem > g40.

Astroshak
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Astroshak
268 posts
Peasant

I did a test a few patches a while back.

I set up 8 amps supporting two traps, one with a red-black-orange and the other, right behind it, red-white-orange. The 8 amps were arranged such that each trap had 6 pure orange amps supporting it.

Other than the color change (black or white) the gems were made identically. I was using the 16 gem upgrade plan on them.

At grade 28, the White gem was a little better (10 percent? 12 percent? I forget exactly). I had the mana and did two of the 16 gem upgrades on both traps, and the Black gem, at grade 34, was 42% stronger.

White loses its potency compared to black around Grade 30.

Erile
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Erile
488 posts
Chancellor

UgAhgItHurts

To answer your question, all the guides and related links on the site are for premium (magician's pouch) players. There has yet to be any helpful advice or guides for players who do not have the pouch or are otherwise are not able to get the pouch.

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

I glanced at the threads you bumped from April/May. Perhaps for those guides, but they missed a lot of the obvious. (In those days you just needed or+black+beam tower then amp or+black for billions of xp, of course that was patched out, but they had white or black amps for ages too and that was even more insane that what's left.)

Fusion + white or black (less effective non-premium, eventually way better prem) in gem is enough of a boost to get red into too many chains territory fast, but having red available on all fields is really nice.

The gem types, a bit of starting mana (level 100 is fine to get a mana farm to go critical) and non-ridiculous skill selection is all you need. The first compass reward which you can get non-premium is an ok field, there's a handful of others that have red + white and a non-horrible layout (few entrances, room for amps, orb not right next to same--I think some of them are the complete on glaring map rewards). It's not premium anger a wave to 10^24 armor and perma-freeze on a trap for stupid mana, but it'll build nicely, it just needs a decent number of waves for you to get your feet under you before you can get most of your xp (a couple billion on those certain few friendly fields).

So you can do two things to make sure that you're right. Tell us how you did on the vision fields (the red+or one you should easily be able to get 10k xp on if not 100k), and provide your save game so we can see exactly what you have to work with and can say do this field with this.

Erile
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Erile
488 posts
Chancellor

Hey, I only bumped one from April/May, and that's only because I spent months researching this :P (after asking around on the forums for months and not getting any answers )

Even combining red with black or white in available fields non-premium, at my level you never see a chain hit more than 2 or 3 (assuming you survive after wasting tons of mana on making extremely weak gems with low chain hit values).

By the way, compass is never available to non-premium. As it is currently explained in the guide, you have to be able to access all the compass fields to get the rewards from any of them. (Not that it matters as I cannot do the compass fields because my computer/connection is too fast - I don't have a loading screen for fields, therefore I cannot set the gem levels).

Regarding the vision fields, I passed all three of them easily the first time I played them. (non-premium only gets V1, V2, V4)

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

Non-premium, this is level 250, my other slot is still too low, I restarted to get a shot at the first compass level. I need glaring to do anything interesting there at least.

Skills at 24 max, those being colors, mana and traps. Some crit and slow, 9 or 12 I think. 4k starting mana (I should free up some skills). Y5 because no cheesy white or black (non-premium, forget black probably, but white will amaze), we have to make our own cheese here. Glaring, 151 levels without hardeners (beacon freebie because indoors, giants because more giants makes everything gemcraft easier instead of harder like they seem to think and so on...) Also no gem weaving stuff, you need skill points so the 7% increase in specials is multiplied a few times and even then, it's not worth a gem grade until the 30s.

Slow traps start next to traps at level 3 (1 red 3 blue then upgrade). 50% for 2 sec, I'll take it. Level 7 is 80% for 6 sec, it gets better with white like everything.

Mana trap 1 red to 3 mana. Kill gems 1 part red to 7 parts yellow. You need monsters on your traps, and multiple at a time to make red do something (1.15 or somewhere changed from how GCL had it, traps don't self-chain). Another difference from GCL is angering: don't count on anything above level 1 paying out in mana. Hope things are obvious, I did this at 9x speed and wasn't trying to wring every scrap out I could, not getting close to the billion xp I have on this map in 15 minutes, this is just show that it's possible.

So the slide show, and it's not like premium where you start with multiple grade 10s lol:
http://i.imgur.com/c5YcxmV.jpg
Already paid for itself:
http://i.imgur.com/OVfOP6l.jpg
It's not premium + white or black stupid, but it's getting stupid:
http://i.imgur.com/vOY5B7y.jpg

Hope that helps.

thunderrider
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thunderrider
641 posts
Peasant

NICE job there!

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

It's level 250, you can abuse that field a whole lot more than that, and fields with red + white way more still. But the problem is I started level 250, which might be a lot higher than him.

It's a lot harder to help in this game v. GCL, since there you just set the skill points and played the same game. You do that here, you'll be asking why he doesn't have grade 14 gems by wave 5 since wizard level changes the game in a lot of ways (and I noticed I used a lot of those words interchangeably above and shouldn't have, I suck at writing how-to). That's why I always ask for the save file

I'm close to glaring on my level 40 game, but barrage is really nice to have too. So get those, and I'll see what kind of crazy I can do with that (and remember to back up that save since after everything will be stupid easy) and hopefully that'll be illustrative enough of how to mana farm your way to stupid and pointless.

I really didn't go into angering. Anger as much as you can handle with mana you don't mind throwing away (a couple % of your total mana per wave, 6 to 12 bombs so pick your gem grade with that info--and double or triple that for giants because that's where the xp is). You need a steady stream of critters on your farm, otherwise it just sits there looking pretty and doing nothing for you. As I said before, don't depend on gem angering alone paying off the mana spent on it, it's not as simple as grade x = y more monsters here.

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