Forums → Games → GC:CS End game tactics after v1.1
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Hi everyone,
I'd like to collect here some opinions of more experienced players than me on how to tackle some of the changes of v1.1, as the master source of endgame knowledge (psorek's guide) is now slightly obsolete.
Then we can link the two topics together and have an updated end game guide.
EDIT 29/12/14: scattered all over the topic there are a lot of useful info, I may recollect them all in the future.
DISCLAIMER: I'm an high level MP player, what I write here is from my perspective, may not apply so well to low level/not MP.
1) Hatred, is it worth it?
My observations would say not, but I'm still not sure, I seem to get ~20% less exp from lv 7 hatred than without it, but maybe there is a better balance in between, on the other hand it makes the round shorter, so I could actually do more if I was continually grinding exp.
Of course without MP I guess it's a blessing, because it shortens the number of waves you have to play to reach unkillable monsters and lets non-MP players achieve similar exp levels as MP players.
2) Enraging, theory and practice
Now that exp bonus from enraging is a one time factor (one g1 and thousands of g100 give the same result) it makes no sense enraging to killgem's kill power (displayed_crit*displayed_damage).
What I'm doing now is enraging with tons of g2 to make the armor grow during my mana gathering phase (I use over 500 g2 at the later waves) and killing them all with a throwaway killgem with bolt.
Then I start the exp gathering phase and just bomb them up to 999 monsters using as little bombs as possible to keep their HP low: I seem to recall throwing 9 g62 and 8 g68 per wave are two sweet spots, going for 7 bombs was too costly.
Do someone has a better tactic?
3) Goodbye sharding (and permafreezing)
Peter fixed the two bigger exploits we had to get to astronomical mana values
I found (some confirmation would be great) that if you bomb a shard and don't make it spawn you still get the 5% bonus mana, but it's waaay too low to make sharding a viable mana gathering method.
I don't think there is anything we can do about this, other than discover another exploit.
4) Farming high level talisman fragments
Luckily I had already did this time ago, but hatred has made a full traits speed run of Y6 much more difficult, to the point that U upgrading barely gets me to the end, but I cannot get the 3 endurance fragments.
I've always used a method similar to this, are there better ones?
5) Gem recipes
The only gem changed from 1.0.x to 1.1 were slowing and suppressing, both were improved, so the previous recipes for killgems and managems are still valid.
We (psorek and I) actually built better ones than the ones on the guide, but the lack of easy and understandable diagrams for them precludes their use to anyone who isn't willing/don't have time to parse unfriendly parenthetical/tree formulas.
Is there someone that could help with this?
Recipes can be found there: gemforce results
6) Uncapped skill balancing
Component skills, true colors and resonance were uncapped, great news, but finding a balance between them can be quite tricky.
I may do the math one of these days but at moment, does someone have a thumb rule that gives good results?
EDIT: as usual, thanks to AG forum for messing with all my formatting.
Yay for walls of text
12345ieee
EDIT: I forgot to mention the #gemcraft IRC channel, where a lot of top players reside stably (access from https://kiwiirc.com/client if you don't have a favourite irc program).
- 108 Replies
lag is ok for me. it was a lot worse in previous versions. i get aprox 2 little wavestone tick per second but no freeze. i dont really know how exp for beacons is calculated but in midgame a wave of beacon droppers give around 1000M exp (after multiplier).
Ill make screens in my next run, i just screwed 6h at wave 220 pre-edurance by misclicking "b" and shift instead of shift and "b" :-(
wow that feel when you have the game open so long that another version is released LOL
so from what i have tested is that having true colors and bloodbound at the same level is the best while having your others(crit,mana,ect) like 20 levels or even up to half your TC and BB level is WAY better in terms of damage and specials(getting a good balance for your mana farm and damage output)
keep true colors at 3,6,9,12,15,ect...and get BB to the same level then crit mana. i found resonance to be not so worth it after the first 50 points invested into it.
i also don't see the point in not spending all your skills points( once you get to a high WL im at 7200ish) one tick from the first wave can get you like 1000k mana lol so why waste the 1000 or so points to get a higher starting pool.....
my levels are TC=165,BB=165,CRIT=123,ML=123,all the other things that should be 45 are 45. also all my skills have the +15 from tailsman ofc
i dont bother with poolbound because its junk and dont get chain its a waste of even one skill point resonance is at 49.
also i really recommend that you start super gemming or weaving or whatever you want to call it, if your not already it can take you get you to higher waves which equals more xp
i hit 5.5e30 mana in the first 5 waves....(and again why even have left over skills points? lol) ofc that depends on what WL you are but its really good
as for the traits i set mine like this
7 0 7
7 3 7
7 7 7
mana lock is free xp but i really hate waiting
hatred looks nice at first but when you really think about what its doing you kind of look at it and say WOW ITS BAD first 3 levels are ok but anything after that is not even worth the extra xp unless ofc you can hit 10^300 damage then max it out.....>>rank 3 3000>> >rank 4 10k>>>rank 5 30k>>>rank 6 100k
rank 7 300k>> rank 8 1m>> > rank 9 3m>> > rank 10 1b
oh and its MORE hit points so you take there hit points *10k (at rank 10) and ADD that to there hp so that guy with 1.5e30 hp is now 1.50015e34
is that 4 e4 extra hp worth it...
for 3.6 mult per level it starts to fall off REALLY fast after the 3rd rank maybe 4th and this is not even counting the hit point increment
i guess my post was to long it cut off some of it urg oh well
i never thought of farming the beacons for extra xp. that thought never hit me wow.....all that xp lost NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
ok sorry for a triple post <.< cant edit after like a few mins URG kind of stupid but oh well heres a pic with some data on it i did a while ago (1.1.1)
http://i.imgur.com/dA1viIO.jpg
D is gems MIN damage damage is D*crit
bb is just there to show the scaling (its in per hit level)
on the right is what my skill points where set to.
bottom right (the numbers with nothing above them eg 100 ect are resonace the resonace skill is not worth putting much into it...ill just say that lol
I find the post-lock thing annoying too.
Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions for increasing XP in endurance (not counting traits and difficulty)? Enraged waves now only get an XP increase once, annoyingly enough.
Roll more wisdom sparks is about it besides surviving longer. Have less lag
I did R4 yesterday for 110B (everything but hatred, about 7 wis sparks over 650 waves). R1 today for 195B (full everything, 14+ sparks, died at wave 500). Did some press u on R4. Took maybe 2 hours on R4, 3 on R1. Since your killing power doesn't increase as fast as creep hp (and heal on death gets brutal), probably better off not touching Hatred at all unless it took the multiplier to 200 (bit less for gem combine macro or if you're bilbo).
The problem with hatred isn't the flat addition. They start at 4M hp late hexes, anger to mid hundredM or so, a starter managem will still kill that after a few hits (I play manalock and spend about 60k angering the first 6 waves). I throw together a grade 9 r/blk/y to kill that no problem, and after mana comes in it's grade 25 and good for a while.
What kills you is the HP increase multiplier over waves, in R1 I was at e53 by wave 500 (and most of your xp is in waves ~400-600, they're worth 100x more than starting let alone your multiplier being higher then). Or hp increase by a factor slightly over 10 every 10 waves or so.
thats true the hp over waves is also alot but the flat increase is what makes the "little over time" ALOT more by like a huge amount 10k on top of 7% is huge over 500 waves...
the hp per wave seems to be around 12% or so...cant seem to get it perfect each wave....but then add 7% on top of it.....on top of a base 10k hp value..
did some tests on c2(no reason just picked it randomly) and without hatred at wave 240 reavers had 4.893e17 hp with hartred maxed they had 3.417e28 hp
thats 69,834,457,388 times there normal hp... thats only 240 waves........
urg numbers
two screenshots before and after a wave of beacon droppers (after beacons stopped spawning):
Hatred is easily worth it without MP (no endurance).
Are all the other traits with it, though? If you use only 7 of them, rather than 8, you're getting about 10-12% less exp. If you can get another 10% waves beaten by dropping one, then those waves will be worth losing the multiplier.
Are there any tricks for getting talisman fragments? I only have +3 to my skill levels.
Tricks? Umm... you can get 3 prior to Endurance, and 3 in Endurance. I'm not sure on the mechanics of that (is it limited to 3 and 3, or is it limited to 3 and 6, enabling you to get 4 or 5 in Endurance if you only got 2 or 1 pre-Endurance?) but the most you can get per stage is 6.
A higher level stage, both having more waves and a higher rarity range, is ideal. It used to be Y6 was the spot to go to for fragments, I don't know what the best spot is now. Probably still Y6, but I'm not sure. Be sure to take six of the +10 Rarity clicks when you start a stage though, to cover all six of them being a better rarity. You want that higher rarity so you have a better shot at that coveted +1 All Skills modifier on your fragment.
Ah, mental note, try the standalone flash player 7k creeps and a dozen traps let alone the beacons would blow most of up.
Non-MP collecting high end talisman (80+ are fine) was tedious, now it's ridiculous. Some other changes in the patch hit non-mp pretty hard as well.
@Astroshak: I don't have MP, so limit 3 for me. Also, field X5 has the highest rarity range. Thanks to 10 levels on hated I can now get maximum 100 before the +10.
Do you know if it's a chance per kill or wave?
(Will do some testing after my current XP run.)
Later waves tend to give higher rarity parts, and you don't have to anger at all for creeps to have parts (just to kill the end ones). X5 has that nasty instant lose thing if you accidentally don't have any creeps on the board during the last 6 waves, but you tend to find parts before the end too.
Would appreciate more in the trenches on non-MP patch, seems like a lot of changes really hurt there most of all.
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