OK, let's look how fast you can get a serious Wizard Level at GemCraft: Chasing Shadows
I assume you have Magicans Pouch - Without you will hardly follow the steps as I use a lot of red and, later, endurance runs...
Start all over at f1, New slot:
Get use to enrage, enrage almost every wave with at least 1 or 2 g1 gems, really soon you can enrage some waves with up to 5 or 6 g1 gems
Look at the Achievements, do whatever seems possible w/o too much effort
Don't spend any skills
Do not spend shadow cores on talisman frags - I did not do so the whole guide - but put the frags in your talisman, and look if you can exchange them with a better one.
Some landmarks:
Finishing f hextile: WL 20, 35 Achievements
Don't spend too many skillpoints, 3 on each is enough, trap is not needed at the moment.
Next e hex - Use haste 1 and orblets 1 - not too expensive but brings more waves and xp - use endurance with not too much effort to get more xp
Landmarks (without e6): WL 46, 69 A
Spend three more skillpoints on relevant skills (manastream/fusion)
Some advices: Look at the achievement and try to get as many as possible...
Newext i hex...
Landmarks i: WL 56, 87 Achievements
Rule of thumb for enraging: first 10 waves: 2 g1, wave 11-20 2 g2, wave 21-30 2 g3 -- vary for swarmlings, they aren't worth "high" gem enraging
Spend three more skillpoints on relevant skills. My personal skillset at this moment:
9 Manastream 9 Fusion 6 Masonry
6 Bolt 6 Chain 3 Poison
Inintial Manabonus: 2492
You can start with a g5 gem, you should never go below (starting mana)
Next h hextile
Do them all, including the vision field
Landmarks after h: WL 75, 103 Achievements
Upgrade Manastream and Fusion to 12, Chain to 9 and freeze to 6, you should still have more than 2200 mana bonus
Still don't spend sc on frags.
Time to go back to e hextile and finish e6 (and e7),
You should always use Adaptive Carapace, giant domination and orblets at 1 as standard traits, not expensive but gives xp
Go to hex b and rush through for mana skill,
landmarks after b: WL 93, A 121
btw: standard killgem: r/o
Move to hex a
Skillset adjustment: Manastream and Fusion up to 18, Masonry 9, Mana leech 6
Landmarks after a: WL 105, A 141
Move to d
Skillset adjustment: Manastream and Fusion up to 21, Mana leech 9, Poison 0, Trap 3, >2100 mana bonus
Start to put a r/o gem in a trap
Standard traits orblets 3, Adaptive Carapace 1, Giant Domination 1, still cheap enough, but gives more xp
Enraging rule of thumb: 3g1 for the first ten waves, 3g2 11-20, then 3g3
Landmarks: WL 120, A 150
Move to m
Skillset adjustment: Fusion up to 24, Beam 6
Do not forget about the power of mana with beam, use beam on your main gem (r/o) as often as possible, use a yellow killgem behind when you can afford a g9/10 or higher - at lower grade, the critical hit is too seldom useful.
Landmarks: WL 141
Move to j (leave out j4)
Skillset adjustment: True Colors 15, Manastream 24
Enraging rule of thumb: 3-4g1 for the first ten waves, 4g2 11-20, then 4g3
Orblets up to 7, AC & Giants 1
Do not forget the vision field
Landmarks: WL 154, Achievements 180
Move to g
Skillset adjustment: TC 21
At G6, you can do a first serios endurance run after freeing the sealed white and yellow gems - mine brought 60.000.000 xp resulting in WL 409, I had a xp multiplier of 2.8, it was not planned
Skillset adjustment: TC, MS, Fusion, Mana leech: 36,
No traits from now on to save sc, no more enraging to save time, still r/o as standard, call all waves asap
Move to k
At k5, you can do another endurance run. Rearrange your skills to TC, MS, F, ML: 36, bolt 0, beam &freeze 6, amp&trap 12
Traits: Orblets 7, Giant & Swarmling: 3, AC: 1 Resulting in a 5.2 multiplier
That run gave me WL 860... (560.000.000 xp) If you do not know how to do manafarming/endurance, I explain later at R1.
However, even if you have way less xp you should rush through the rest of the game...
So a skillset adjustment for rush through: TC, MS, Fusion, Mana leech: 42, Amps & Traps not needed, beam, freeze and chain: 15
Move to l
Heading for the first bound gem, the poolbound
Just stay at the r/o gem, when you don't do something strange you should almost immediately call all waves on every map - I usually enrage the first 6 waves (the visible ones) with 5 g1 gems, as soon as beam is ready, I send them all.
Move to n
New standard gem: 2wor
Move to o
Move to p for barrage
At P2 you could do some funny things: Select glaring, enrage the first 6 waves with 5 g1make your standard gem (2wro), place it in a tower next to the nest. As soon as possible, put a copy of your standard gem in a trap right behind the entrance and enhace it with beam - after wave 4 just call all waves and keep your trap gem updated permanently (pause, press u and 6, unpause)
When you exceed g20 put your gem in a tower to cover the map, select structures and bolt for the drops...
That is something you could do on any map - after finishing p3 you have barrage, use barrage on the trapped gem and enjoy even more mana. OK, p4 is not the best map for that... You really have everything to beat the game - but for WL 1000 and best endurance experience stay tuned.
Move to r
Adjust your skillset: Put the points spent on freeze to barrage - no need to freeze at the moment...
At r1 select glaring and all traits but mana lock!
Enrage the first 6 waves with 10 g1 gems, put your standard gem (remember, 2wro) as a g7 in a tower under the tome chamber, double it asap and put the copy in a trap. Open the tome chamber asap, don't bother to enrage every wave with 20 or more g1 gems
As soon as you have opened the tome chamber clean the screen with tower, build a trap surrounded by 6 amps next to the entrance. Put your standard gem in the trap. From now on it is called "managem". Build another gem, i.e. 1r3y4w - it is called killgem. put it in another trap and enhance it with bolt to ignore any armor. At g16 it should deal something about 160.000.000 damage (160.000 max damage x 1000 crit damage) enrage your waves till this value is their hp... place some slowing gems (2wrblue) in front of mana and killgem. Place a tower to care about any beacons (it should not kill the monsters. Soon you can enrage to billions of hp, ignore the armor due to bolt in trap, put high grade pure mana/crit gems in your amps and enjoy the flow of manafarming... Remember: Upgrade the trap gems when the spell is ready to use (barrage on mana and bolt on killgem)
After g45 upgrading gets slower and you hit a wall with grade 50 or so... That is enough for killing e20 monsters
To avoid some trouble, do not enrage the resocketing giants for now...
After entering endurance mode you might consider to switch to killtower - I had at this point a g53 killgem set to structure, surrounded with g48/g49 amps ready for e23/e24 monsters. Enough to get a bunch of xp! So just enrage every wave till 999 monsters, I use 100 g9 for all and let it flow... - It's done when the monsters exceed e24/e25 hp, then just send all and look if you can get some more shadow cores from flying ones.
In the end that gave me 5bn xp beaming me up to wl 1780
Now I stand with 7k shadow cores and the rest of the game certainly needs no more guide.
Have fun!
