Forums → Games → GemCraft:Chasing Shadows, Beacon farming information tables.

This is nice, but if you could figure the chances of giant monsters spawning beacons on a given field that would be more useful.
Also, is the formula for giant-spawned beacon xp the same as for enraging?

I think we confirmed monster spawn beacon is the same as anger beacon except in hp calculation. At least ieee found nothing in the code.

I don't know the weighting on giants dropping beacons. But remember the largest influence on xp (wisdom sparks) is totally random anyway...

Also, put link to this thread in the important links sticky, psorek will put in the first post when he's around.

Done. What else should I add?

PS if you want to inform me, just type @psorek and I'll receive an email.

Chance it appears a beacon-spawning wave is the same on all fields, I don't know the number but it's not worth looking for, it's not like it helps you to choose the level.

Beacon exp depends only on the wave that dropped them, not on the method used (anger/droppers).

Last a huge thank you to @psorek for updating the sticky with some fresh new threads, this included.

@psorek . Much thanks to you for including a link to this thread on your sticky, and for all the work you have done otherwise for helping all of us GemCraft players out.

can you elaborate on why the max number of because determines the xp? wondering if this is even viable for leveling over something like just beating endurances for 1t xp

Beacons are worth 2 to 3x as much xp as creeps now (with the trade-off of even more lag). The game had some significant changes a few patches ago, are you caught up on those, I don't think there's a map where creeps total 1T xp now, or at least not well over that.

Something that may make a difference with these beacon droppers is whether lowering the swarmlings trait to increase the number of giant waves would compensate for the lower xp multiplier by giving more beacon droppers. If so, there could be a trait level besides 7 that gives better net xp.

That would be one for 12345ieee, one of our skilled math people, to figure out.

Reducing swarm waves shouldn't increase the number of giants. The waves would turn into reavers, in which case the extra exp is not worth the deceased multiplier.

@hillmer :
To add some more to this the exact formulas are:

Endurance wave composition:
Swarms_fraction = 0.15 + 0.05 * swarms_dom
Giants_fraction = 0.15 + 0.05 * giants_dom
Reaver_fraction = 1 - Giants_fraction - Swarms_fraction

Which means that reducing Swarms trait only gives you more Reavers (it's not worth it, even if Reavers give more exp, already did the math).

@CrystalLuna : Y3 color on the 1st table is wrong

Errata corrige: Well, it seems that actually lowering Swarmling Domination CAN improve the XP, because of the extra exp the Reavers give (giants are unaffected).

This thing depends on a multitude of factors and needs some further research before I can say something certain.

I'm a fairly low-ranking player (barely 1400) who just started playing a few weeks ago. How does beacon farming work? I've always used walls and towers to prevent beacons from messing with my gems (particularly gem resocket beacons) during my endurance runs.

When you destroy a beacon, it gives you a certain amount of experience. The amount of experience you get per beacon scales upwards as the wave number increases, resetting once when endurance starts. Also a few more multipliers for mana pool experience sparks, talisman fragments, and battle traits must be factored in. When you kill beacons by the thousands (an average is 50-120 per wave depending on how many can fit on the battlefield, give or take (see tables)) by summoning them by enraging wave stones with hundreds of G1 gems or by killing beacon spawning monsters, you can get a boatload of experience added on to what you get from killing monsters alone. Depending on the field and how many beacons you summon, you can increase your overall experience by anywhere from 50% to 200% over what it would have been otherwise. This can turn a 100 billion XP run into a 200 billion XP run easily.

Another thing, when you are overrun by monsters at your kill gem's limit. As long as you have a mana farm in good working order and constantly replenishing mana, you can continue to beacon farm even while banishing monsters by the thousands. Simply set your kill gem to Structure, enrage a wave to summon the number of beacons that will fill up the screen, call the wave early, and then let your kill gem destroy the beacons, and repeat for each wave for as long as you can hold out on the increasing lag. Use G1 gems for this, since the HP of the beacons summoned is related to the grade of the gem you use to enrage the wave. The higher the gem grade, the more HP the beacons will have. Keep the beacon HP as low as possible to make them easy to destroy. You can continue on in this manner for perhaps 50-150 more waves this way, or until the lag from dozens of thousands of monsters on screen makes your computer lag too much to be useful, then just end endurance. You can get perhaps another 15-25% or more XP over your running total when you were overrun with monsters from late endurance beacon farming in this manner.

Thanks for the info. I've tried destroying beacons before but my gem winds up either destroying the beacons too quickly (and thus screwing up my mana farm because it wipes out the monsters) or the beacons are so strong I can't destroy them at all. But based on my new research it may seem that gem bombing the waves with anything higher than G1 bombs is no longer needed due to an update that occurred months ago. So I may give that a try to see if I can make to wave 300. Right now I'm just not high enough WL to before my G40s poops out and the monsters overwhelm me.