Forums → Games → Gemcraft Chasing Shadows Endurance: Is it beatable?

Yeah WoE works well (with all of the fragments), sucks that every 5 banishes sends them back and they gain HP. If I took that top trait, I don't think I'd be able to beat it, due to them gaining MAX hp too. But yeah, it took very long yeah, not quite that long though. Obviously, targeting was lowest HP first.

I got to 71 gem with the 32 then 16 method, and near the end I messed up on trying to do a half combine of the 16 and didn't keep a original copy, so ended up as 73ish

I've started to think Yellow + Black + White, would scale better due to how you need to kill each mob, and deal as much damage as possible, for that even last bit of HP.

Permafreeze manafarming is the only way to beat Endurance, I suspect, after the first couple fields in the first hextile or two on the easiest difficulty. You just won't be able to make a killing gem strong enough after that without permafreezing for your mana.

Cooltang, you would be better off farming hits for your killgem. Sure, White starts off a big boost to it - but for two things. One, in a trap, a Red-Yellow-Black killgem became more powerful than a Red-Yellow-White-Black killgem at grade 30 (see my posts in the thread here : http://armorgames.com/community/thread/12325262/gemcraft-cs-stronger-gems-with-poolblood ). Two, in a run last night I was surprised to see that a killgem (think it was grade 60, might have been 65) had the same "rated damage" (max damage multiplied by the critical multiplier) whether it was in a trap surrounded by 6 amps ,or a tower surrounded by 8 amps. The implication there is that you should forego the white in a killgem after grade 30. Farm hits for it if you want (its a good idea to farm hits with unamplified dupes of your killing gem, dupes that you will use in the next 16 or 64 upgrade) but do not include any white in a gem you are going to be taking up into the high grades.

Strictly speaking, a good solid 60-70% hp reduction from a well-boosted wake/wave of eternity will eventually tear anything down to negligible hp as long as corrupted banishment is off, even without perma freeze...
"...and they gain HP."

Um, are you sure that WoE banishments trigger that boost? *will try and test*

WoE banishment is the same as any other banishment. If the monster would gain HP (from Corrupted Banishment) then it does not matter if it was banished for contacting your Orb, banished for WoE, or banished by random chance on one of those few stages that has something that randomly banishes a monster every so often.

I tested it on f1, with level 5(?) corrupted banishment (enough to make sure that 67% or w/e of hp was not lost to rounding errors), killing everything except the last wave. No monsters were allowed to reach my orb.

WoE was used. monsters were banished.

The banished monsters had the same max hp as the other monsters. WoE does not affect max hp normally.

conclusion:
Corrupted banishment DOES NOT apply to WoE banishments. I would guess that other random banishments do not cause corrupted banishment to be applied, either.

Hmm, that doesn't match what I'd been told, thanks for testing it. Now we know.

Good to know, I just read the description on it, and figured it'd be the WoE banishments too, guess not, nice.

I'm like 3k level and yeah idk game gotten boring now. I did all achievements and etc.

@Astroshak, what I meant about the Yellow, Black & White gem was dealing the most single target damage. Ignore Red all together, since the chain brings nothing to the table, when only select 1 or 2 have low HP in the pack of 10k mob. I also did massive hit farming so it wasn't an issue there, but typically near the end, where they have massive HP, only way to take mobs down is the WoE (maxed + fragments) (more than one shot too), and then let the kill gem finish it off (hopefully)

Chain allows the one shot to damage nearby monsters. That's not exactly insignificant, though you don't necessarily need as much red in your gem later on as you started out with.

If you want to forego the red altogether, starting off with White-Yellow will give you the most striking power. At around Grade 30, though, Black-Yellow gives more striking power.

I'm not really sold on the WoE+max fragments though. At max (taking 70% off of monster HP) 3 casts and you've trimmed it down by about two "e" levels. e75 down to e73, for example. That is a lot of casts, to do work that your towers/traps are supposed to be doing.

During my G100-run I've casted 19k spells - some hundred WoE wouldn't be so much more anymore
But you have to pay much more attention as a fifth of the monsters start to move again...

Forgot to mention earlier, cooltang.

If you want to convert psorek's 32 spec starting gems into pure yellow/black or orange/black, replace the G1 Red with a G1 Orange/Yellow. Just go two color, rather than 3 color.

"I'm not really sold on the WoE+max fragments though. At max (taking 70% off of monster HP) 3 casts and you've trimmed it down by about two "e" levels. e75 down to e73, for example. That is a lot of casts, to do work that your towers/traps are supposed to be doing"

As long as it can tear them down fast enough they don't get a super-high banishment cost, then perma freeze is not strictly necessary...just a half-decent mana farm.

WoE when maxed has a pretty good range. Combined with permafreeze you can hit 10k+ easily.

Now, not only does this reduce high wave's healing ability multiple times, as they're frozen it's easy to reduce their healing to nonexistant. When you do that, so long as your gem deals E3ish lower max damage than the total health after WoE, it'll kill them eventually.

That means w/o WoE, about E44-E46 is the max you can plausibly kill. With WoE maxed out and spammed as often as possible for even just a few mins on 9x, you can kill E48-E52 easily with a G92-100 supered correctly with 64.

I have beated Endurance.
Field F1, difficulty Looming, no traits.
Wizard Level 3307, complete rarity-100 talisman, all needed skills 45+15.

Outcome screen:

Manafarm gem:

Kill gem:

Other screens: http://imgur.com/a/nq7gc

Did not do spec32 or combine16 schemes.
Did do easyer-to-remember schemes:
2+1+1+1+2 for black,
2+1+1+1+1+1+2+4 for orange,
2+1+1+1+1+2+4 for yellow,
2+1+1+1+2+4 for black-yellow,
2+1+1+1+1+2 for black-orange (IIRC).

Permafreeze first 3 waves on manafarm enraged to e+28 armor. Farmed something like e+24 or e+25 mana. Built killgem (grade fifty-something), entered Endurance. Call all waves early. Heated all sparks: shrine, experience, mana. Let beakons, shrines and mana shards appear.

I noticed that mana invested in mana shards doubled. It has something to do with talisman's "mana shard harvesting speed". So I heated mana sparks with all my mana. Manafarm became obsolete.

Did not enrage waves much. It was not-for-xp run.

Did not need to use WoE or shrine of blades on regular monsters. Killgem damage 7e+49 was enough. Used WoE and shrine on apparitions, specters and spires after wave 950.

It is beatable!

p.s. sorry for my English, it is not my first language.

Congratulations!

You're not the first, but you're among the few. I've yet to do that myself.

Still, you only reinforced my point : the first few stages of that F hextile may be doable without permafreeze but to beat Endurance on higher difficulties or stages would require permafreeze. Try that on, say, the A hextile, or the W hextile.

I've just beaten endurance on F1 too. Took say 4 hours play time. Needed a bit of permafreezing at the end when a load of apparitions appeared at once with e55 health....

I did also need the mana shard trick noted above. Without that I would probably have had to spend a couple of days to get enough mana.