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

For Killgems, sure - but in WoEs it is, depending on helth loss - around 20 to 50 WoEs more
I'm not sure if I will build a killgem like this or even better anymore, 2.8e35 is really a lot of mana to spend...
For the Amp-gems I used 16c by the way, up to grade 79, some just updated with 'u' to g80, just to see the mana work instead of having at "in the bank"
But it is really fun to enrage till e52 or e53, and it is a bit disappointing when you almost don't gain any xp for the real hard waves, the ones that can't be enraged. It is truely just for "I beat endurance"...

E77 doesnt seem that unfeasable with WoE and a killgem thats upgraded continuously rather than getting to about wave 80 the stopping manafarming (manashards gave me the best mana)

Was it you, or was it someone else, who said that manashards gave twice the actual mana spent on them back? Or was that just how I misread the particular statement?

Anyway, the way I see it is manashards can be an incredibly useful supplement to the manafarm, but they do not come along frequently enough to replace it. Even at the higher grades of managem, where it takes many Manalock cycles to obtain enough mana to upgrade the gem once more, you still need to actually farm enough mana to pump into the shard, and that requires the farm. By the time the next shard is likely to roll around, you've already gone and spent every last point of mana you got from the previous shard.

no that wasnt me, however i have noticed that the higher you mana shard harvesting speed due to the talisman the more mana you get from your shard. I have +130% mana shard harvesting speed and can get almost 3x the mana out that i put in. very useful late game, had E30 mana by wave 600 using manashards

Yepp, the manashard-thing is VERY useful, I forgot to mention it in my report.
An IMHO good way to deal with manashards at high numbers is to throw seven of the eight Amp-Gems and all other mana into it, freeze all monsters until the shard is harvested. And then do not reinvest in Kill-gem at once but in Amps and maybe a clone of the killgem... My mana-gem was a 32s, 64c G80, twice updated with 'u' to G82. The rest came from (much to few!) shards.

I guess I'm in the club now, too.
Did F1/looming/no traits full endurance. For pictures, please see this comment.

Special about it is that, as far as I know, I could be the first to have proven that you can beat endurance with normal ('u' upgraded gems of levels G77 for the mana farm and G78 for the kill gem. The worst in this scenario are the healing monsters. It is so frustrating to fight the monsters down from e49 to under e40 (taking an hour or so), and while finally being able to kill them, one of the healing monsters dies and heals hundreds back to full life...

BilboCGL said : "And for bloodbound: My Gem (manacost 2.8e35, don't know what grade it would be ) had more than X14.600 per hitlevel "

That would be a base cost of Grade 113. I don't know what the actual displayed Grade was though. That's not a cost you are going to reach if you start with a 32-spec gem and then only use the 64 gem upgrade on (raises cost-equivalency by 6 grades each use). Its also not a cost you are going to reach if you use the 16 gem upgrade plan on (4 cost-equivalency grades). Though I don't believe you've ever said that you use either of those exclusively on any given map ...

@tulamide: congratulations and welcome! Finally you've had the patience!

Astro: Thanks for doing the maths! In the very end I use to leave the pure doctine of 64c and I look what I can do with the mana and gems, quotiong myself: The Gem, 32s, 64c up to G90, then updated and waved a copy of G91 or G92 in the G95...

[bjust another beaten endurance[/b]
This time I took field J1, and I started three times:
First run: flash crashed after I reached a G85 manafarm gem...
Second run: missing half an hour for the G85, I wanted to hit space for pause and clicked for selecting something on screen... The game lost focus, I scrolled down and clicked on a link.
Third run: This is the run I tell you from!

First of all a warning: Don't try this if you have
- no patience
- not a real high wizard level (3k++)
- no patience
- a bad talisman (you need freeze duration and a little WoE would help)
- no patience
- relevant skills not maxed (maxed means 45+15) or
- no patience

Pic 1: My talisman:


My goal was not only to beat endurance but to gain a lot of XP, this makes things a little more complicated: You have to
- play haunting
- max all traits
- enrage every single wave until to the limit

The map j1 allows all monsters to run through two trap/amp-sections:


You might notice two strange things:
1st: I have my manafarm behind the killgem
That's because I like to select the monsterfriends who will accompany me for ten or more days carefully, I just take giants with no specials to farm, they are slow and can easily be frozen at the farm. To do so, I enrage the monsters to e45hp while my killgem can only handle e25-e30. as soon as the monsters are on the farm, I don't need the mana from random upcoming monsters. For this run I took 4995 friends on the long journey.
2nd: I've introduced the seven-amps-trap
That was possible as soon as the monsters were frozen on the farm and due to the lucky circumstance, that this map gave a second path to the orb.
I had three mana-traps hitting the monsters:
The most monsters were hit by the middle trap where my best managem was placed.
The second most monsters were hit by the lower, the seven-amped-trap, always holding the second best gem.
The top trap was very ineffective, only holding a gem when the other slots were filled.
In the picture above you can see the middle-trap gem, here is the lower trap gem:

When you are familiar with Psoreks (thanks for the math!) 64-combine sheme, you will find that this second gem has the last "4+4+(8+4)" gem part... If you are not familiar with it, read the extreme-end-game-guide of him! All of my gems were build 32s, 64c!
For your fun: During this run I had two times where I had to rebuild my managem from the beginning loosing billions of hits only due to dumbness of myself...
This is the right time to tell you about patience:
Building a G80 gem is done within a day, the G85 takes two more and the G90 (in two parts!) was done after ten days... During that time I tried to keep up with the amps, sometimes that worked fine, in the end it was a little hard... But it is important to have these amps for two reasons:
First: they give you much more mana than unamped gems
Second: You need them later on to throw them all but one on manashards.
Uh - have I told you about freezing? No? I'll tell you...
When you do manafarming there are some people having auto-hot-key or similliar programs to press '1' and click, press '1' and click, press '1' and click... I don't have any and don't want them (now). Instead of that I prefer watching some good old films and press '1' and click, listen to audio-books and press '1' and click or play another no-action game on the mobile and press '1' and click... I really like my laptop, so press '1' and click could be done with one hand...
When freezetime exeeded 100k seconds, I've let my laptop run over night...
After I stopped freezing I gained around 1.000.000.000 raw xp from freeze spell...

OK,a while after building that G90 managem, I got enough mana for a G90 killgem with G86 amps... This run I took some little preparations for the killgem:
1: I had a gem enhancement shrine, I put the same yellow and black g1 gems in it over and over. As I had this idea a little too late in this run, my black g1 had a max damage of 83k and my yellow 120k.... Good gems to combine and to build really powerful amps and killgem from it
2: I took a red g1 to farm hits, IIRC it had 70.000.000 hits when I started building the killgem so this gem had a powerful bloodbound component from the beginning
Combined with the amps I could enrage the first endurance waves to e54hp and kill all monsters immediately Great! And when you enrage with g80 and higher gems, every wave brings a lot of xp

So, during endurance I put all mana I could afford into manashards. All mana includes: all mana-amps as they weren't needed anymore!
All but one killgem-amp. One is left over as I didn't want to rebuild the gem from the beginning every time. Here it needs some tact/sensitivity/intuition (in german: Fingespitzengefühl). It is important to put most mana in amps as you can throw them to the next manashard and on the other hand the killgem has to be upgraded when you have enough mana (AND enough mana left for the next shard!). When the killgem is too weak and the manashard is overloaded, it will take too long to harvest the mana...
When I was good, it took 3 or 4 waves to earn the mana but the last manashard took me around 70 waves to harvest! With a G110 killgem...

But it was useful, the hardest wave I met had 4e74 hp...
At this time the kilgem was G115, surrounded by 3 G116 amps (64c), 3 G114(64c till 111, then 16c) and 2 G113 (64c till 111, then twice updated) and it looked like that:

The proove of beaten endurance:

and, last not least, the outcome


OK, who's next?

WOW much WOW

wow bilbo what i did isnt as imprassiv but i think i get a new time record : ~1,5h

i did looming f1 only orblets maxed. i just used shard farming after i got e22 manapool and upgrated ma gems with "u".

How about with this new version out? the permafreeze is gone so what now?

F1 Looming isn't too bad, you just have to kill e54. So the easier hexes around there are doable, you won't get much xp on them though.

The current biggest gems will take F1 Glaring, maybe. I forget what F1 Haunting gets up to, but think still out of reach. Of course 2 hexes over it's up to e80 at the end

F1 haunting has e67 monsters, so we need at least a grade 127 to barely kill those beasts .

Endurance in F1 looming, no traits, was finished. Obviously, there is no longer any permafrost.

To do this, a grade 71 ybr (psorek's method for 16c upgraded) gem with 8 amplified g68 16c upgraded gems was used to remove the opposition (set to least hp). This gem did e45 max damage, which is 4e23 damage * 3e21 critical damage. This is enough to kill a monster with 1e49 hp in 10000 (good) shots which takes ~10 minutes game time. This time can be shortened with blade shrines and wake of eternity.
The gem cost 1e29 mana, the full amplifier set cost 1e30 mana, taking about 8 hours to farm.

Also, a tower with an obur grade 90 gem (straight upgraded) was set to random. This slowed monsters to 90% of speed constantly and provided enough mana to keep from dying to banishments, but not enough to upgrade anything.

Used a bp grade 89 gem and a grade 89 bc gem (straight upgraded) set to random to remove most armour and hit point regeneration as well.

Until wave 200, had an obr gem 16c upgraded to grade 69 with 6 grade 68 pure orange 16c upgraded amplifier gems, and three more obr gem traps near that mess.
each gem gained ~1e22 mana per hit, paying off the next upgrade painfully slowly, as these gems cost ~1e29 or 1 million times as much.

Made third wave, before endurance, have e42 hp. This got me to grade 55 16c upgraded gems before endurance for yellows and oranges and amplifiers.

Then enraged each wave in endurance to e37 until wave 200. Sometimes I used gem bombs which spawn "gem wasps" which slow down monsters further.

Next, threw the mana farm into a mana shard when I had enough to take out an e50 wave (which I had calculated beforehand as the max hp to deal with), made my final towers, and fast forwarded until wave 900.

Used shrines for infection, time, blade and , fully upgraded freeze and woe to kill the toughest enemies, which was an e51 spire. When e53 spectres came on the screen, I simply hid my exposed gems and gave it a low grade gem to steal.

Wave 999 had e50 possessed giants x3 which were banished about 5 times before going down. (each banishment in endurance costs 20% of mana pool, so I used a buffer of ~e25 mana to absorb this anticipated hit).

Total time ~9 hours.

I am wizard level ~3000 (One can get to wave 500 and gain billions of xp on any map in about 30 minutes, without using the laborious 16c combination method.). I put ~110 points into pure/dual/triple/quad gem enhancement, ~90 points into orange
and ~90 points into black and have +14 to all skills.

Notes:
http://pl.vc/4c4y6

The main thing limiting mana gain is the max hits per second. Although the level 70 gems say they have ~200,000 hits per second, this is limited to about 40 hits per second for both traps and towers. This reduced mana gain to ~1e24 per second from a theoretical ~1e28 per second. That would pay off the orange grade 70 gems in seconds, not hours.

If the hits per second were increased to the same it says on the screen, grade 150 gems could be made in minutes, not decades, of game time, with the "u" upgrades, but this is not how the game works.

Also, the mana gain from killing or banishing monsters does not scale like the other numbers (although banishment costs 20% of mana pool in endurance).

Alternatively, a shrine of blades and a "juggling" technique could kill the toughest monsters, but the # of demolitions is strictly limited.

The above technique would NOT work for e70 monsters. A grade 73 or grade 76 gem would cost 16 or 256 times as much, do maybe e49 damage tops, and the mana gain would take longer than the time it would take for 999 waves to come and go.

Mana shard mana gain of bomb gems is strictly limited to 5% increase. Even if you had 80 mana shards, this would only give you ~16 times the initial mana, which would get you an upgrade of about 100x the damage at most (1e2, not enough to make a big difference).

This is truly a game where only exponential changes make a difference.