I first suggest getting familiar with the game's mechanics. Scroll down on the game page and look at those keyboard shortcuts, they are very useful. Read carefully all the tutorial pages so you know everything.
Then, I highly suggest completing the game, or at least most of it, so you have a decent level of at least 80 to start with.
I myself managed it at only level 141, but that was because it took me from level 110 to 140 to even find poolbound tome lol.
Your First Endurance
The essential skills are:
Mana Leech Poolbound Fusion Traps
Lesser Essentials:
Crit True Colors Chain
In the order they are listed.
Reasons for not including other skills that may SEEM good(and are in regular play).
Mana Stream: The mana you get from killing monsters will be next to zero compared to the farm. Lower mana pool caps is unnecessary.
Amplifiers: Until your next couple of runs, you won't have enough points to spare to max Bloodbound, which after you start using it often, is where amps shine.
Resonance: Not enough skillpoints atm. Priority falls just below chain hit tbh...
you also shouldn't max chain ever unless you enjoy mega lag/are going for a really high grade gem for bragging rights: You want least lag/most mana for your endurances, lest you quit because of lag.
Fury: Very nice skill, need more points to max it though, because mana farming specs are most important.
All others: Don't bother.
Okay, so this is the skillset I would suggest at level 80, with 553(+ achievements) skillpoints, and a skill cap of 13.
This is what I suggest for level 80 wizards, if you are higher I suggest adding to pool, traps, leech first, in multiples of 3. Leave 1K mana at all times. If you are 90 and cap is 14, raise all others as much as you want instead, it's best to have multiples of 3 as the secondary bonus especially for component skills, is very nice.
Almost forgot- If you are missing any of the colors-
B5 has orange L6 has poolbound R1 has critical hit
Now, onto gameplay- I suggest an early map that has one entrance only(F1, F4, F5, F6, etc).. set glaring, maximum haste, 1 mana lock, 7 beacon storm, 7 swarmling, 7 giant.
Open up with a grade 4 red yellow white gem in tower(split approximately evenly, made of 2 grade 1 chain, 3 g1 crit, 3 g1 pool, if you can).
Make the tower gem grade 6, that's it, save up mana until wave 10.
Now, make a grade 5 with 5 chain, 6 mana, 5 poolbound grade 1s.
place it as close to the entrance as you can.
Build towers on any non-path 2x2 space near the trap to prevent discharging beacons from appearing there.
Upgrade tower gem to level 8 or so, then put it into trap a little ahead of the mana farm
start angering the waves to about 20x the max damage of farm. Upgrade killgem to go along with it, killgem should be 2-3 grades behind.
Just keep upgrading farm, make amplifiers if possible nearby them filled with pure orange 4-5 grades lower, keep enraging waves with the highest grade you can afford that drains maximum half your current mana. Try to use up more mana on giant waves- they're slower, which is a plus they'll give more mana from the farm, and they have higher initial xp, so bombing it gives more xp.
By wave 30 you should have no problem with mana, keep doing what you did and continue until you get bored, pretty much.
Then, end the endurance and/or try and get extra achievements if you want(more mana/skillpts), then collect all your xp.
You should be at about level 160-240 at least if you did it right. If you did, great job! If you didn't, try to follow the guide closer, and of course tweak it to suit your immediate needs.
Part Two- Your second jump, from the hundreds to thousands- will be typed up later. I want to get to level 3K at least from level 2818.
Some inner frags with freeze duration would be great. I just can't seem to find them. I'm up to level 1235 at this point and still rocking my level 21 fragment with the +8 Freeze Duration.
As-is, I have Freeze maxed with +2 and the duration is 13-21 seconds, with a recharge time of 20.6 seconds. So with a full charge I can stretch it out pretty far, but I still can't freezelock.
Been blowing through the Compass Levels lately, seeing what sort of fragments I'd get from them. I even ran a Haunting/70x/+10 trait set on X7. It was actually kinda funny - the predicted fragment level was from 60-100, I had the +10 boost that costs 100 cores, and despite getting three fragments over the course of the fight, the highest one I got was 66.
Still not sure how the math worked on that one but I guess I keep on trying. Still got a few cycles to go on the compass before its done.
for those using my low level guide AND mana farming: you are being excessively conservative. The low level guide assumes you're only getting a negligible amount of mana from orange gems.
Once you get a grade 15 mana farm gem, you need to use the following:
1. mana farm in trap.
2. killgem in trap. past grade 15, trap is better. Tower is technically better again at about grade 40, but it's also laggier.
3. switch angering strategies:
3.a: anger untill the hp is:
MAX damage X red* X firerate** Yellow/1000
*consider red maxed at 100 red.
**firerate in traps has a cap, but I can't remember what it is. something like 3,000 shots per wave...
3.b Adjust the grade you use so that you use up 10-40% of the managain per wave. (level 1 mana lock is pretty helpfull in figuring out how much mana you're gaining per wave); higher grades give better score.
3.c if you're not summoning 999 monsters per wave after creating a grade 25 killgem/mana farm, you're doing something wrong.
(and brew...use y6 for fragment farming, not x7. y6 has a much better minimum rarity)
supergemming:
if you get the "32 combine" correct, you need to make 2 gems:
2,1,2 and 21111122
this is the simplest way to render the 16 combine: simply combine right to left, then combine the two gems together.
Brew, If you are going to try to set up a farm, my advice is fairly simple.
Always use a killtrap (the only reason you want a tower is to kill things that don't get hit by traps), and bomb appropriately.
Your killgem is triple color, yellow, red, and white-or-black gem, right? I'd recommend following Psorek's guide for the gems, but if mana is tight that may not be practical. Your killtrap should still be those 3 colors though. Starting off with a YRW killgem gets you more damage capability than starting off with a YRB killgem. However, it also "requires" that you keep a YRB killgem somewhere, farming hits without actually killing anything. Once your YRW killgem hits grade 30, start doing your upgrade (U, or one of psorek's 16, 64, or 1024 upgrade plans) to the YRB gem to bring it up to grade 30 and use it rather than the YRW.
Your managem should be very similar : red, orange, white-or-black. Starting off with white provides a much higher mana leech, but will also "require" that you farm hits with a red, orange, black manafarm replacement gem. The switching point, from what I could tell, is grade 40, unlike the killgem's point at grade 30.
When it comes to enraging waves, there is a much simpler way to do the math. The first monster wave is going to be a lost cause anyway, but for all waves after Wave 1, take the killgem's maximum damage and multiply it by the critical hit multiplier. If it is a particularly weak gem (say, no skills allowed in V3 kind of weak) it may be 81 max damage times 2.15 critical multiplier. If you have particularly high skills and are using White for your starting killgem, it may be 3,349 max damage times 185 critical damage multiplier. Call this result your trap's Damage Rating. Likely, it will be somewhere in between.
Now, your critical chance *should* be 80%. If not, then don't enrage quite as high. It will hit the 80% cap soon enough.
Since G1 bombs tend to bring monster armor up much faster than monster HP, the first few waves (depending on how quickly you anticipate the monsters reaching your killing field) you want to bomb so that HP + armor is just under the Damage Rating. Once you get your first Bolt spell charged, hit the killtrap with it and immediately enrage the next couple waves so that the monster HP alone is just under the Damage Rating.
Proper bombing can make all the difference.
For more exp, put a Black-Red-Dark Blue gem in a trap right before the killgem. U to upgrade this one (it does not need a lot of levels, no point in doing anything elaborate to it) so that the Slow is 90%. Now you can bomb waves so that monster HP is just under (avoid going over!) ten times the Damage Rating.
As your mana pool grows, you will be able to bomb with higher grade gems than just grade 1. Higher grade bombs are better than lower grade bombs when it comes to the exp you get for beating the wave. A few grades after grade 1, monster HP rises faster than monster armor per bomb. After you have cleared out all of the high armor monsters, switch your killtrap enchantment from Bolt to Barrage. This will increase your Damage Rating considerably, and by that point monster armor should be small enough compared to monster HP that it is meaningless.
Whenever you upgrade the killtrap, or the killtrap's amps, recalculate the Damage Rating and bomb waves appropriately.
Lastly, always upgrade your killing area after your manafarm area. That should be obvious. But, never let your killing area lag more than one cycle behind your farming area.
That's basically it. I hope some of those pointers help.
In response to an easier post by han2 which was answered by Astroshak.
No you cannot manafarm without the pouch (premium). It does not matter whether the field has the chain hit gem available because you need the skill for it to be effective. Without the skill for chain hit, its effectiveness is too low and monsters easily slip through your trap zone when you get more than 10 of them or so. I've been testing all of the manafarming guides without the pouch and none of them work because you never really have an effective chain-hit gem.
I'm not thunderrider. I'm going to answer your question anyway, but one thing I need to warn you : this guide is fairly old, and thunderrider wrote it not that long afte rthe game first came out. The game has undergone a few updates since then, and is supposedly (according to the developer's blog) going to get an update at some point this month (November 2014). I have not perused the initial post to see what's no longer applicable.
What thunderrider said to do though, was to look at your mana farm gem. Look at its damage range : minimum damage - maximum damage. Then to just take that maximum damage, multiply it by 20, and bomb monster waves so they reach about that many hit points.
