I'm wondering whether I can still progress farther in the game or not without buying the magician's pouch. I remember some early hardcore players here saying they did manage to finish the game without, and re-playing after buying the MP (which is what I intended to do actually, I don't have any problem with going premium, but I didn't want to make the game artificially easier in the beginning).
I'm currently level 59. I'm stuck at levels R2 and Q6 - two levels I feel I cannot win without either the chain hit or poolbound skills (both of them actually reserved for premium players, right ?) or bloodbound, which I understand can only be unlocked in the latest levels of the game.
The gem skills I currently have are all the other gem types : Mana leech (orange), critical hit (yellow), poison (green), suppressing (cyan), slow (blue), armor tearing (purple). I also have unlocked the 3 enhancement spells plus freeze and curse, amplifiers, and quite a few achievements. My talisman is far from great though (thought it would eventually get better in the last levels with higher rarity fragments dropping), my best fragment so far is only lv20. I also have 1260 Shadow Cores.
I'm completely failing to build a gem capable of defeating either of these levels with what I have now. I wonder if it is at all possible with my current setup and given the recent game updates.
I do read the other threads carefully, but I still may have missed a few insights about advanced kill/mana gem combining, any advice would be more than welcome.
Don't get me wrong, I will eventually buy the magician's pouch (that was my plan all along), but as a personal challenge I intend to go as far as I can without. Please tell me it's still possible, and how. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
It's definitely possible to win without the pouch. Can you tell me what the problem with those fields is? Like, to many monsters, giants, anything?
R2 has a good place to set up a tower with 8 amplifiers just above the lowest monster nest. Just redirect all monsters around there, make a dual or triple gem with yellow and something else and amplify it with some g3 gems. That should help with giants, especially if you put some points into critical.
Q6, yeah, that one was pretty hard. Critical helped there as well and make sure there's only one path for the monsters to reach the orb. You'll have more than enough time to take out the locks, so worry about them after you've gotten your tower set up.
Bloodbound and Poolbound are on pouch-only fields I think.
Level 59, for R fields without red? Mana farming, at level 59, without premium?
I'm one of the (more laid-back) pro-players, and I don't think I could manage that. Besides, you'll want level 120+ by the time you get to X, so go replay some levels.
Use my guide in walkthroughs about anger management.
The two best maps for your level are H3 and e7: they have AWESOME layouts.
Do not use glaring difficulty for exp untill at least level 140. I learned that the hard way.
X hex is where you really must check your skill settings. on X2 i reduced my beam and bolt skill and improved true colors(max), chain hit and bloodbound. and i was lucky that no flying beasts were around the 2nd time .......... very hard layout.
@Ell1e : in R2 (attempted 3 times so far, last time right before writing this post) monsters seem to get stronger, faster than every other field I played so far. I feel overpowered at wave 15 already... I had the exact setup you described - a well-placed, 3-color, yellow (50%) blue-orange (25%/25%) lv9 gem (regular gem, U-upgraded) in a tower with 8x amps with lv4 pure yellows, I somehow survived (barely) until wave 58 to be annoyed by both a shadow and a specter (was attempting the emergency purple beam+freeze technique to take the shadow down at that time), during which the specter eventually stole my gem, only 10k mana to craft another one... and of course I died soon afterwards, and ragequitted.
My mana farm may be the cause. I only had 1x lv4 blue and 5x lv5 orange traps enhanced with barrage or beam, and 1x lv5 poison (the rest of the path filled with purple gem traps to try to weaken the monsters).
For some reason, I can't seem to craft a powerful enough kill gem without red (or white, or black) component. That's my problem on both of these fields. I may be doing something horribly wrong merging colors. I definitely can't reproduce the crafting schemes that used to work so well for me in GCL.
@fractalman : yeah, I do retry completed levels from time to time, but I'm not leveling up all that much. I completed glaring on the 10 first levels, the next one (E5) seems well out of my reach for the moment, so I didn't ever bother to try the harder ones.
Honestly, the only people that seem to give advice are the level 1000s who seem to want to get you a billion exp. At your level just going through the game for the first time, the only thing you need is pure yellow gems. No amps, no traps, no manafarms, no crazy multicolored combo gems, just a pure yellow in a tower (maybe two or three, if swarmlings are giving you trouble). That should get you through the game, and be good enough to get you a few million exp in the F hex.
Once you've done that and gotten to a half decent level, you can go for manafarming and billions of exp
do you use walls ? can save time for getting mana or bolt/beam. i just had a look at R2. Only 2 ways for the monsters to reach the orb. so close one side at once and make the path for the monsters as long as possible.
@smario : yes I do. That's the only thing I'm perfectly sure I have right, given previous exp in GCL (+online video howtos).
@XasdZbaa : thanks man ! I feel dumb for not trying it before, but as you suggested pure yellow seems to do it much better than all the compound yellow I've tried so far. At least I feel I have a chance now.
Finally completed R2 on looming with a pure yellow kill tower/amps, and no real trouble. For some reason, this time I didn't get any spire, specter or shadow, that sure helped (while I had all three of them the last time, and angered waves just as much - go figure...).
I have finished the game w/o magician's pouch a day before the 1.0.16 nerf. I'm not so sure it can be done now. If it is, it will take A LOT more grinding.
@Calimero75
I can't get the pouch and have also been wondering the same thing as you! I've spent more than 3/4 of my hours in the game just farming to get extra levels and I am not sure how much more farming I want to do, since it gets worse as the game advances. I'm level 79 and am near where you are, it I had to complete half of the preceding fields on glaring with 3 to 5 levels of added difficulty in order to get to my current level. I am currently running out of fields to farm, as if I raise the difficulty one time on any previous fields right now, I get wiped out in the last wave.
Right now, I am stuck on Q2, R1, and P1 as I always get at least 2 shadows and 1 spire each time I try those fields. Getting 3 major threats every time at my level pretty much means a quick death, especially since they always show up in 4 waves or less from each other.
So far, all the advice I've seen in the forums for getting more xp are pouch-dependent and from people playing with the pouch. The methods use the chain hit skill a ton, and reply on the higher amount of available mana in order to build more structures that aren't available to people without the pouch. (I previously received advice to beat a level by spending like 800 mana at the start of the level when there was only 400 available lol - and no I hadn't overspent on skills and yes I had completed tons of achivements)
I don't understand how one can rely on yellow gems as suggested, since the yellow gem is generally not available at this point in the game (1 of 6 fields). I can't use something that doesn't exist for me yet unfortunately.
I also don't understand the advice to only use 1 gem - since 1 gem can't stop standard swarmling waves. I find I need 3 gems for standard swarmling waves, even if every hit is a kill shot. Even a single gem in an 8 amplifier tower only stops half a standard swarmling wave. But, at my level, it is physically impossible to buy 8 amplifiers, since they cost way too much too quickly - you can buy 8 amplifiers but your gems won't kill anything.
So I'm stuck the same way as you and am wondering if there is a way out of it, or if its a game I give up on because of the hundreds of hours of grinding for non-paying players.
@smario
The red skill (chain hit) can only be obtained by buying the pouch, so this player (and other players without the pouch) do not have it.
The question is how? If I can get through half the level without getting wiped out by shadows and spires, the creatures get so powerful even with grade 8 or 9 gems you can't hurt them... :/
