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.
@Erile - you know you can replay endurance on the same map and get the difference between your new, higher score and your old score added to your xp, right? I had to do some of that as well. There are maps available with r/o. With a supergemming strategy, even if you can't get to high gem levels, you'll be able to beat your old scores, get more skill points, and repeat.
It's a pain, but labyrinth and chapter zero were much the same.
I've redone every previous level at least 30 times though, which is possibly why I am 19 levels higher at the same point on the map than the person who started the thread. In my questions above, I am now running into the same problem on every level available to me; I have done them all at the max battle trait multiplier I can without dying and am kind of stuck at the same problem in every case (have done half of them at glaring with variable levels as well).
I actually had none of these problems in labyrinth (at least what I could complete without paying for it), and chapter zero was easy to me lol.
@Erile : being at level 64 now and a few fields further :P Yeah, you probably did a great job at leveling up, something I didn't want to do because unlike the previous Gemcraft games, for some reason I felt this game didn't quite encouraged me to do so plus my gems were too weak to even try, I choosed to move on as fast as I could to unlock the various skills & fragments I deeply needed instead, thinking I would naturally level up along the way (and that's why happened, but more slowly than I would have thought). I don't play with battle traits either for now, saving my SCs for the levels ahead (which may drop much needed higher rarity fragments, mine really suck for now compared to what's ahead).
Advancing in hextiles proved quite difficult on some maps with no decent kill gem color provided (I remember Q4 was one of those before I get the Critical hit skill, and doing so unlocked the gem color for all maps including that one).
My guess would be that by introducing the True Colors skill, the developer also increased slightly the penalties for mixing gem colors, and at the same time made the whole game more difficult for low-level non-premium players as a side-effect, since we only have access to one good kill gem color skill (unless sometimes provided by the map we intend to play). It may get better with good colors/skills (thus, go premium), or maybe with higher true color skill level (I'm at 9, max is 11 - haven't tested this assumption though). Thus, most advanced color mixing strategies given by medium-to-high level premium players out here don't apply to us, and we have to find other next-best ways to move on.
Anyway, the advice given in this thread definitely set me on the right track : if lacking red, white and black, then pure yellow is the safest way to go for the main kill gem. I'm now making my way through the eastmost hextiles with confidence.
Ok, so that brings us back to the original question I asked on page 2 that I have been desperately hoping for an answer to! Given the information I provided on page 2 for @thunderrider , how does one beat R1 to get the yellow gem?
Most of the advice given so far is to use things I don't have because of my position/level or that I can't have because the magician's pouch is not available to me. I don't have True Colors, I don't have Red, I don't have Endurance, and I have repeat-farmed levels to extremes (I have records of all of it so that I don't repeat levels at lower or equal difficulties to those I have already done).
The only other advice given was to remove half of the few skills I have and not put points into any other skills. The 200 mana I get is insignificant for the reasons I discussed above. Trying this out made it impossible to do the levels in question, and I died halfway through the level instead of near the end because you have to have skills of some kind to kill tough monsters.
Some advice that may help you @Calimero75 Doing levels on glaring, even without battle traits, provides a much higher base rarity rating for talisman fragments. And if you add the shadow core boost of +10, you will always be getting 10+, 20+, or 30+ fragments instead of just 1+ and 10+.
Wait you don't have true colors? I have true colors on my level 74 save (not premium). I thought it was one of the first skills I got!
...E7 and H3 come with red AND yellow. the latter comes with a couple of free red/orange gems as well. My level 74 backup has 143k exp on e7, and 273k exp on H3 (wizard tower in H). most levels have only 2-5k exp on them.
obviously, I was below level 74 when I did those.
Do those maps with my angering strategy. Do NOT use the absolute maximum difficulty available, you want the wavestones to move slowly, you want the giants to be angerable at least once...and do NOT use glaring, even if you have it.
I don't know why I don't have it, XasdZbaa said it was from M1, which I've opened many many times, but I don't know. I had significant problems with M1 when it was bugged. What does True Colors even do?
How useful is red without the skill? Without the skill, the chain hit length is almost nothing... I've tried using it a number of times when you get it free, but I've literally never seen a chain hit actually occur, even with higher grade (7 or 8) gems. I also never had problems with clustered waves, just giants and high armor reavers. Based on that, and assuming that a length of 2 is required to actually hit a second monster (based on the limited information provided), I was essentially treating red as useless without the skill.
I don't know what your angering strategy is, would you care to elaborate?
True colors gives a bonus to gem damage and special effect - the more skill points invested, the higher the bonus. At max skill level a triple-color gem is 200% damage and 140% specials power, for example.
If you really can't get true colors, I recommend a complete restart. It's a rather valuable skill, not only for special power but for the damage boost.
as for the angering strategy:
Angering-aka enraging, or dropping wave bombs on the wavestones...
First, look at the mana gain per monster. you may multiply the number out if you wish.
Then, select the grade based upon the mana gain per monster:
So I just carried out this strategy in looming on E7 exactly as described above. I only built one gem (since its an easy field) and I angered every reaver and giant according to the numbers above until their armor's value was 50-60% of the gem's minimum damage. In the end, I got up to a grade 10 gem and received only 14,401 xp (less than I previously had). No monsters were banished. How do you get 100K out of this with only 32 waves?
I just completed H3 using the same method (reavers and giants, but at 60-75% armor of minimum gem damage) and received 25,776 xp (also less than I previously had).
There is something in your method that is definitely getting left out, because I don't see how its possible to get 100K xp on those waves using the information provided.
...tell me your wizard level again, and list your available skills. your lack of true colors may be the problem. I'll compute your optimal skill distribution.
Gemcraft CS : can one finish the game without the magician pouch ?
Yes. I just have. Thanks for the tip regarding True Colours. Also, thanks to Peter for making the best game in flash.
Also I'm nowhere near a brick wall WRT levelling. If you read the help forums and are willing to take advice anyone can complete GC2 and they can complete it for free.
