Forums → Games → Gemcraft CS: Any suggestions on fragment farming?

Don't chase freeze duration at your level. if a rarity 52 seems good, you're not ready to splurge for fragments.

Y6, with maxed traits+pouch very nearly guarantees at least one +1 ALL SKILLS fragment, which is worth MUCH more than a +freeze duration, and isn't restricted to inner. Only downside is, those fragments are pretty expensive to upgrade.

Y6, with max traits and Haunting difficulty, yields fragment pieces of 78-100 rarity. Buying the +10 rarity thing six times provides the most effective yield, since six is the most fragments you can get on one map.

Run through it as fast as you can, and once you have all six fragments that you can get, sell off all of your gems (ends the map faster).

To farm SC in order to max those high rarity fragments, go to any low level stage that you can beat very easily. Leaving the Difficulty at Looming, set the Chasing Shadows trait to 7, make a killing tower and surround it with 8 amps, and call everything. You should get quite a few SC, especially from the Shadows that the trait calls forth. It should not take you more than a few minutes to finish the stage.

Thanks guys.

I do agree that +1 all is very helpful, and I never said the 52 was "good" - its just the ONLY upgrade to freeze duration I've ever found, and a lack of freeze duration is really hampering any attempts I make at a real endurance run.

I can't freezelock since my max freeze duration matches the recharge time, and the swarmling trait makes them thaw faster. I just can't keep things on the farm long enough before I have to kill them and before too long there I am with a thousand things onscreen I can't kill but enough farm power to not die, and nothing left to do but sell the gems just to end it.

At level 1255, I feel like I should be doing a lot better than I am. Let's put it this way - I've yet to have an endurance run where bloodbound bonuses come anywhere near the poolbound bonuses. Hell, I've yet to have a kill gem in a trap outperform a kill gem in a tower.

Here's my current talisman:

Astro, that's pretty much what I've been doing. Its good to know at least I'm not messing that part up. Well, that's not true - I maxed traits on Y6 (Haunted, 70-something multiplier), bought the +10 rarity, and still managed a level 60-something fragment.

And yes, the higher end fragments take a lot to upgrade. I sometimes find myself making max CS trait runs just to feed them.

Is there any way to tell how many fragments you've picked up, other than having paid attention? I find myself missing a lot of the notifications when dealing with things like all seven shadows showing up in the same round..

The Battle Stats tooltip will tell you. When you have collected any Shadow Cores and/or Talisman Fragments, the total number found on the stage appears beneath the Demolitions Left tally.

As for the permafreeze, get more All Skills fragments. Freeze Duration is a big help, but having 60 Freeze skill helps more.

However .. permafreeze is not required for good manafarming, only for insanely good-yet-time-consuming manafarming. I managed to get 9e12 exp off of one map without using the freeze spell at all. Its really just a matter of knowing how much you can safely anger waves, upgrading your managem as much as possible, and upgrading your trap's killgem to match the managem.

level 1255? oh. you're worrying about the wrong issue, then.

Yes permafreeze is nice, no you do not need it at that level. level 700 is enough to set up a grade 30 before wave 150. without permafreeze.
Grade 30 is the point where black beats white.

If you're level 1255 you should be able to do Y6 haunting max traits, and start getting some high level fragments.

Alright, guess I need to work on refining tactics then. I know I have a lot of work to do on optimizing wave angering but without any kind of macro assist, it is literally an endurance run.

So it seems pretty unanimous, Y6 max traits is the best place to farm fragments. I've already farmed dozens of 70's, a handful of 80's, and a couple 90's, but still no freeze duration. Its good to know its not required and at least I can focus on something different.

And thanks for the battle stats tip, Astro - I keep forgetting its even there! That'll help save some time for sure.

One of the Rarity 95 fragments I use has 19% Freeze Duration. It is the only piece with that that I have.

I did (finally, wtf) find an 89 that also has 19% duration, and it replaced the 13% one. The 9% WoE health drop on it is nice too.

Its not *quite* enough to allow freezelock, but at least now there's some bit of freeze/recharge overlap and I can keep giants in place for quite awhile.

And I've been focused on fragment farming for so long, I guess I hadn't realized how much of a boost my skills actually had since my last real endurance attempt. I'm still not sure about a killgem in a trap outperforming a killgem in a tower, but I did get BB bonus on my mana trap up to several hundred, which is a full order of magnitude higher than I'd ever gotten PB. So there's that.

Killgem in a tower has a couple of advantages over killgem in a trap. It can be boosted by 8 amplifiers, for one. It will be stronger without amps than a trap without amps would be, as well, due to the way traps reduce damage by 80% and boost specials by 380% - it would take a 400% boost for the damage loss to be fully offset by the critical increase.

Traps, however, have one HUGE advantage over towers for killgems : they have a much reduced range. A killgem in a tower *will* start to kill stuff that has not reached your manafarm yet, and the only counter to that is constant management (placing it in the tower when you want it to shoot, putting it somewhere else when you don't, and using a Bolt/Beam/Barrage spell to instantly socket the gemif you need it that badly). A killgem in a trap, on the other hand, will be *almost* as strong as a 6 amp tower killgem, and will wait for monsters to run by it to kill them.

There are two kinds of manafarms. One is Permafreeze, in which you can use a killgem in a tower, because you are not really going to be worried about setting it up until you're done farming all the mana you want out of the permanently frozen monsters.

The other is without permafreeze, in which you set up a manafarm trap area, and a killing trap area. Maze the monsters so they all pass through the manafarm, and then the killtrap, en route to the mage gem. Put Bolt on the killgem at first (because the low grade gems you are going to be bombing the first couple waves with will boost armor astronomically compared to HP) but replace it with Barrage when you start using gems that boost monster HP up orders of magnitude higher than monster armor. In both cases, just bomb the wave so the monster HP is around the strongest hit that your killing gem can manage to make. If you put a slowing gem in a trap just in front of the killing trap (and manafarm trap, too!) you can even go as much as ten times the top damage rating of your killgem.

Yes, a killgem in a tower has a lot more time to kill the monsters. Yes, a killgem in a tower has 2 more amps boosting it. But trap killgems are incredibly effective as well, and require less micromanagement. The only time I even bother to put a gem in a tower when I'm manafarming (since I tend to stay away from permafreeze) is when I've got a flier incoming - apparition, specter, shadow, or (though its not a flier, it still "requires" a tower gem) a spire. For that, I just put my wave bombing gem into the tower (G1 yellow + G1 black, 'U' to upgrade it as necessary) and I make sure the tower is next to three of the killtrap amplifiers.

Good info, thanks! I was having a hard time believing that a kill trap could outperform a kill tower in the same way that it did in GCL, since even at very high levels (50+), the tower still did way more damage. I've seen lots of people post that the kill traps outperform kill towers, but either they weren't completely right or were maybe not fully describing the context they meant.

I did find myself using the trap when possible so that the farm was still being used, as well as to not lag out the entire screen, so its good to know the usage was right.

I'd been trying to farm freeze duration fragments so that I could try farm #1 as described in the Psorek extreme guide, but so far have been unable due to lack of permafreeze. I've had some pretty good success with #2, but my score still hasn't gone much past 10 billion. Mostly due to time availability and sending waves instead of angering. I really wish there were a "save" feature so you could come back to the middle of a round.

Side note, the random number generator has now decided that whenever I do a SC run and quickly blow through a low level map, I will always have at least one 20-something inner fragment that has +freeze duration on it. So aggravating, lol

I went and checked the tower vs trap thing, by the way.

I took my killgem, in its trap surrounded by 6 pure yellow amps, and multiplied the max damage by the critical hit multiplier, as I normally do, to find what I call the Damage Rating.

I then went and duped two of the amp gems, moving everything into a tower surrounded by 8 amps, and got that Damage Rating.

I don't know why, but the damage rating came out to be very close. that was at 45+15 for all relevant skills.

That tells me that unless you need the "shoot anywhere" aspect of a high grade tower gem boosted by 8 amps, or the higher firing rate of a tower unassisted by amps (to farm hits for the Bloodbound component of a mixed gem) you are better off using a killing trap after your manafarm trap.

Actually "shoot anywhere" aspect is the main reason tower outdamages trap. If only there was a way to limit maximum range of towered gems, so it would be possible to have different "areas" without constant micromanagement.

Indeed. However, take too long killing one monster, and the next one of its kind will die closer to the Orb. With the idea being to kill them before they reach the orb, you want to minimize time spent killing any one monster as best you can, meaning as few shots at it as possible, so the "kill anywhere" aspect is moot most of the time.

Fliers/Spires, and after things start getting past the killtrap are basically the only reasons you should want to use a tower for your killgem. In practice, I'm not sure that a tower is better than a trap for farming hits; maybe I'm doing something wrong there (because I'm not permafreezing) but I seem to get more hits on gems I put in traps than in gems I put in towers. I suspect that may be because I'm not sticking red amps next to those towers, and the chain value is amplified by being in a trap just as any other specials in that gem are.