Forums → Games → GCCS: Thoughts on getting from level 200 through 1000

For angering, figure out what your killing gems are capable of handling, then anger to just under that point.

If your killing gems can handle 250,000 hit point monsters, no point in only angering the monsters to 90,000 hit points. Not angering to just under the limit of what your killing gem can handle costs you experience at the end.

BTW, Erile, the reason the Pouch is so for manafarming is twofold. First, it allows you access to the Chain Hit gem on stages that do not naturally give it to you. Second, it allows you to use the Bloodbound and Poolbound skills, which dramatically increase the power of your gems. I personally did not bother to put many (and, after the first few farms, removed them entirely) skill points into Chain Hit until I was over WL 2000. The reason I put the points back into it was because the skill points increase the damage from the gem, and I did not want to reduce the damage of my killing gems by putting inferior materials into them.

Alright, level 48, I've got barrage and a talisman full of garbage--14% freeze duration and 200 more starting mana being the only highlights. E6: Glaring + 7 banishment + 7 giant (c'mon, why can't non-prem have the not make things harder one and actually makes things easier one lol). I know if I hit beacon I'll get a large range billion hp unsocketing beacon somewhere horrible lol, don't want to deal with that at this level.

Started mana gem + tri-colored whatever to kill (probably 2 slow/1 poison/1 armor, upgrade with slow, toss for red/yellow at higher level).

Hard to anger much, armor is a factor. Slow traps first then a red/or trap. With some angering, freezing on trap and other such nursing, it was able to pay for its own upgrades til grade 9. Amps suck at this level compared to gem grade, didn't bother much--on kill gem of course, range and a little more fire rate help tons.

Last 3 waves were million hp giants. Managed to kill them, but it wasn't pretty (had to sell the mana trap to upgrade kill gem to 10), 170k xp. That's 10 more levels and a resolve never to try manafarming this low level again, so maybe when I hit 75

UgAhgItHurts, you can "block" beacons by judicious use of Walls, Towers, and Amplifiers. They do not appear on paths, either. So go ahead and use Beacon Storm.

But even with walls, you're talking 300+ mana, and at that level, that's a big deal in the first few waves, plus it'll mean more hp for existing beacons that you probably need to blow up fast. I'm not saying it's not worth tons of xp, but you're just not ready to deal with that mess at level 50. Well maybe you are, I'm not--and it's extremely random, anything from 4 to 7 digits is going to show up

So news. Level 63ish. Always had a soft spot for D2 and omigod red. So let's glaring, crank banish to the max and maybe giants (it was 8 multiplier total, don't think I maxed giants--and I probably should have, they were cake). Didn't do mana trap, but mana trapS. Complete the walls, make a grade 5 orange, be thankful I have mana left over. Two traps, one 1r3b, one 1r3or, placed near the bend, gem in one of the existing towers. Tried angering the first few waves, didn't look good, restarted without. Beamed orange gem, bought a pure yellow for killing things, upped traps without adding more red (3 hits forever) as their hit totals said they'd paid for another until I have 4 mana traps in a line.

When they were up to level 7, mana started to accumulate like a few k per round from them. Combined them to a 9, upped that before my yellow gem. By wave 65 I had an 11 r/o trap that did 4 fire rate, 3 hits, 35 mana per. Cost of a grade 11 is 170k, it starts with 2 mana, goes to 3, 4.5, 6, etc, think it earned it's keep with its 25k hits along the line (and also paid for a grade 11 yellow). Cashed it in when most of the creeps were dead and there were the late spawning spires with 3 and 6 kk hp, gah (and I'd killed a shadow earlier too). Yellow grade 12, lots of curse and specials and 380k xp. Yay level 74 and 12 skill cap so I can do more horrible things.

We already knew multiple low grade traps work, so not much new there, but maybe the travelogue will be useful. Still not confident in making one mana trap pay out enough yet, but can't hurt to try.

Thus the word "judicious". You do not need to prevent Beacons altogether; you just need to prevent them from appearing within range (a few tower/amp sized spaces away) from your stuff.

Preventing beacons altogether is not a bad thing, but it is not necessary at the start. Merely stopping a resocketing beacon from appearing in range to upset your towers/traps/amps is enough to start. Later on, when your tower gems have upgraded a bit, they can take out any beacons that you find truly offensive. Just be sure to set an additional wall, or tower/amp, in place to prevent a new beacon from being set there.

Walls (usually) have the advantage of being cheaper, but they are less permanent. Spires and Shadows will destroy walls when they crash down. Towers/Amplifiers are not subject to being destroyed in that manner, making them a better choice if you have the mana. Fortunately, while Beacons cannot appear on a wall, you can place towers and amplifiers on your walls.

So, I'm responding to a few different things here that get in the way of it working.

The first is the traps. One trap only hits 1/3 of the monsters that go over it on average, so you have to have 3 equal traps to do the job, which costs way too much mana to set them up to be effective. The slow trap helps, but its only effective long enough for them to pass over 2 traps.

For me, chain hit does not function in a pure gem until grade 7 when it can finally actually work. As a minor component, its value is too low to actually function in the capacity its expected to. (which the skill increases)

All of the suggestions for skills vs everything else do not leave enough mana to actually accomplish the desired gem combos. Ug's only leaves me enough to make one grade 5 gem at the start and thunderriders from the other page leaves me deep in negatives. I'm level 251 and have a high level of achievements (309) so I always assume the big difference in mana is the boost pouch players get in skills and extra achievements.

And finally, the angering methods do not work in these situations at all. I tested this extensively and posted elsewhere that this seems to be because the non-standard monsters (special reavers etc) do not react the same to angering as normal monsters. This is a problem without the pouch because when you don't have endurance, the only way you can have fields with lots of waves is to do increased difficulty with extra battle traits. And in this situation, you get mostly non-standard monsters causing you to lose mana if you use the posted methods.

Specific reply to Astroshak - I totally understand why the pouch helps farming. But as I've posted before, the pouch was never available to me as a player. At this point, after finishing the game etc., I honestly don't feel like trying to spend money on it or waiting for them to fix it anyway.

My level on that game is 247, besides 3 barrage here's the awful skill layout and talisman (I start maps with 5911 mana, that's at least 2 grade 5s, maybe 3).

Not sure what could be up with your game, chain works for me non-prem. Even in a tower with a stupid low value I get the occasional multi-hit. Seems that there's some easy things to check: try a long path map and compare a slow trap v. a slow + chain trap. Summon a decent amount, see if they're all hit by one without chain.

I stopped messing with premium because I lag something awful with high level gems and piles of critters on the screen, but even if that weren't the case it's pretty tedious anyway. When I did, no points in chain of course, fury and the bound gems are way better. I'll be messing with non-prem for the next little while, so if there's a map you want to see done with this game or my level 80odd, say so.

I've tested the trap thing a lot in situations just like the one you describe. The only time all monsters get hit is if I have 3 traps in a row, otherwise the traps miss monsters. Chain hit doesn't significantly affect how many get hit until it gets to better grades. With slow its rather easy to test since you get a little symbol over the monster if you hit it.

Almost never see that, even with my grade 3 1r3blue traps. You set them to random targeting? I don't think that'd make enough of a difference though, I'd say try in a different browser + different flash implementation (i.e. chrome or firefox implementations if you haven't tried)--especially because of other things that don't match what everyone else seems to see.

I can try Chrome, but I normally use Firefox with everything fully updated. I'm not sure what you mean by a different flash implementation though. What things exactly don't match?

Keep in mind that the angering variations are factual and reproduce-able. Basically, in the same way that a giant or a swarmling wave angers differently than a reaver wave, a special reaver wave also angers differently than a normal reaver wave, making the standard angering formula for normal reavers fall apart when you are doing advanced fields on glaring with increased difficulty (and thus have a dearth of normal reavers).

Non-prem, level 89. Trap 1 (actually bottom left, not where the 1 is) is 1 red + 3 bl set to random. 2 is that upgraded.

That's what should be happening. That's the tower on hex I (not enough waves to do much with).

I use firefox in linux mint 12, no issuesm try about::addons and pick the plugins tab. Maybe deactivate the built-in one, sometimes there's issues. If windows, the adobe download has a lot of shovel-ware that's annoying to get rid of, use with care. I'd say try chrome first, at least it's a lot less hassle to just try out and get rid of if you don't like it. You just have such a different experience from the rest of us posting, that something has to be up somewhere--you start with way less mana or gems cost more or something compared to what you should have by level and 100 more skills from achievements.

Really only worry about mana pay-back from angering by killing the first few waves. After that, I don't worry, just that I can probably take care of the creeps by the time they show up (I tend to do the first few waves grade 1 then up the grade, usually 5-12 gems per wave until like wave 30 or 40. Well that's non-prem, prem is first giant wave gets 7 to 9 sheets of grade 1s then perma-freeze them on your mana trap for stupid mana fast and get around to killing them eventually--at least there's still some game in it non-prem lol.) Marked waves, the only thing to worry about is speed, if they have piles and piles, then tread carefully, otherwise, no big deal, the bonus hp or armor is usually a joke.

Anyway, I said 88 above because I got 900k xp out of Dsomething (the one with the block of 4 beacons). Was ready to rock and roll just when it ended, and those last few waves were all 5kk hp giants...could have taken a few more angers, but not enough to net decent xp out of them. It'll probably be easier once I can add some chain to a kill gem while keeping a decent crit chance at grade 11 or 12, probably a few more skill points.

Interestingly, I have pretty much no plug-ins as I've already disabled them all except for essential ones for playing the game and using the internet lol.

Here's a question: could a difference in trap behavior be speed related? For example, I could never actually complete the compass specials because I don't have a loading screen for fields in the game. I just select the field and its loaded.

It's computers, anything is possible. At least now you know its acting weird with at least this game. You want more, you can buy me a comp that isn't 8 year old improvements on 12 year old chips

Around level 100 is the breakpoint where you can get millions instead of hundred thousands of xp on any red non-horrid map. I didn't push it as far as it can probably go, and I'm still a bit beacon wary, had another large range billion hp discharge drop next to my kill gem before I could afford some protection lol. Also shadows and spires can be a problem, killing them probably sets you back a few waves and that's most of your experience.

It's very different from premium where you can get one of the bound gems and also orblets which is easy mode and shadows which isn't a problem for you if it has much effect at all other than giving you more xp. It's 350k xp per level at level 150 now, I should probably go open the rest of the map sometime

Of course I didn't exhaust all that you can do non-prem, and I find that way more fun than premium anyway (same as GCL).

So I was looking for cores and read hey T8 glaring or haunting. Died at wave 90odd glaring so decided I needed some quick xp (non-premium). So X4 everything with everything on top:



Compare to last page where there isn't white on the board (almost same level, much worse talisman) and I had to deal with some ugly beacon placement (does quadrillion hp beacon for level 247 non-prem sound remotely fair--yah for prem it's a speed bump, probably won't even see it place)? Anyway, got rid of those things. I rebuilt everything 16 spec when I saw I'd be doing trillion+ cost gems (ok way over that), for mana/kill I did 3 16 combine yellow or orange with a 16 combine 1r15w (get the most n + (n-1) with pures), to water down the red.

For 12 or 6 skill, 16 combine is worth a grade late 20s, 2 grades in late 30s (about double vs vanilla in specials). Probably not worth it when you have to kill 100k giants with grade 6

Probably could have angered a bit more (so tedious still, 20+ clicks per wave), got 1.5 billion xp and 450odd levels (247 to 693). Rarity 69 talisman part that didn't have anything I wanted and 150 cores... Really hope I don't have to switch to black non-premium, I hate farming hits.

So those would be my thoughts on getting from level 250 to 700 non-premium

Bots should stick to playing the game, not posting about it.

So what's that I spy on g6, an imprisoned white gem (grade 3 so tough to optimize, but beggars get what they get)?



That was yesterday's map of the day, don't remember what my level is now. Just know that I want a few more before looking for better talisman parts (30% freeze + 45 skill = oh so close to perma-freeze, off by 4 seconds).

Granted it feels like ages since I saw an xp boost spark, but red stages without white just aren't the same. 1/4 the xp, even when you start way lower hp and doing that means fewer waves to work with.

Really glad I got the compass map, red + white is fine even if it's ugly to get amps up there, guess that's next, then I'll need to hit the 1000-2000 thread.