Forums → Game Walkthroughs → GemCraft Labyrinth: Non-premium Pylon leveling

Also, until when do you upgrade lime? If the powergem is in a trap its quite useless, as it can only hit monsters in range, and that will, most probably, never exceed 40.

I already have 14 gems(12 in amplifiers, 2 in traps) to constantly upgrading, adding 2 more? I am too lazy. On the other hand, possible to get mana while one of the gems recharging. So spreading can help. If you find it preferable, use it. As i said, i am too lazy.
Lime component in manafarm i upgrade in two ways:
1. At start till 3-4 based on angering
2. After getting cyan. Based on "how long monster survives".
At max i got 100 targets per hit and there was giant wave with 100+ monsters. Definitely they spend a lot of time on my trap.
Lime for damage gem in trap... Sometimes need 10(giants+swarms, and if 2-3 entrances you can get solid flood of different wave monsters) often no more than 3.

I KILLED 5 STINKY MONSTERS WITH FLYING PROJECTILES, SUMMON MULTIPLIER WAS GOING TO BE AROUND 250 AND ENDED AS 60.


-.-

That's why i prefer traps
Video from second page i did three times...

Oh By the way, I made this quite useful Spreadsheet, anyone wants it just post here and I will upload it somewhere. I use it to work out how much is the mana threshold for summoming with different gems, how many monsters do I need to summon, having a rough estimate of my multiplier and what it can be, and how to summon with different gems and how much would it cost.

... Fail

You can use "Google docs" for this table.

About battle settings multipliers for PYLONS.
In case you got all amulets(3,65), how much monsters you need to summon to get same final result.
As you can see if you choose "double monster amount", you need to summon more than 2 times less monsters.
With both hardeners you need to summon 7 times less monsters with same result.
At last - random waves vs armored.
Angering increase hp by (7+3*grade of gem)%, so 110% for 1 grade, 113% for 2, etc; armor by 125%
pros for armored:
1. You need to summon even less monsters to get same result.
2. No @#$@#$ swarms
3. No giants.
4. They are slow
5. They always have decent mana on kill
pros for random:
1. normal monster have 40% less hp than armored, so you can anger each normal wave by 11 grade gem(O_o) and think that you have armored wave
2. runner monster have 20% less hp than normal monster, so you can additional anger each runner monster by 4 grade gem, then by 11 grade gem and get armored monster
3. swarm monster have 65% less hp than normal, so you can anger them by 19 grade gem, then by 11 grade gem and get armored monster wave.
4. more monsters(swarm amount vs armored amount, even 1 anger by 11 grade gem vs armored) means more damage for bloodbound, more mana for manafarm trap and easier highscore.
5. Giants. They gives excellent manaboost per anger. (for me - 1600 at 1-10 waves per 57 used without upgraded multiplier)

pros for random:
1 - Giants. A lot of mana boost if you manage to wreck them - early giants are too easy to over-anger and lose mana or have to restart game.
2 - Runners. These aren't as fast as swarms, and give considerably more mana per monster than armored. Also they're a good deal weaker than them. This allows higher early angering.
3 - A little more fun. Armored are moving at about the same speed, and it's not fun watching them crawl.

Cons for random:
1 - You have to have a good starting roll, if you get too many swarms in a row you will have a great chance to screw up "no banishment" amulet which is worth ~8% of maximal possible boost as a battle amulet, that's much I think.
2 - You have to anger carefully early on. With armored-only you have a uniform method of angering, while here you have to vary the outcome.
3 - Swarms. Worthless to anger until big mana farm and seriously upping chances at losing battle amulets. However, once you have a mana gem ready, they can still give big boosts.

That's why i don't anger swarms at start - i always can gembomb leakers.(already catch 1 monster that pass)

1. normal monster have 40% less hp than armored, so you can anger each normal wave by 11 grade gem(O_o) and think that you have armored wave

Swarm monsters leaking is a bit of a problem at the beginning when your kill gem/gems are low level and you want your main damage on the 20 giants you summoned I had to use a bomb or two since I got 3 in a row early when I did the top left pylon.

On double hp, it's no problem to keep up once you can throw a level 8 or so gem with some amps in tower or trap. Well unless swarm only, but would want a slightly different approach there, but even quad hp shouldn't be a problem if you can crank out a decent mana farm.

I tried J10 following the advice mentioned, I was only level 162 when I began and therfore had way less inital mana and stupidly forgot to ad any points in yellow mastery

a tip of my own, when trying to get the shrine kill amulets, you can get them easily on later wawes by puting 5 shrines close to each other and spam lvl 14 gems

ended with 6,574,779 and got to level 328 (more than twice of what I was ^^)

I just realized that monster's HP doesn't rise after wave 250 for some reason. Each wave has 3,333,333,333.
You can anger them for higher HP though.

is this pylon leveling still working? i am premium and i tried it three times, summoning 2000 to 6000 monsters and reaching waves 150+, but my summoning multiplyer was 1.12 the lowest and 2.00 at max, givng me around 55k xp for a 90min game. once i used all kind of higher grad gems to summon, the other time just hundered of lvl 1 gems and both did not really work.

It's the silly summoning multiplier calculation that lets you get silly high scores on pylons because on other levels you have to kill all the monsters (they're cleared when pylon fills).

Get all your battle amulets. Get the pylon like 3/4 filled if you don't have say level 20 gems.

Now you're going to stop killing monsters. Add up how many are dead, kill extras until you have a number divisible by 4 less one i.e. 5001 killed. Now summon until you have 5000 monsters summoned. Finish the pylon. Enjoy your stupid huge summon multiplier (something like (#summoned / (#killed - #summoned))^0.53, so about 120 for the example).

Summoned don't have to be on the board to count. Level 1 gems summon 4, level 5 gems summon 25 though gem bombing skill might change that.