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[Toaster]

That was more voicing annoyance that I can't use it at all, unlike giant domination which is "Hope you didn't want to actually beat this level!"

[saracoth]

Regarding beacons, on many maps you can prevent their appearance by simply building enough walls on off-path squares. In my experience (with v1.06 and earlier), beacons, shrines, and mana shards respect walls and won't appear on top of them. If there are no valid openings, they won't appear at all.

You don't have to cover every square, just enough so that there are no 2x2 openings for new beacons. I usually cover at least the area immediately around my towers and traps to avoid gem resocketing beacons.

[Trevasaurus]

So the pouch must make a lot of difference to the grind factor. I max all traits except the mana over time one and have no problems running levels on haunting now. Just using 1 R/Y/B/W tower with 8 amps and I can bomb the waves to 999 mobs without fear.

[MoLAoS]

So the pouch must make a lot of difference to the grind factor. I max all traits except the mana over time one and have no problems running levels on haunting now. Just using 1 R/Y/B/W tower with 8 amps and I can bomb the waves to 999 mobs without fear.

At least someone understands that amps are godly. Although I would use orange in my combo. Its a crap ton of mana using beam. Depends on what %damage increase yellow gives you I guess.

[Trevasaurus]

At least someone understands that amps are godly. Although I would use orange in my combo. Its a crap ton of mana using beam. Depends on what %damage increase yellow gives you I guess.

Yellow is by far the most important gem in the game. Mine have an 80% chance to do 5,000% damage which makes a huge difference on high waves where monster hp increases to insane levels. I fill all 8 amps with pure yellow gems and keep them -4 levels of the boosted gem, which is usually level 14 by the end. I can now take down 1T hp giants with x7 giant trait and x5 adaptive carapace.

[psorek]

I am currently level 1800 and something. I've bought magican's pouch becouse I waited for this game for about a year - it helps a bit, but no SO much.

I've never gone into the endurance. To level up I use mass angering and GCL-style manafarms: a trap with mana gain/poolbound/chain hit - it grows extremally fast if you put about lv24 in pure colors, red, orange, white and trap skills. As killing gem I use chain hit/poolbound/multiple damage - the last one scales rapidly above grade 12 or so. The key is white, it's unlocked on some non-premium field.

About shadow cores: high diffucity run gives me about 2k with cost of 500 so I simply don't have to worry about them (nearly) anymore.

Amplifiers are useful only below g18 to amplify range - later I've noticed no difference when using/not using them.

[LordBucket]

magican's pouch becouse I waited for this game for about a year - it helps a bit, but no SO much.

I use

poolbound/chain hit

Neither of those skills are available without the pouch. Would you be level 1800 without them?

[Drammor]

I highly doubt so. It looks like, as much as I like playing this game with the pouch, without it I would have given up. Yellow, Red and White are necessary for high-level play. You can play and even beat this game without them, but you'd have a much harder time at it, and need to grind for an extra 6 hours or so just to get the requisite resources, but it can be done. If you're only playing this for the story, the pouch is not necessary.

If you're playing it for the experience, or the challenge, though, it's an absolute requirement.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's "pay to win," since the devs did put years of hard work into making it, and $5 is nothing compared to that effort. It's only fair and right that they should want something back for their trouble, even after the cut that armor games and kongregate and steam will take, regardless of whether they charge others or not, but I really sincerely wish that there could have been a way to do that without crippling the people to whom ftp was given.

[psorek]

Neither of those skills are available without the pouch. Would you be level 1800 without them?

poolbound is pouch-only? OK, I didn't know.

[Robsoie]

yes, according to the guides they're available only in a premium locked field

without it I would have given up. Yellow, Red and White are necessary for high-level play. You can play and even beat this game without them, but you'd have a much harder time at it, and need to grind for an extra 6 hours or so just to get the requisite resources, but it can be done. If you're only playing this for the story, the pouch is not necessary.

I agree, not having purchased any premium content, that's exactly why i gave up playing that game.

Basically the game difficulty is linked to your starting mana in most fields.
Not enough starting mana and you'll have weaker gems or less ones deployed from start and from there it's a race in which you're always trying to catch up until the last part in which you don't deliver enough damage to beat everything thrown at you.
Enough starting mana and you start very well, and keep up with the monster power progression.

Now if you increase your skills too much, you lose a lot of that starting mana that depends a lot on your unassigned skill point (that's in my opinion is bad design, a game in which you need to keep your upgrades low in order to win on some fields ... but whatever)
A workaround to keep skills not too low while having enough starting mana is then to level up ... level up a very lot (as the talisman fragments that give +mana does not give much anyways unless you're insanely lucky in finding good ones)

To level up a lot, you will need to replay fields with traits enabled, and make those traits as high as possible.

And that's the problem : increasing field traits will cost a lots of core shadow (more than 130 at the point i decided to give up), and when you're finished playing such a field, you will have gained between 2 or 3 levels yes, but you will have gained only between 10 and 20 core shadows most of the time !

Meaning you will have to go grind again and again to get back enough core shadow in order to replay fields with highest traits power (to get the best XP possible).
And that without mentionning that fragments will cost lots of core shadows too.

The fact that the gems (and gem skills) that makes the best combinations according to every guides are premium locked, meaning too that you will be stuck a lot in many fields as you actually available gems will not be as powerful as they would be if you had the premium locked ones+corresponding leveled skills.
Meaning that you'll need more starting mana to counterbalance the fact you'll have weaker gem and keep up with later field difficulty, meaning you'll have to level up again a lot more.

Back at the core shadows grinding due to expensive traits, and repeat ad nauseum.

To me for non premium play, Chasing Shadows is the worst game of the serie, even the many premium locked content didn't prevented the player to have fun in Labyrinth in which it was better balanced between premium and non premium, but in Chasing Shadow it forces non premium to grind a lot more than in Labyrinth.

And despite i usually have patience, it was frankly too boring at that point in Chasing Shadow to grind again and again.
Definitively a version of gemcraft in which you want to get the premium content to cut the very boring grinding and enjoy it.

The good side for me is that giving up on chasing shadows unlocked more time to play something else

[LordBucket]

You can play and even beat this game without them, but you'd have a much harder time at it, and need to grind for an extra 6 hours or so just to get the requisite resources, but it can be done.

I think it's not the shadow cores that are the problem so much as simply the need to go back and play the same levels 3-4 times each. Shadow cores are easy to macro for. But even with an endless supply, the lack of chainhit and poolbound skills makes it terribly difficult to beat more difficult and rewarding settings. The "I have poolbound so I'm going to get 70 million on a map" phenomenon doesn't happen. Instead, it's play every map once, then play every map with 30-60 shadow cores worth of difficulty, then go back and play them again with with 100-120, then go back...again and again, each time increasing your score a little bit.

Even at level ~250 something I still lack the penetrating power to beat many fields on max settings. Try it. Drop chainhit skill to zero and don't use any poolbound gems. Then set an early field on a tile like E or I to max settings and try to beat it. Once the multi-million health giants and half million health reavers start showing up it simply becomes impractical to kill them. Massive angering for score even less practical. And unlike Labyrinth there appear to be no non-premium endurance fields that you can use to bulk up your level.

But what you can do is, again, continually keep redoing fields, getting a little bit more...a couple hundred thousand xp at a time, on 80+ fields. Slowly leveling up over forever.

But even that's assuming macroing. If you're not doing that...yeah, without premium I don't think it's realistic to even come close to beating the game. I stopped counting how many shadow cores I macroed to do the above level grinding, but I thin we're probably talking in the vicinity of 24 hours of macroing over a week. And even still I don't have enough levels to beat later fields. Doing that by hand? Not going to happen.

[psorek]

I've had about level 130 when purhased magican's pouch. Had about 2k shadow cores then and never had problems with them. I used all-on-3 traits with glaring gaining 10 levels every time. It is very rewarding and costs only 100 shadow cores or so. BTW, starting mana isn't a problem from level 250 anymore.

[lorb]

Now if you increase your skills too much, you lose a lot of that starting mana that depends a lot on your unassigned skill point (that's in my opinion is bad design, a game in which you need to keep your upgrades low in order to win on some fields ... but whatever)

It occurred to me at some point that it actually isn't such a bad design. It really is the same as having a non-capped skill that increases starting mana. You decide where you assign your skill points. It's just that by default all skill points go to the mana-skill, which is the only skill that has no cap.

edit: for those that for whatever reason can't pay any money for this there is a cracked version around. It has premium content unlocked, is not site locked and most important for me, runs even on linux. Am I violating board rules if I say where one can get it?

[Toaster]

Probably.

[Blaze]

In the end, it looks like there's 3 locked hexes. C,L, and W. It looks like you need W to unlock the spiritforge area; if it's unlockable at all.

Poolbound, Bloodbound, Chain Hit, and Fury are MagPouch only.

Anyone figure out what compasses do? I see that gems appear on the loading screen whenever you try going into a field with one.