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[LordBucket]

Whenever I add trait it never says that my rarity level is rising. Perhaps I don't do enough?

Have to add a lot. It's ~13 shadow cores for the first +1, and even with four traits at 7 for 112 shadow cores it's only +3-7. It's cheaper to pay 100 for the rarity enhance, but if you do both, plus glaring, 1-20 becomes 21 to 49.



Again, drops seem to be weighted towards the bottom edge of the rarity range. But if you want to farm for good talismans, save up several hundred shadow cores, then pick an easy map like F1, pump it up as much as you can, buy a couple rarity boosts, and as you play watch for talisman drops. If you don't get one, restart the map before it finishes. That way you don't waste the shadow cores on spent on traits. If you're using glaring difficulty, try to use two rarity boosts, and glaring drops multiple talismans fairly often.

Be prepared to burn through a lot of shadow cores on trash talismans if you do that though. The above talisman is by far my best, and even after spending over 2000 shadow cores, I still have a couple single effect talismans. My more median talisman is something like +7-9% damage to something and random useless effect like extra curse charge.

Poison traps possess the powers of a small god. How did you get so far without them?

Armor tearing and critical hit gems, mostly. Early on I was angering waves a lot due to chapter zero / labyrinth habits. With low starting mana that made traps unviable because so many monsters snuck past my traps without taking any damage. And since armor is a thing here, armor to reduce it or crit to do enough damage to get past it seemed the way to go.

It worked for a while.

EDIT: And, it seems to be working again on later fields. There's a lot of armor, and I'm starting to see reavers with 6000+ health. Poison traps don't do much to that and it's expensive both in in terms of mana and space to create poison trap trails. Whereas 6 grade 3 beam-enhanced purples in traps all in a row can cut remove a couple hundred points of armor for my killing towers.

Maybe stacking %damage on reavers is better than it seems but it doesn't feel like it.

I had mine over 60% for a while, but couldn't tell the difference.


Has anyone managed a skill cap higher than 10? It's been a long time since I've seen it go up and I'm starting to wonder if that's as high as it goes.



EDIT again:
Spending an hour on a super beefed up map only to have a half million health spire show up in the last few waves is awful.

[LordBucket]

Now level 60. Yes, skill caps can go above 10. Though it's now 77 starting mana worth of skillpoints for an extra 3-4% modifier. Starting to see swarmlings with over 10,000 health, so poison traps are generally only useful for the first 10-20 waves now. Whereas armor traps are becoming pretty much essential to deal with the routinely 30+ creatures on the field with over 200 armor each, including the occasional giant with 600,000 health.

Fields are sometimes taking ~45 minutes to do, and sometimes I lose. Would really like to power up some but my next level is 50,000xp, and I'm running out of easy fields to dump shadow cores on. I think if I were to do it over, I'd have made a general policy of always spending a couple points on traits every map after E or so. 1 each into mana lock, haste and beacon storm wouldn't significantly affect difficulty, and for only 3 shadow cores per map it would mean doubling my xp on all those fields. That would be a lot easier and less effort than going back and replaying all those maps a second time with minimal settings, and I can't beat most of them with much higher settings. I've been trying to farm high level talismans on the starter field, bu I can't even come close to beating it with maximum difficulty.

F1, the simple 3 wave starter field, when pumped all the way up as much as I can costs 280 (+100) shadow cores, and has 40 waves with giants with over 2000 health and almost 100 armor by wave 3. It would be nice to have some of those rarity 24-53 talismans it would drop, but I'd need thousands more starting mana to even have a chance and without endurance mode from premium I don't see any way to casually go out and get 20 more wizard levels at a time.

On the bright side it's been a long time since I've felt I was stuck at a wall. There are options now. More fields to fight on, and things I can do to get stronger. The game nevertheless still seems a lot harder than any previous game in the series.

[Robsoie]

I'm stil not far, reached only level 30, but it took me some time to understand why i had so much difficulty in some of the previous maps : in fact at that stage of the game getting all the skills to their max when they're available is a mistake.

Because in this new version of gemcraft the skills points you don't spend into skills will translate into a lot of starting mana, so each time you increase a skill it means less mana at the start (not enough compensated by some of the talisman parts).
There are maps in which when i went with full skills, it was simply impossible to avoid being destroyed in 2 or 3 waves, as i had not the mana to build enough gems and not able to get them leveled enough to destroy the 2/3 first waves.

And then it makes a huge difference if you keep some of the skills to 0 , what was near impossible suddenly become completely doable, something to keep in mind if you find one of the levels too hard.

So far it looks like the same as in the previous version, gemcraft labyrinth, mixed gems are superior in efficiency to pure gems .

[MoLAoS]

Depends on the gems I think? Poison is best left alone. I wonder if there are any good combos with chain. I read somewhere that poolbound stacking with chain was nerfed.

I think skill wise its best to change skills around a lot based on the map.

[LordBucket]

at that stage of the game getting all the skills to their max when they're available is a mistake.

That becomes even more true later on. For example, right now it's not even possible for me to max everything. At Level 60 plus 193 points from achievements, checking...I'd only be able to max 9 out of 16 skills if I tried.

it looks like the same as in the previous version, gemcraft labyrinth, mixed gems are superior in efficiency to pure gems .

Oh? What are you mixing? I haven't found any combinations that work very well. Orange/purple in traps kind of, but I've yet to get that to actually work in a map that I hadn't already won. No premium here, so chainhit isn't an option.

...wait. Actually, is it only the chainhit skill disabled for nonpremium or chainhit altogether? If it's only the skill I can cn still get multiple hits from an unskilled gem...that would make a huge difference. I'm going to check that.

EDIT:
Yes, chainhit does work for non-premium. Wow. I've been making this way harder than it needed to be.

I think skill wise its best to change skills around a lot based on the map.

Agreed. Traps work better on some maps than others.Though I'm finding I use armor tearing pretty much no matter what else I do.

[MoLAoS]

Well I just got a rarity 30 on the all trap map with a max of like 34. I now have 1 green and 1 blue talisman piece. This new blue one does 1% exp and 0% for swarmlings and giants and max shrine charge. It has 5 upgrades to the greens 4. Once I have the 200 cores to max them both I expect them to be pretty awesome. I should have 10-14% damage bonuses on all 3 monster types. If I had 5 side and 5 corner I would have 50-70% bonuses on all types but that's far, far in the future unless I pay IRL money.

Do you think chain can work with traps? Even hitting only 1 extra guy at small range would give poison traps a massive bonus for some stuff and would be worth a lot for mana. I think the max mana I ever got was 12k. I got the 10k mana leeched achievement at least.

[LordBucket]

Do you think chain can work with traps?

Yep. Just tested with a single trap, and saw two monsters explode on a single tick.

Just got a rarity 30

Congrats . Post as screenshot once it's upgraded?

I should have 10-14% damage bonuses on all 3 monster types.

So far as I can tell, each tier of upgrades doesn't upgrade every bonus always. Later upgrades seem to only upgrade bonuses closer to the bottom of the list.

[MoLAoS]

Do you think chain can work with traps?

Yep. Just tested with a single trap, and saw two monsters explode on a single tick.

Just got a rarity 30

Congrats . Post as screenshot once it's upgraded?

I should have 10-14% damage bonuses on all 3 monster types.

So far as I can tell, each tier of upgrades doesn't upgrade every bonus always. Later upgrades seem to only upgrade bonuses closer to the bottom of the list.

That seems correct. In any case shrine charge is on the bottom and exp is on the top. The monster damage are the middle 2. So it should average out and at least be as good as the blue reaver damage bonus.

[Robsoie]

In Labyrinth it was clear that dual mixed gems were much superior to pure one, with both skills maxed, many of the levels that seemed impossible were in fact easy if you used mixed (and of course clever use of walls).

Because, at least in Labyrinth as i have not yet enough experienced this with Chasing Shadows, even if effects are lowered on mixed compared to pure, the pure slight bonus to its own effect wasn't enough to make them as efficient as getting the 2 effects of a dual hitting monsters at once.

That is for dual gems, as i have never really tested with triple or more mixed, but dual gem simply won me the whole game in Labyrinth, while i had enormous difficulties on some specific levels if i used only pure.

I'm too early to see if the situation is similar in Chasing Shadows, but so far i have used only dual gems (mostly poison and armor , as both the skills were available to my character at that point of the game to increase their effects) and it seemed to do the job.

Except on that special level on which you can only build traps and no tower, i just used tons of poison trap to get through it.

But that major thing with that Chasing Shadow game is to make sure you have enough starting mana, so really don't max too many skills , keep some at 0 intentionally, on some hard levels it really can make the difference between impossible and possible if you're able to improve even a single gem earlier.

[Mephansteras]

Oh, cool. I really enjoyed Gemcraft. I'm sure this will suck up many hours in my future.

[Ozyton]

So I've never played these games before, which one is the best/which one would you people suggest starting with, and where do you suggest playing it (website)?

[Robsoie]

The one i enjoyed the most was the 2nd of the serie, "chapter 0" , the one i liked the less was Labyrinth, probably because it was a bit too repetitive as i played it right after having completed the 2 previous ones.

Chasing Shadow so far isn't too bad, as i didn't played a gemcraft since a long while, but it still does not hook me like in the past, i guess the appeal of the novelty really disappeared for me.

But if you're new to the serie any of them should be good for you i think.

The 2 first gemcraft had some skills locked to specific website due to their contracts, Armorgames , so maybe it's better to play them there if you want to have access to all the content.
Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows have "premium" content on top of that, while chapter 0 and the 1 gemcraft had no locked features.

[LordBucket]

which one is the best/which one would you people suggest starting with

Gemcraft 1 is probably something you can sit down and beat in several hours. A few days at most. There's story continuity between the games, so you might consider starting with Gemcraft. That said, it's kind of a cute little tower defense game rather than an epic game. If you decide to play them in order, it's Gemcraft --> Chapter Zero --> Labyrinth --> Chasing Shadows.

Gemcraft Chapter Zero, is in my opinion, and I think that of a lot of other people too, the most memorable of the series. It's a game I continued playing for a long time even after beating it. (228 wave challenge, anyone?) It is however, long, and beating it will probably take months. Of all the games in the series it's the most intense because while this is where the series first started to shine, unlike later games that had an active pause feature allowing you to continue to spend mana while the game is paused, Chapter Zero is a constant race against the clock. This makes is less strategic in a sense, but more riveting.

I found Labyrinth to be a big disappointment. It had a lot of interface and conceptual improvements, but the dev made some balancing mistakes that render the game incredibly easy. It's 'bigger" in the sense of having more fields, it's more intricate and there's more to do but once you get to the middle third of the game there's a rinse and repeat strategy that once you figure it out will get you quickly through each level in minutes. At that point beating it becomes mostly a question of how willing you are to spend enough hours spamming the next wave button. If you play Labyrinth you might consider avoiding reading the forums, because once you know the winning strategy it's incredibly boring.

Chasing Shadows (the game this thread is about) is probably the best of the series in terms of technical quality, but it's not really grabbing me the way Chapter Zero did. I think original gemcraft was a fun little project, Chapter Zero was the devs response to realizing that wow, people really like his games...and now it's a fully commercialized business rather than games for fun. That's had both good and bad effects on the game. If you want to play the whole series, I'd save this one for last because if you start here with all the interface improvements, going back and playing some of the previous games might be difficult.

which one is the best/which one would you people suggest starting with

Like Robsole says, exclusive content on armor games. If you're flexible on where to play, you may as well play there.

[Drammor]

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed so far, but talisman fragment rarity doesn't appear to be based strictly on random generation. I was playing an early field a while back, and I got two talismans while playing the map normally. One was a 17, and the other was a 19. Once I beat the level, I continued on in Endurance mode, hoping to get more talismans. I did not. However, when I was ultimately destroyed several waves later, the talismans were instead 31 and 33.

[MoLAoS]

Hit skill level 10. I think that by level 70 or so, you can afford to level most important skills to 10, simply because with your total mana as high as it is, the savings on skills, which scale as you spend more mana, becomes beneficial. I'd leave most gem type skill bonuses at 6, but the true colors, and the cost savings skills really should be maxed out from that point on. I'm only level 60 and I'm seeing benefits of focusing on these skills.

6 for the more situational skills is good because its when a secondary bonus ticks up and also the next 3 levels cost as much as the first 6 and the 4 after that as much as the first 9. And the 5 after that as much as the first 13.