Flame Power

[Mysterio28]

I'm still on the first galaxy, up to shard 4 I believe. I'm just wondering if it's worth going back to previous shards to try to build up a high wax count to try and increase my Flame Power? Or do I not have to worry about that yet?

[rob_s_cat2]

the only problems with returning to previous shards are that a// quests are disabled, and b// everything gets reset in the shard as if you're starting a new one, which is true also when you return to the current shard. at shard 4, which is the shard before things get 'harder' due to shard resist, i'd suggest get through it by perseverance, then rather than leaving the shard, rep-eat it while still in the shard a few times until you have a more agreeable flame power rating when you get to the city.

[wulfster42]

The first galaxy is the hardest, but you can totally power through it. We did back when things were harder than they are now.

That being said you can totally go back to previous shards. The general idea is to go back to one of these shards.

Easiest shard. First shard in the galaxy, enemies have lowest health and defense etc. There are only 40 levels, but that means you can finish a shard and update your flame power easier faster. This is the shard you want to do if you are farming grim chests by wax upgrades (you enter the shard, do a run, reset, do wax upgrades, then finish the shard and repeat.

Such a method is always useful as it gets you material forupgrading your weapon etc, quickly, it gets you flame multiplier (and therefore more was) so you can buy the first weapon from the shop as well (always reset the shop and only buy heavy weapons because they give iron and steel....which you will need for higher tier weapon upgrades.

This is a good shard to farm in the first galaxy once you get your flame multiplier up a bit.

Next up is the 4th shard I think it is, which is the first shard in a galaxy that goes to 50. This shard is useful to farm if you wanna set it and forget it on runs, but don't wanna deal with the higher difficulty of the resist runs. Resist runs have 2 champions though, so more wax per run, so if you can power through them, this is the best.

The last one you might want to repeat is the 5th shard in a galaxy which is the first resist shard, which means 2 champions (it's about 70% more wax per run I think). As long as you can power through it, this is the best long term shard to farm (lowest hp/defense, with max wax obtained).

That of course is for base shards, if a shard later on has a special effect, you may want to farm it, but beware, if you leave the shard (finish it), you will lose it's bonus (Ie flame shard will become a normal shard). Same is true for negative effects though so ...for instance, if the 5th shard is a blood shard......after you finish it, you can leave and re-enter and it will now be a normal shard for farming.

Honestly you don't need to farm almost at all to finish the first galaxy if you upgrade your weapon correctly. Go with the no-name weapon and upgrade it, toss in dominance stones (3 of em) and try and get it to quality 8 if possible (which makes the cost to upgrade 1). This alone should let you push through the first galaxy quickly.

After you finish the first galaxy, under serpent you can take a star that gives you poison soul. This basically makes all future content cake for you, and you will have no more challenges.

If you don't want to do that, the one that boosts weapon damage by 10 is also really good early on. Either way, you'll find the second galaxy way easier (even without poison soul) and it just keeps getting easier and easier from there. The game is sadly currently set up to have a huge initial difficulty level (where if you mess up, or don't upgrade your weapon it can be impossible to progress) followed by almost no challenge at all ever again.

[Mysterio28]

I'm currently on the 4th shard and can get up to area 41 before I hit a roadblock. The HP jump from 39 to 41 is huge and no matter how many times I use ritual to reset, it never seems to get any easier. That's why I thought maybe I should've built up my flame power some more on easier shards. But I'll try and stick it out and hope for the best. And I'll give using my no-name dagger a shot by upgrading it and adding those stones to it.

And is it better to just stick with using a single weapon rather than 2 or more?

[wulfster42]

Early on 2 or more can help because you don't have good items for the other slots, and your main weapon isn't upgraded that much yet.

Later on other weapons are just money hogs compared to your main upgraded one, which does so much more damage for the cost.

At your point rightnow, with a brand new no-named dagger which is probably under quality 8....you can certainly gain alot from having weapons in another slot. 2 equal weapons would almost double your damage btw, compared to just one (if both are same quality and have same upgrades).

In the first galaxy I do think i had more than one weapon as I didn't have good items for all the other slots and I didn't have combat gloves yet either.

But yeah, if your just using normal weapons right now, upgrading the no-named dagger will massively help, and make things way easier. That is why I restart, I went with a heavy weapon initially, and upgraded it a bit, but couldn't do that much with it, and I got totally blocked on stage 5. I tried for a WEEK to get by that stage, I boosted my flame multiplier to 50 (in the first galaxy with no bought wax multipliers etc), but just couldn't get past the 4th boss, let alone eventually make it past the 5th.

So I restarted, and this time used the no-name dagger and not only did I get through the 5th shard, I finished the WHOLE GALAXY in 3 days.

So it makes a huge difference.

[Mysterio28]

I don't have enough materials to upgrade my no-name dagger to quality 8. I only had enough to get it to 5. I also only have one of those dominance stones as well. And after trying out the dagger at quality 5 with just one of those stones, it wasn't looking all that impressive so I went back with the 2 weapons I was using before. I've done reset like 4-5 times now but regardless, I can barely get through are 41. Looks like it could very well take me a couple days to get past this shard.

[wulfster42]

It could almost be impossible, did you put any resources into those other weapons? Claws or excellence stones? Even quality 5 could be good with the right stones in it, although you would REALLY want to try and get at least 2 dominance if you could.

The game is a bit easier now, but back a bunch of months ago when I started playing I got stuck on the 5th shard of the first galaxy because of my weapon. Thing is, if you do the weapon wrong, you plain out can't get through that shard, doesn't matter what you do (or at least it was like that).

That being said, you get enough stones to make a good weapon with the no-name dagger, and you can remove stones from other weapons (but you won't get an item to do it with till later I think. You can buy them from the shop for not too many shards.

If you do buy one, once it gets down to only 1 charge left, upgrade it two, and always do that so you never lose it and have to buy one again.

That could let you remove the stones from whatever other weapons you have and add them into the no-name dagger. Meanwhile to upgrade it, you can run the first shard in the galaxy, and get grim chests by doing the wax upgrades, and then resetting the shard and doing it again. With a decent multiplier (which you probably have by now) you can do that in 2 runs.

The weapon is the key, it can make or break you. A base weapon...without any decent mods on it, won't get you through stage 5.....heck, it wouldn't get my past level 40 on stage 5...after a week of trying.

I then restarted, used my stones on the no-name dagger, and flew right through it....the weapon is all the difference since you can literally multiply your damage by 100x+.

Look at it this way. Base dagger is 5 damage and 25 cost.

Even at only 5 quality, a dominance stone makes that 10 damage and 20 cost. That more than doubles your damage per cost (it's basically a 125% damage increase.

One stone of excellence means you get a 1% increase per level and level your weapon up to around 200%.....so that is a 3x multiplier, 2 of them would be a 6x multiplier (and that is seperate from the above). So those 3 at this point is about a 15x multiplier of your damage, and you only need quality 3 for that many.

With the last 2, say you put claws in each, they add 5 damage each, and 20% multiplier (aside from everything else).

That boosts your dagger up to 20 with a 20 cost, and then boosts all your damage by 40%.

So first, your base damage doubles...that multiplies everything by 2x right there...so your 15x mulitiplier you had before, becomes a 30x multiplier. Then you multiply that by 1.4x....which brings it up to about a 42x multiplier.....at quality 5 only.....and with only 1 dominance, 2 excellence and 2 claw stones.

Now consider how hard it would be for you to kill a boss....doing 42x less damage. All the farming for wax in the world will only boost your damage multipliers at the top end by a small amount (they get less and less). True, you can wait for increased multipliers from your wind mask, and those do work together (so damage and crit multiply by each other), but...even there, you would need to have 42x the combined multiplier. to beat the boss (so basically what you can get in 30 minutes......would take you 18 hours or so).

You can still do it mind you, just you have to wait a very long time boosting your wind mask damage and crit multipliers......or you can just have a strong weapon that...like for me, lets you literally just use wind mask damage for 2 stages and wind mask crit for 2 stages and your done.

That is how important a weapon is, and that is only at quality 5...which is a VERY low quality and you can farm better than that very fast, I'm not even sure if it requires steel for the no named weapon at that point.

If you don't know, you can reset the shop, by leaving and rejoining the game. you can then buy heavy swords from it (just reset till it's the first option) and break them down for both iron and steel, which means you should EASILY be able to get quality 8 before finishing the 5th shard.

Sadly it's not as easy to get the stones though, so if you didn't have luck on those and only have 1 dominance, your Q-8 no name dagger would only drop to 17 cost with 13 damage. You could use one of those coins for now, to drop the cost 10 more, to 7 though, which would help alot, and I think you get one by the 5th shard.

Anyway that is generally the biggest challenge, and it's all up to the weapon you make starting off sadly.

[Mysterio28]

It's possible my weapons just aren't up to snuff, but it could also be my build too. I'm using a pure STR build at the moment with my primary skill focus being:

Blacksmith Craft
Mask of Fire (for the 10x dmg)
March
Flame Throw (my main dmg source later on)

It seems to dish out a lot of dmg, but I'm thinking in the long run it's actually not all that great. I have tried a pure AGI and WIS build too but I can't even get them to do a fraction of the dmg as that build. And I've tried looking up builds but not much luck.

[wulfster42]

Mask of fire sucks by itself, it's only a 10x multiplier for your mask. Wind is just better in every way, even if your mainly going down fire (And you get fingers along the way which rocks).

You can use ambush to get around the no crit penalty of mask of fire though (giving you 100% crit chance and 10x multiplier from strength).

But think of this, you can get a 10x damage multiplier from masks soul damage, and a 10x multiplier from masks improved crit damage AND the advantage of switching to wind masks auto click (basically doubles damage, and gives you the bonus from fingers even if you are running rage (and don't invest in photo etc)..

So yeah, strength isn't gonna do it for ya, march is actually better than rage, just slower, so if you want, you can do a march build which means no photo needed to boost enchant under wisdom (tier 4), higher long term damage multiplier from march (compared to rage), and less total points invested as well.

But march or rage, go wind mask, and then boost your damage soul and improved crit soul. Get ambush and on target (even if you have to sacrifice blacksmith to do it) and you'll destroy the bosses.

Without the huge investment of blacksmith you can easily go with this:

10 points rage
1/10 firefly skills/20 points fingers/5-10 points ambush/20 points on target.

Then invest 10 points in wisdom (to get to tier 4, and 6 points a pop total per enchant point (5 in photo/1 in enchant) 4 points in enchant (24 points total) nets you a x4 multiplier..which is waaaay cheaper then trying to get all the way up to blacksmith (which costs like 60 points, 70 or 75 to get to level 10 alone.

Bonus points just go into on target all the way up to like 40. With even 1 dex ring (and try and get a dex ring and a dex vodoo doll) along with improved crit soul (and at least 4x multiplier from improved damage) you'll destroy the bosses.

Meanwhile that doesn't cost too much at all. Wait to put a point in wind mask until you get to ambush (which auto boosts you up to on target). It's level 9 for ambush which means 46 total points spent to get there. You need 10 points to get to enchant, and only 1 point to get to rage, so base points total needed for that build is 57....leaving you about 100 points to spread amont the skills.

10 points rage + 20 fingers + 20 on target + 25 photo + 1 mask and 4 enchant is 80 points.
The last important step is non-stop critting so 1/9 in firefly and 10 in ambush will make that happen easily, and use up the rest of your points (you can use less you only ACTUALLY need 1/5 and 5...so you could put the other 10 points into on target to get to 30....but....it's much easier to do with more points in ambush etc (and no chance of accidently using up all your energy and ending rage if you have 9 in firefly).

Anyway this setup maximizes your bonus from wind mask (improved crit bonus) since EVERY hit is a crit.......When you finally get to the boss, you switch from improved crit or damage, to autoclick, and that should annihilate all the bosses (in the first galaxy) easily.

Going for blacksmith in the first galaxy is a trap. It is a simple multiplier like fingers, but at a MUCH steaper cost to get to, and you get almost nothing along the way (that being said 2 or 3 in strength is cheap....and does boost damage significantly at first.

anyway 100% crit chance from ambush with even just 1 dex ring + improved crit soul, and on target (which is a 250% increase per point) is by far the most damage you can do with only 3 skill points per level. Everything else is secondary. Since you pass fingers along the way, and rage is only 1 point, the most efficient way to damage is to do the following.

1/10 firefly and 10 ambush along with 20 in on target is the largest damage boost you can get by far early on. it means 100% crit chance and 20 in on target is a 5000% damage multiplier (as every hit is a crit)...and that is multiplied by the normal 10x crit multiplier. In addition any dex rings/vodoo dolls will multiply that again...basically making you do WAY more damage. Still other sources/mutlipiers will boost it even more (for instance a 5x damage soul multiplier from wind mask, increases your base damage by 5x..which then gets multiplied by your crit damage.

It all works together, you want as many multipliers as you can get, as each makes the others much stronger.

That is why the enchant which only gives a 4x multiplier (for 34 point investment) is worth it, because it multiplies all the other damage (like the huge crit boost) by 3x.

With rage (17 points is a 750 or 8.5x multiplier), and fingers 19 points is a 20x multiplier, and enchant 4 points is a 4x multiplier. You boost base damage significantly. Then you boost that a FREAKTON with on target and ambush. That is basically the easy way to get through early content, although your weapon....is still important.