More about angering waves in endurance

[hbarudi]

I would like to understand the good amount of angering the waves for an endurance run starting from wave 1 before endurance. Always one of two things happen:
1. They die on the mana farm gem.

2. They walk past my high level tower taking little to no damage and then they take my orblets and end my endurance run just because I overestimate how much to anger the waves.

Last endurance run I defeated to wave about 375 was those overangered giants that eventually finished my run, but still I got 10 billion xp. After those giants, I eventually clicked call all waves early and put my tower on least hp. This got me to wave 550 or so before those giants finished me off while my freeze is cooling down.

Question is how do I calculate optimal wave angering? Even when the monsters have much higher hp than mana gem, they still die on it just reading gem damage and kill gem damage + yellow ability does not tell much about what I am supposed to do and what about chain hit and reaching higher bloodbound hit levels.

[dholland]

When mana farming, it should be all g1s. There's two stages. First, before you have a bolt in killtrap, you can only enrage to the sum of monster HP and armour. Be careful, with g1s the armour goes up a lot faster than the HP, so when you have no bolt (so killtrap can ignore armour), so you have to keep the armour slightly below your killtrap power (max damage times crit). It's usually straightforward to kill them if you get through the armour since the HP will be relatively low. Note that, provided your crit on killtrap is a reasonable amount, if your manatrap gems are the same level they will not get through the armour as they have no crit. As soon as bolt is ready, put in killtrap, and now you can enrage to HP equal to killpower. When you upgrade/combine, if you do the killgem to same level as managems and enrage to the new killpower, at least the newly enraged waves won't be killed by the managems, but the old ones with less enraging already on the screen might be. It gets easier the higher your wizard level, because you can quickly get to 1000 or more g1s and stupid amounts of armour, so managems can't kill anything.

At low wizard levels, you'll end up killing some waves when you transition to more enraging and upgraded gems, until you have enough armour on the monsters. You'll just have to accept it, and manage it to be the least number of waves you can.

High grade managems, especially with amps, shoot very fast, so they will kill monsters unless the max damage of the manatrap is below their armour. So concentrate on the armour and enraging that as much as the killtrap can handle. You may still kill a wave or two when upgrading /combining but it won't be much. Most of your XP comes in the later waves, so don't worry about it.

[dholland]

You quickly get enough chain from bloodbound. If you can get 10 billion XP, then you really don't need to worry about chain! Towers with chain will be able to hit all monsters on screen if there's only one entrance (a good way to farm hits since you need at least one tower for beacons/shadows in Haunting). With more than one entrance, you can only chain nearby monsters so you only can hit all the monsters near one entrance with one tower. Up to you whether you have more towers (and lag). With manatraps, they can only chain the monsters actually on the manatrap. That's usually quite a small number even if there's 1000s of monsters on the screen (although freeze and WoE can help increase it, along with slow gems to concentrate monsters from several waves together). So you really don't need any more than the minimal amount of red and let bloodbound do its job. If you want to farm hits on a killgem (my choice) or a precursor like a red black gem, you can put it in a trap after a slow trap and before the managems. The problem here is that most of the hits go to your hit trap, rather than the managems. In the end, it's mostly about the mana, so you should arrange that most of the hits are going to managems rather than hit farm killgems. Of course, these hit farm killgems have barrage and not bolt, so they don't kill anything before it gets to the mana farm.

You have to make sure the hit farm gems don't kill anything, which can be a problem because of their crit (hence the red black alternative with no crit). But once you have bolt on the killtrap, you can then use hit farm killgems of the same grade as the killgem, and because of the armour there'll be no problem. If you want to start farming hits immediately, you'll have to have a lower level gem to avoid it killing stuff.

[hbarudi]

My last endurance run I reached mana pool level 51 and grade 60 gems.

Kill trap? I always use a kill tower changing range accordingly, such a pain sometimes especially to kill beacons all over the map and then immediately reduce range to not kill stuff on my mana farm, set to structures except of certain fields where thare are dangers such as the corrupted mana shard that will take away my damage and the sleeping hive which will make unkillable swarmlings to kill the monsters, do I have to use a kill trap and it is hard to get 6 amplifiers for a trap on many fields, so it would have to be the trap itself on example B3 no amplifiers, but B3 trap only. But on B3, How do I kill a spire there, that is a problem as he will possibly prevent me from even beating the level normally.

So back to my question, anger with only grade 1 gems, as for beacons I am walling since they are my source of lag in this game nothing else I can build lots of towers and stuff and have several thousand monsters onscreen, but beacons are such a source of lag that I just eventually wall off the whole map and only dying spires reallow beacons to be built. Back to angering question, so I anger until their armor is more than the max damage of the mana gem in trap so they cannot die on the mana farm. But what if my kill tower couldn't defeat those monsters and then they take my orblets and kill me since they become too strong for the kill tower to handle.


1000 grade 1 gems on one wave? Are you serious? For me this is suicide, they get on wave 1, 10^35 hp (max fury and on haunting) which is the same hp as monsters in wave 600 on A5 haunting endurance how are you people able to anger that much? Also with 45 fusion, it will cost 18000 mana to anger each wave.

"High grade managems, especially with amps, shoot very fast, so they will kill monsters unless the max damage of the manatrap is below their armour. So concentrate on the armour and enraging that as much as the killtrap can handle. You may still kill a wave or two when upgrading /combining but it won't be much. Most of your XP comes in the later waves, so don't worry about it.", Most of my xp? for mana gems I care that monsters don't die on mana gems for mana, not xp in this situation since I think only my killgem is usually giving xp. However, I do have to allow stuff to die on my manafarm when I upgrade it.

The above is about your first comment.

[hbarudi]

Ok, now for the second comment:
First of all I have seen the guide about hitfarming and the use of strong chain hit amplifiers and grade 2 black red gems for getting hits. However, my concern for chain hit is how to use it to figure out my damage for the purposes of angering waves which is what this discussion is about.

More towers does not give more lag for me, only more beacons give more lag especially if 999 beacon giants are being destroyed by a kill tower set to structure and reach the whole map this makes my game freeze or go to extremely slow less than 1 frame per socond rate as far as beacons are concerned, this is why I simply wall the whole map so that they can't build beacons this to a lesser extent applies to angering waves.

For bloodbound, http://gemcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Gems will show hit levels for black gems. And I see the guide which suggest using beam with max beam skill and put in lots of red black grade 2 traps and towers also with beam and they can't kill the monsters, but get lots of hits. I didn't do this on my first endurance run, but will think about hit farming on my second endurance run. Also my manafarm alone, got about 37 million hits which brought it to hit level 30. For my kill gem, got about 15 million hits for the kill tower which is hit level 28 and this is without any hit farm boosts. When hit farming at the end I just combine them into my mana and kill gems to get those extra hit levels.

We are straying to much from the main topic here which is angering the waves.
So only grade 1 gems, I was increasing my gem grade every 15 waves and using 50 gem bombs per wave and until I got grade 15 gems 50 of those give 999 giants. So angering only with grade 1 gems to give them incredible amounts of armor, then I can even use purple gems to cut all the extra armor after they get past the mana farm. Then I need to be able to kill those monsters. So I should use kill trap then instead of tower, and then use a weaker gem maybe white color in tower with 8 amplifiers to kill stuff such as shadows and early beacons built before I can afford the walls to block them also white gem bombs are more effective on buildings than other color gems as gem bombs.

So for next endurance, anger using only grade 1 gems until armor > mana farm gem max damage. Lets see if I can even survive them.

[dholland]

I don't suggest 1000 g1 gems immediately, just that you build up to as many g1s as your killgem can handle. I use the extreme endgame guide, which suggests killtraps during mana farming, then when you have done with farming you do switch to a killtower, and of course at that stage you switch enraging to g2s or higher (for max beacons, if you have the patience use g2 or higher to get 999 monsters and then more g1s for beacons up to the HP limit of killgem) so you have less armour than HP for your killtower (but the killtrap first has to kill all the high-armour monsters). The reasons for using a killtrap: increased crit and bloodbound specials in trap, also the bolt is permanent in trap and lets it ignore armour, which is the point of the g1 enraging, to get armour so managems and hitgems can't kill anything. I've found this the best way to be able to get to 999 monsters as fast as possible, because g1 gems enrage armour the most (all grades are the same for armour, but you need less high grades to get more monsters but they also get more HP. So if you're ignoring armour with bolt killtrap, best to keep the HP down with g1s). Obviously, I'm higher level than you, so I can reach 1000 (actually 1250 because my hitgems get too powerful) after a couple of mana locks, and still kill the monsters with my killtrap, but the point is that your mana traps will get more mana with more monsters in a wave, provided your killgem can deal with them. So you have to figure for yourself how can I enrage to the most monsters I can handle as soon as possible? If you can get more with a killtower, then do that. But I found the killtrap method to be more efficient.

I don't recommend the hit farming guide, only the extreme endgame endurance guide, which also includes hit farming (kill)gems. You can have some red amps for a red black beacon tower just to get enough range to hit some beacons (especially when using mana lock), but once I have a lot of mana (like e11 after first lock) I switch to a killtower for beacons for complicated reasons to do with my use of GemCombiner, which has great large combines for killgems. I'm not going to even attempt to explain that, I refer you to the extreme endgame guide and the optimal skill distribution guide. At high grades, beam is pointless on towers when they already fire as fast as possible, it does not get you more hits. And bloodbound quickly gets you more chain than there are monsters on screen. You can only hit them once with chain, so no more is needed.

[dholland]

I don't have 45 fusion, I have 45+15 for 60 fusion. The 15 bonus is from my talisman, every frag adds 1 to all skills. There are video guides to talisman farming, but you need maybe level 90 (sometimes a bit lower) frags, I don't know exactly your level but you should be able to handle Y6 with all but hatred and mana lock and buy the +10 rarity for 6 frags, and get frags in the 70s plus. I can do it with mana lock and hatred maxed as well, so I can get level 100s without too many tries (my level is 14k). With 60 fusion, it's just 6 mana for a g1. Actually, I enrage the first waves with maybe 160 to 180 g1 because my g8 killgem can handle that. After 1st mana lock and e11 mana, I combine up to being able to handle maybe 500 to 1000 g1s, depending on the map and where my killtrap is placed. But then I have 60000 starting mana from talisman wizard level bonuses (another reason to farm frags) and I can easily get 90% slow and 80% crit immediately. At your level it will take you longer. I suggest you max your talisman as much as you can (to level 85+ frags at least fully upgraded. There's also a video guide to shadow core farming, but basically you build a killtower and start all the waves, provided you've beaten the game and have the bottom right trait (also have all easy traits you can handle but nothing tricky). You're just shooting shadows for cores until you die in endurance.

Please understand, if you max your talisman at maybe level 1000 you won't get 60000 mana, just 4500 mana. That isn't so much, so the skill bonus is more important. To be precise, you also get talisman bonuses of up to 150 mana per frag, so that can add another 2250 mana. You decide if it's worth having that now and taking the time and cores to upgrade your talisman now, or do it later. If you have level 1000, I'd say do it if you can get frags with +1 to all skills. It's nice having 60 fusion!

[darthmohawk1]

Originally posted by dholland:

There are video guides to talisman farming, but you need maybe level 90 (sometimes a bit lower) frags, I don't know exactly your level but you should be able to handle Y6 with all but hatred and mana lock and buy the +10 rarity for 6 frags, and get frags in the 70s plus.

Y6 is indeed the best place to go to farm frags. If you use the +10 rarity booster and play on Haunting, with all battle traits maxed and Hatred 8, all frags dropped will have rarity of 90-100, with a 22% chance for r100s. All it takes to clear Y6 on these settings is the ability to make a g50 killgem, plus a little more to reach far enough into endurance to get three more talisman pieces.

Later on you can also farm for talisman frags with specific attributes, if you have the patience. The most powerful elements are increased freeze duration and increased WoE damage, both of which are found on inner talisman pieces. These are not necessary to complete endurance, though - all you need for that is the +15 to all skills.

[dholland]

What he said:-) He has a better grasp of the details. From my notes, I'm guessing you are around at least level 6k, so you can certainly use a maxed talisman and with the initial mana bonus should be able to play with mana lock in Endurance. The extreme endgame guide suggests having 40000 mana for that, and you won't be far away. I'm a bit lazy so mine isn't entirely rarity 100s, but it's only a % or 2 I'm missing. I haven't had the patience to collect WoE bonuses, but it's probably not needed for Endurance XP. At least, if like me you're not spending more than one day on an Endurance run. Might be different if trying to beat a Haunting Endurance, which may require e36 mana and a lot of spells against the final waves.

[BilboCGL]

WoE is not needed for beating haunting endurance, in fact I switched my r100 frags to some w/o WoE component. With WL 40k+ it is possible to beat e73 monsters with killgem only, for higher hp (e77/e78) the WoE (and patience, again) is needed...

However, I won't think about beating endurance w/o 15 frags with +1 to all skill
The hitfarming is valuable - I usually end between hl35 and hl40. I use a killgem grade 31 (2000s, 4.000.000c) or two, enhanced with barrage. Make sure you do not amplify one of these gems accidentally with high grade manaamps...

And yes, it is needed to enrage with some hundred gems... If you can't do it in wave one, wait till wave 12 or so, with WL 1000, there is no thinking about that, it needs i.e. WL 6k or so...

[hbarudi]

Thanks for the replys, I did 2 endurance runs was wizard level 1062
1. A5 and got 10 billion xp and reached wizard level 2292
2. B1 and got 56 billion xp and
I am now wizard level 4085. Thanks for your help.

[astrosha]

Perhaps a bit late, but here are my thoughts on enraging.

Use g1 gems only.

Early on, pre-Bolt spell, bomb such that mob HP + armor is less than Killtrap Max damage. Use a Killtower set for structure if you wish, place it far enough away that it will not mess with the manafarm area much. This *should*, thanks to the Critical Damage on the killgems, provide enough armor that the monsters walk right past the Manafarm area without hindrance.

Once you have Bolt on your Killtrap, enrage such that monster HP is near, but still under, your Killtrap's maximum damage. Monster armor will ensure that your Killtower cannot kill the monsters, but will have no trouble with beacons or flyers/spires. Note that it shold not take long for your Bolt spell to be readied, even without any points in the skill. A few waves is all, really. The only troublesome part is before it is readied, as its lack severely gimps your Killtrap, and thus your ability to enrage monsters.

[dholland]

Enrage to killpower (max damage times crit), not max damage, provided you start with 80% crit, which is easy enough if you can build g7 or higher as you would need for mana lock (perhaps 4k wizard). Only wizards unable to get 80% crit and having low crit multiplier need to worry about max damage, and then only for a few waves until they can build higher grades.