Dealing with giants at low level (Q4)

[LanguidJaguar]

Short question: How does one deal with giants without the critical hit, poolbound, or bloodbound gems?

Long question: I'm wizard level 200, so I don't know if this really qualifies as "low level", but I've only explored about a third of the map and don't have any of those three damage gems unlocked.

I come to Q4 (with suppressing, slowing, mana leeching, poison, and armor tearing). I play it with the Orblets + Haste + Mana lock + Swarming domination + Giant domination. Giants require management, but are handleable with bolt/beam/freeze/curse usage. Until 15 levels from the end, at which point my gem doesn't seem to hurt them at all.

I quickly lose.

Try again, this time placing an armor tearing trap in front. Still lose. Checking the stats, armor is not the problem -- the trap removes all of it. It's that the giants have 3,000,000hp or so compared to me 2,000-3,000 damage per shot.

I remove Giant Dominance. Well, now the giants just have 1,000,000hp compared to my damage, and I lose again.

I remove Haste, play again. I get to the end and have ~16 giants or so remaining. Using a pure slowing gem, I go to work and destroy each giant individually, a process that takes awhile -- I lose several orblets and a bunch of mana to banishing before the last one is brought down.

I enraged reaver and swarmling waves minorly (4 G1s, G2s, or G3s, depending upon how much mana I had), but Q4 in particular has a bunch of giant waves, and I've never enraged one.

It felt like hitting a wall -- what did I do wrong here, or what could I do better?

[12345ieee]

Post your skills distribution, the problem is likely there.
Fear not, Q4 is easily beatable at WL 200, you just need the correct strategy.

[ventuz]

I'm not sure what's your goal, win Q4 or clearing it with highest xp you can get at 200? There's ton mana shard lying around there making it an easy win, you could alway cut down traits and finish map quickly, then come back to it later when you get to higher lvl.

[pernunz]

You've stated Armor is not the problem, but hit points. You need to increase your damage, and this can be done in only a few ways:

1. Increase the gem grade (requires mana) - This could be done by having an orange gem in a trap near the entrances, although without the chain hit gem it might not be as useful as you want (also, a slow gem targeting random monsters before the mana gem in the trap)
2. Increase gem damage through amplifiers
3. Increase gem damage through skills (Resonance or True Colours)
4. Get more gem types to use on the field that deal increased damage (White/Black/Yellow/Red). This is done by unlocking skill tomes.

I would go to field L6 and obtain the Poolbound gem, and field R1 to obtain the Critical Hit gem by unlocking the skill tomes at those fields.

Remember, that adding battle traits increases the number of waves of monsters, so the difficulty is increased. Remove the orblets and Swarmling domination traits and it will be 14 waves shorter compared to if they are set to 7 each.

In answer to your shorter question: How does one deal with giants without the critical hit, poolbound, or bloodbound gems? The answer is to obtain those gems.

Edit: You can also increase your damage through Talisman fragments.

[Zelph]

Poison gems in traps work nice to do a lot of things, and from there, just get as high a grade gem as you can.

[LanguidJaguar]

1. I beat Q4, so I can do it. It was just tedious.

2. This was with no giant domination and no haste (I still used orblets and mana lock), so there's nothing I can turn down to make it "easier".

3. My problem is that the giants take hundreds or thousands of hits near the end of the level, and without critical hit, bloodbound, or poolbound, I'm not sure how to *not* make them do that.

---

I ran into a similar problem on K2. There's just a lot of giant waves, and although I can do with the early ones easily and the middle ones with spells, it seems like the giant health just outpaces my gem damage at the end.

On both Q4 and K2 there's abundant mana shards, and with those I get ahead of the game -- but after they run out, I start to fall behind.

I replayed K2 using a pure orange gem (I had only ever used them in traps in GC:Labyrinth) instead of the slow/poison I was previously using, and that allowed me to get a G12 gem which was helpful, but it was still a matter of not being able to kill the giants at the end until after they'd already grabbed orblets and were marching back.

But on K3, for instance, which has critical hit available, I can turn Giant Dominance up to 7 and breeze through the level no sweat.

---

Skills are:

True Colors 15
Beam, Bolt, Curse, Freeze, Fury, Mana Stream 12
Amplifiers, Fusion, Masonry, Traps 6
1,155 unspent points
I know I could spend a bunch of those points, but since I play with Mana Lock 7 I like to have enough for a G5 and to bomb the first six waves with 4 G1s each.

[12345ieee]

Indeed your problem is in the skill point allocation and in your lack of good colors.

Colors aside, you'll get them eventually, let's get at skills.

Put at 0 (zero) the following:
Bolt, Curse, Freeze, Fury
Amplifiers, Traps
as wasting all that mana on minimal CD reduction or exp isn't worth it. Amp skill is very weak and won't make a difference at 6. Traps are just not useful enough at your level.

Your reasons about having a good starter is sound, a G5 is mandatory at that point.

reinvest back your points into True Colors, Mana Stream, Fusion and Leech skill:
18 18 18 15 should be reasonable
keep Masonry/Beam at 3-6 points

Done this, just slot a good pure orange gem with beam and a couple of amps and let it do the ugly work, you should get enough mana to make everything you wish.


Ultimately, I'd ditch all traits that make your life harder (EXPECIALLY mana lock, which I actively discourage using before WL 1k) and rush to hextiles L/R for white/yellow, you will do exp runs after you got the basic colors.

[pernunz]

Originally posted by LanguidJaguar:

2. This was with no giant domination and no haste (I still used orblets and mana lock), so there's nothing I can turn down to make it "easier".

Each level of orblets and mana lock add a wave to the length of any map. If you have both of these at level 7, it will add 14 waves to the length of the map, and causes monsters to wave higher armor and HP, therefore making it harder. Turn each of these down to 0 if you want it easier.

[Таня]

poison gem+trap+talisman dmg to giant+curse/freeze work well up to WL 250