by Sidestepper on Wed Jan 30, 2013 7:26 pm
And they said it couldn't be done. I found a dedicated Earthmother strategy for Shifting Passages. It's actually very powerful. It exploits the fact that Shifting Passages begins as the single most open map in the game and only starts to close up when you kill monsters. The idea is to use Greenblood and Elf mana to set up gigantic kills and advance to the endgame with as few kills as possible.
Make an Elf Wizard acid caster as described earlier. At first level, you want to explore maybe 75% of the map. Brick monsters as you go. With Entanglement, you can get decent xp with this. Anything level 3 or lower is fair game, and really you can get away with bricking almost anything. You neither need nor want popcorn and you get more piety for monsters than you do for plants.
Get all of the glyphs, use your transmutation seal on the sword to increase the value of your first conversion and to fund shop purchases, and then convert as hard as you can. You want to get your mana up to at least 20, but 25 is sometimes possible. Spam Greenblood harder than you have ever spammed it before. Try to get 8-10 stacks. Also take 3 Vineform. It's cheap, it lets you use Schadenfreude to its full potential, it lets you poke minotaurs to knock out walls, and it does crazy things with 1st level BLUPTOPOWA.
Once you're ready, fireball the absolute highest level monster that you can. With burning, your fireballs will be doing about 17 damage each. You have four (maybe five) or them, and Schadenfreude doubles that. If you also have B2P, you can kill a level 9 with maybe the additional investment of a mana potion.
Keep climbing, always blasting the biggest monster possible. If you are not gaining a full level with each fight, you are doing it wrong. Use your remaining exploration to allow at least one ENDISWAL per fight. You should be in a position to kill the random boss after 2-3 kills (a shopped Schadenfreude does wonders here).
When that's done, explore the entire map, bricking monsters to build up piety and using any utility glyphs you have to clear potentially difficult blockages. You'll want about 50 piety stocked up before attacking Evolovia. Do not think you can rely on Plantation. There are not enough bloodpools.
You should be able to nuke Evolovia with a giant spike. I'd have a ding set up just in case Retaliate: Fireball comes up several times in a row. If you get really stuck, Entanglement interferes with R:F, but unfortunately it also interferes with Evolovia's blinking, meaning that the retaliate trait won't go away. If you still have enough piety for Clearance, you can sometimes chain Entangle him.
It's a weird strat that ends up being really strong. I can't tell if it's broken or not. It still requires you to use the entire map's worth of resources, just in a really weird way. It only works to this extreme because of the starting state of Shifting Passages.