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Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby Lujo on Wed Jan 30, 2013 7:10 am

While the wizard has perks with spellcasting and all, maybe the Halfling priest of Mysterea, going for Mystic Balance to get the fireballs to cost 5, would be a better deal? You get more health to tank you own fireballs, and you get a full restore per hp potion?

Gnome monks might be nice too - it's probably easier to sidestepp the monks attack penalty via mega fireballs than any regular way.
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby 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.
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby Lujo on Wed Jan 30, 2013 8:40 pm

That is one of the most awesome things I've read in a while ^^ It's not broken, but I whish Clearance worked a bit better with guys other than Wizard :(
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby The Avatar on Thu Jan 31, 2013 12:10 am

Wow! That's awesome! Totally counter-intuitive, unusual, but AWESOME! I can't wait to try it. Thanks to Sidestepper for yet another great contribution.
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby xspeedballx on Thu Jan 31, 2013 9:58 pm

So I am confused. I just used the strat sidestepper just posted for shifting passage, and it worked like a dream(without battlemage ring). Kill level 6, level 9, First boss, evolvia, done. However where I am confused is my fireball does not seem to be doing the type of damage I would expect.

Evolve has 11 stacks of corrosion, 14 stacks of burning. I am level 7, burndayraz does 28 damage. I would expect that I would do 53 damage per cast. However I am only doing 40. Any thoughts onto why?
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby gjaustin on Thu Jan 31, 2013 10:14 pm

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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby xspeedballx on Thu Jan 31, 2013 10:18 pm

Not at all. I prepped EM, and had Dracul kicking around untouched. It occured to me 30% MR would make sense, but nothing in the level had it. Might this be a bug? Or is there something more subtle I am missing somewhere?

Edit: Tested again. Level 1: 3 stacks of corrosion, first cast does 7 damage(expected), second and third cast only 8 damage(expecting 9). Both sets of numbers seem to reflect Burning only doing 1 extra damage on top of the corrosion.

Edit2: Tested again. Level 2: 3 stacks of corrosion, first cast does 11 damage(expected), second and third cast only do 12. Burning seems to only adding 1 point of damage.
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby Sidestepper on Thu Jan 31, 2013 10:30 pm

Huh. I noticed that sometimes I needed more fireballs that I had calculated, but I wrote it off as carelessness on my part. The loss of burning is a big deal during the endgame, making the greenblood caster weaker than a vanilla one. The strategy still works because of the enormous strength of the opening game, but I am both disappointed to find that my end game nukes are less awesome than they should be and excited that a bugfix wil make this even better than it is now.
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby Sidestepper on Sat Feb 09, 2013 1:10 am

Image

Works fine in Vicious once the burning bug is gone. Gained my first few levels just bricking slowed monsters. Used a ding to finish the random boss. Dinging wasn't an option for Evolovia, so I used my fireball resources at level 8 to put a bunch of monsters into one-hit territory, dropped an Entangle, cleared level 9, and then started on Evolovia. This gave me better fireball efficiency and generated some bloodpools for Plantation.

Hexx Ruins will be the one to beat, since it really punishes heavy fireball specialization.

I'm uh, kind of hoping this doesn't get nerfed. It's the only realistic mono-Earthmother strategy for vicious, and it required me to use every bit of gold, black space, and monster on the board. It just uses those resources in a weird looking way.
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Re: Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

Postby q 3 on Sat Feb 09, 2013 1:27 am

Wait, petrifying slow monsters gives you XP? When did that happen? Is that one of the things that makes Earthmother actually useful in the early game that I didn't know about??
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