Guide to Beating the Game (Storyline, Spells and Item Unlocks)
By Leximancer.
First up, always make sure you’ve maxed out all of the enhancements available to you.
If you don’t have the ability to increase the level of items, just finish out the storylines you’re able to on this run, push until it takes more than a couple of hours of farming to kill the next boss, and then retire. Start again with different primaries and push for a higher level on those than you’ve reached before. I chose the Student class every run after like my 2nd, and kept my researchers and experience catalysts maximized all the time.
Maximizing Storages
The first thing I do on a run is try to get my maximum storages as high as possible. To do so, use spellcrafting on Space – Essence Storages, synchro earth, mind and space in straight lines of connected elements (will look like perpendicular bars), maximize your space boost (just set it to buy maximum and let it run), until you are blocked by caps on everything. I had to buy and sell furniture constantly each run to max out the storylines each run. I used mana capacity gear here to make it faster to create essences, and the essence-related spells on top of that. Also, be careful to turn off your efficiency-reducing furniture like spell catalysts, mana altars, and storage expanders (I would usually only have just enough storage expanders online to unlock one more thing I could buy, so that I could make the essences as efficiently as possible and minimize waiting).
Rituals and Spellcrafting
Once you’ve got your capacity up, set up the transmutation ritual if you can. Also, mana ritual is helpful, and sometimes wizard too. Don’t worry too much about these, and never take the penalty from going over your corruption cap. I kept the corruption-improving spells active at all times, and was able to mostly do what I needed to do. Spellcraft your space “align the stars” to maximize spellpower. Then change synchro to use mind and earth overlapping each other like mirrored triangles to increase your crafting level further (doesn’t matter for materials like jewels and gems, just for the actual equipment you want to make). Some equipment helps here. Finding an early prismatic ring was HUGE for me, but you should be fine to use whatever your best mana-producing gear is, plus snake staff, plus synergizer. Get these as high as possible before crafting other stuff. I sometimes made a bunch of cheap mana potions and would sit in a low-level area killing enemies rapidly because potions refresh when you enter a new combat, so this let me get a lot of mana really quickly without having to wait or click a lot.
Building Combat Gear
Now that you’ve got your crafting gear built, you can start building combat gear while wearing your crafting gear. The compendium will give you tips on some enemies and I basically just used those hints to direct which type of gear I would build. So if the compendium said I need 3000 defense, for instance, I’d target that first. Then once I got that, I could decide on a way to kill, usually with my highest level equipment or spells or both. Get good pouch items here too, ones that match the attributes you’re targeting for spellcraft and synchro and boosts. Any extra pouch slots are well-spent on stun runes and revival potions.
Combat Setup
Once you’ve got your combat gear built (the best available to you and/or catered to the specific fight you’re trying to do based on the compendium entry about that enemy) you can finally start switching things over to combat. Turn your autocast on for all your passive offensive combat boosts like strength, blinding speed, haste – anything that makes you hit harder or faster. Then you can choose if you wanna use an attack spell or not. I found it was usually best to focus on one or two of the highest-damage spells, but the thing that you can unlock which tells you how much DPS each thing is doing unlocked really late for me so I was basically just guessing.
It doesn’t matter too much though because even when I focused on spells with non-attack gear, my attacks were still doing the most damage, or tied for the most. Anyway, this is when you reset your boost lamp, buy up all the nodes that correspond with the defensive options you’ve chosen (usually health + dodge or health + armor for me), and then nodes that improve your offense (mana, attack delay, attack power). Synchro changes to overlapping triangles of earth and fire OR overlapping tiles of life and mind to maximize your shapeshift (I used eagle most of the time). Spellcraft either your best defensive skill, your shapeshift skill, or your best offensive skill. Or, well, I eventually did double spellcrafts on my best offensive, defensive and shapeshift spells. Spellcraft always for spell power unless your best spellpower bonus makes you hit a mana cap or wizard cap, in which case use your second spellcraft on that spell to mitigate that problem.
Notes and Additional Tips
Always make sure that you are automatically transmuting the limited-resource required for your current enhancements. Literally nothing else in this guide matters if you’re not taking every speck of low-hanging fruit you can, which means buying out everything up to their absolute maximum whenever possible. If there’s a furniture you can buy by getting one element all the way to the cap, then you get that all the way to the cap. If that unlocks one more little building which probably doesn’t matter and requires you to stockpile all of the resource you just spent all the way back to full… you do that. If you’re not capping absolutely everything that you can, you won’t see good results with the rest of what I’ve written.
When land is an issue, priority should go to buildings which increase the capacity of land first. Then buildings which increase the capacity of other resources. Then buildings which improve the rate / efficiency of getting that other resource. The only exception here is research, where I would occasionally sell off researchers to make room for something like combat or farming, and then buy them back when I was done.
Sometimes you get better equipment from enemy drops than you can make. For farming enemies, alternate mind + space in synchro to increase their drop AMOUNT, and use the mind spell Rare Charm to improve the FREQUENCY. The next most important thing is to kill enemies quickly. Faster = more drops = more powerful gear faster, so prioritize offense. After offense, you can slot in convenience items such as regal robes, or rings of mental energy, to increase your rewards.
Earlier in the game it felt like having a solid defense was more important than going all-in on offense. Towards the end of the game this flipped, and I was killing things so fast that I ended up turning off all my defensive abilities (and that was how I got the ‘you have won’ screen.) For most of the middle of the game I was using vampire gear in boss combats, and in the later stages of the game was using my best attack speed gear or my best mana capacity/regen gear (once I had better spellcrafts from easy jewels).
I kept a loadout with soul stone, ring of mental exertion, snake staff and death robe (or druid robe) as my ‘utility’ loadout and ran that for most of the runs. When I needed gold I’d swap to regal robe OR merchant’s mask, but only while farming gold then switched out. Which one you use depends on whether you are earning gold faster by killing the highest level mobs you can defeat quickly, or whether you get more from your merchant stalls bonuses. Regal robe + synergizer was a monster for the middle game.
Specific fights that you will need to do more than once require choker of soul protection or bangle of critical protection, depending on what you have unlocked when you reach them. These are not worth raising past base level, they’re only slotted for their ability during one fight and then ignored for the rest of the run.
Try to watch what the enemy is doing when you die. If it’s the same one or two abilities that result in you losing, stun during those moves when they’ve nearly completed filling the progress bar, to maximize enemy downtimes.
Sometimes items become unexpectedly powerful when leveled. A stun rune gives 4 seconds of stun at level 15, 3 seconds at level 8. With a level 15 stun rune and level 15 alchemist’s cowl equipped, they stun for 7 seconds. In such situations it is feasible to use 2-7 stun runes to stun your opponent for most of the fight. A max level snake staff with max level synergizer make your mind spells operate at 222% of their unmodified power, and that can be further improved with spellcrafting bonuses, synchro and ritual enhancements. A level 7 regal robe makes enemies drop 116x their normal amount. A level 8 prismatic ring makes you channel about 20x more of an element than you would normally. A couple extra levels of gear can make a huge difference.
Events that give you a ton of one specific element are pure money. Turn on your best mana / channeling gear and put all your wizards on producing things of that element. You can use your market stalls to sell that massive stockpile for 60x or even close to 1000x their value in the mid game.
Oh right, always have a familiar in front of you. I found defensive ones were mostly better, but the earth-based one also channels for you which is kinda cool. For me they were just damage sponges though.
Gloves of spell strength can allow you to eke out a few extra levels of capacity in some resources. It’s worth checking that if you’re stuck.
Check your stats screen’s storyline section if you’re stuck. There’s usually a good indicator of what you can look for next in this retirement, or the next one.
I hope this was helpful to you!
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