Hey Everyone,
It’s only the second post in the series I just started 2 weeks ago, but I’m already thinking of revisiting previous topics in future posts for updates and more insight because the game still changes so drastically each week.
One example is the feature I previously called “firing modes”. The spell buttons at the right of the mana bar meant to work as permanent modifiers to how gems fire, but it raised the problem of how gems would pass on their firing mode settings when combined, or should the basic way of firing also become a spell button (for switching back if needed). So these spells were renamed to gem enhancements, they have a cooldown/recharge time, and when cast on a gem, they enhance the firing mode of it temporarily.
As default, gems (in towers) still shoot a slowly flying blob that hits a single target, which is nice, but if you don’t want those monsters to reach your orb and escape through banishment from being hit, or you want to unleash the carnage, there come the enhancements.
They come in 3 flavors, Bolt, Beam and Barrage, basically boosting the damage (and possibly special effects), firing speed, and range respectively, but each are more than just mere boosters and they work differently on gems in towers and traps.
The 9 gem types of GC2 as of the current plans, with some sidenotes:
Cyan – slowing
Shocking was taken out because basically it was too powerful for a gem ability to pin down just any kind of enemy and render it a sitting duck for the other gems to slay down, and then the countermeasure I added, the gradually increasing shock immunity, just didn’t feel right. The ability of stopping monsters is still available, just not through gems (-> more in later posts).
Yellow – chance of multiple damage (critical hit)
Why not a constant damage boost? Because this way, in addition to the increased overall long term damage, this gem has a chance to damage monsters that have more armor than what could be penetrated by the raw damage of your gems. At higher grades, the chance of critical hits, as well as its damage multiplier increases, giving good chances for some very impressing damage output.
Blue – mana leeching
As many of you pointed it out, the de facto “color of mana” as established in many earlier fantasy games, is blue, so it was taken from orange, and slowing was given to cyan.
Green – poison
Poison was a fun gem when placed in traps against early waves, but later in the battle it became rather useless. To stop this disgrace and put the very interesting game mechanic of delayed/gradual effect back to its place, there is a 3-fold plan:
-Monsters will generally have more armor than before, and some will have really thick amounts, but as poison ignores armor, it can start damaging these foes long before the other gems can get to their flesh.
-High grade poison gems will have a great poison damage (if watching out for keeping the green component strong through the combining line).
-Poison will be partially stackable. That is, when an already poisoned monster gets hit with poison again, a ratio of the incoming poison will be added to the total dose, depending on the remaining poison duration and the two damage amounts.
Orange – suppressing healing
Monsters will heal, some quite slowly, but others can regenerate very quickly if not kept under constant fire. This gem, however, can reduce the healing rate (which is also regenerating by the way), its effect is fully stackable, and it can push healing even below zero, meaning, no healing will occur until the healing heals back to positive. This can be essential against some monsters with extra healing abilities.
Purple – armor tearing
No surprises here. Monsters will have more armor, so this gem type will be more useful than before.
Red – chain hit
The chain hit effect was totally off the balance in GCL, especially when in traps and at very high grades, so it will have to be nerfed, but it will be still very valuable.
Black – bloodbound
Unlike in GCL, where gem kills counted towards the bloodbound bonus, in GC2 each hit will help these gems become stronger, to give fresh gems during late waves (when monsters are too strong for new gems to be killed) a chance to power up. When a bloodbound gem reaches a hit milestone, its damage, mana leeching, poison, and armor tearing (the gem types next to bloodbound in the 3×3 grid) get stronger (whichever of these components the gem has). This gem can give late game hardcore players some very interesting options. The mana leeching multiplier isn’t granted by the mana pool anymore, so manafarming will be more tricky.
White – poolbound
As I wrote before, the mana pool doesn’t have a hard cap anymore, instead it levels up and extends when it gets full, counting towards the mana replenish, and xp multipliers. On top of that, poolbound-active gems can benefit from it with increased damage, poison, crit hit, and suppressing abilities.
Gem operations:
In GCL, some of the advanced gem actions, such as upgrading or cloning, were only accessible via the keyboard. Now, if you activate the combine spell, you can do all the things by dragging the gem; depending on where you drop it, you can combine it (this hasn’t changed), clone it (on empty inventory slot), upgrade it (dropping on the combine spell button), or salvage its mana (instead of the now gone gem anvil, the mana bar takes care of the mana refund).
Coming up next:
28th of May:
sparks, monsters
11th of June:
rapid gem bombing, summoning/heating up sparks, gem wasps
