Let’s start today’s post with the rapid gem bombing feature: in GCL you could shift-click the gem bomb spell (or shift+B on the keyboard) and then, keeping shift pressed, click on the battlefield or wave stones to quickly get rid of the gems in your inventory, summoning more monsters or smacking the ones already marching towards your orb with gem bombs.
But what if you don’t want to create gems again and again just to throw them?
GC2 has both the old GCL bombing mode and a new one, which uses mana instead of actual gems.
Keeping shift pressed when selecting the gem bomb spell brings you to the old GCL rapid bombing mode, giving the spell button an orange glowing frame. However, if you just click the spell button (the button gets a white ordinary glowing), and press shift after that, you enter the new GC2-style rapid bombing (yellow glowing). It selects the topmost gem in your inventory and uses it as a gem bomb prototype. While you keep shift pressed, you can click-click-click and your gem will stay there unharmed, just keep an eye on your draining mana. Releasing shift will return you to the vanilla bombing mode, where you can drag and drop gems to make them explode.
If you have a look at the gem info panel above, you can see some new Gem wasp details added. Gem bombs, in earlier GemCraft chapters, were not quite effective later in the game, but wasps bring bombing to a new level, hitting anywhere and hitting hard on the upcoming monsters. Gem wasps (glowing, floating beings) appear when a gem bomb explodes, flying around the drop location, and attacking any nearby foes. Wasps have a limited lifespan, so unlike gems in towers or traps, they do not give a static defense, but are more of an instrument of wreaking havoc on the monsters when the situation gets too hot. Higher grade gems give wasps that live longer, sting harder, and have a higher sting limit, which gives more stings that stun monsters for a short time (as of now, every 4th sting stuns). Stunned monsters get a short immunity, after which they can be stunned again. Wasps act on their own, they can’t be selected and attack monsters randomly.
With more emphasis on making monsters stronger by gems dropped on wave stones, summoning is renamed to enraging. (The rage modifiers shown in the info panel are not final, especially the +50 monsters.) Both hit points and armor will rise quickly if you drop multiple bombs on a wave stone, even additional beacons will appear to give you a challenge.
On the other hand, monsters will give increased XP, making enraging a good choice for both an adrenaline rush and for reaching a high wizard level.
As waves can be enraged, sparks can be heated, resulting in a stronger effect. Before dropping a gem on the spark stone, you can see what changes it will make. Dropping lots of gems brings diminishing results, but with the right amount of gems, you can bring out the most of the incoming sparks without wasting your mana.
Coming up next:
25th of June:
Updates & more insight (on the topics covered so far)
9th of July:
Strike spells
