There were some major changes done to the spells system since the first time I wrote about them.
First, a few words about the strike spells:
All 3 of these handy tools will have an area of effect, best used when thrown into a crowded pile of monsters.
Freezing monsters is a very valuable spell, stopping a bunch of them in front of your towers or right before they could reach your orb, it can make a huge difference in the long term. Frozen monsters’ armor also becomes rigid and vulnerable to your armor tearing gems (there might be monsters with hundreds or thousands of armor level, so freezing and purple-firing can be an essential move). Frozen corpse explosion can even start a chain of chilling death.
You can also curse them, making them vulnerable in many ways, giving you a chance to really hurt some exceptionally tough monsters, dealing lots of amplified poison damage (which also ignores armor, and now multiple poison shots even stack) and physical damage getting through their weakened armor.
The third strike spell is story-related, so let’s keep it hidden until you can finally get your hands on the game.
The 3 gem enhancement spells (bolt, beam and barrage) formerly replaced the normal shots temporarily, now they act in addition to it: A tower-socketed enhanced gem fires both its regular shells as well as the special form of fire given by the enhancement spell, while its ammo Lasts.
The ammo-based mechanic is also a change, formerly it was time-based. Now, you can enhance some of your gems and put them behind the front line, the enhancement will be preserved, so if the monsters break though, they will face shells coming at them in a multiple forms.
All the enhancements have their uses: bolts are powerful and go through armor (perfect against giants), beams deal constant damage and can switch between targets instantly (cutting through lots of those nasty swarmlings), barrage can cover an area from a distance, so it can be very useful weakening a larger crowd of monsters before your other towers pick the remaining ones one by one.
You can also enhance gems in traps, which will give your trap shots bonuses (damage and specials, firing speed, range). Traps don’t deplete enhancements; as long as your trap-socketed enhanced gem doesn’t get salvaged/combined/upgraded or spent its special shots by being placed in a tower, it will give the gem bonuses permanently.
Coming up next:
18th of February:
Shadows + GCL is 2 years old
4th of March:
Talismans
