Let’s start with gem colors: Many of you told that it would be weird to have the mana leech gem blue instead of orange. A decision had to be made between following the fantasy-hack-n-slash-rpg standard of mana always having blue color, and the GC legacy of orange mana leeching gems, and I’m happy to tell that you’ll see orange mana farms in GC2. 🙂
So, as mana leech is now back to orange, and blue is the slowing gem, cyan got the health regeneration suppressing ability. Talking of which, the system got less cruel and more simple: Monsters start with a given regeneration rate, which can be torn down by the cyan gem, even if the monster is armored and shielded, the regen suppression gets through, so it’s useful to prepare a welcome gift for the monsters with 6-7 low grade cyan gems that get rid of most of the regen rate, and in the process they also take lots of shields (if monsters arrive shielded), as one layer of shield takes one shot to vanish (regardless of actual damage, hence high grade gems have no use here).
The bloodbound gem was made more simple and (I think) intuitive, the gem has to reach milestones by hitting targets to “level up”, each “level” requiring more and more hits (plain and simple rpg leveling model). As the bloodbound component levels up, both the gem’s damage and all other specials (excluding bloodbound and poolbound) get stronger.
Monster abilities got simplified too. Previously, abilities had 3 tiers (e.g. low, medium and high amount of health boost), now abilities get stronger with the wave number, meaning, a monster arriving at wave 100 will get a much greater boosts from the same abilities than a wave 20 monster. If the stone cravings look too cryptic, you can always have a peek at the wave info panel, but some abilities are also shown as “auras” painted on the ground around monsters.
Watch out for giant monsters, as they can have any combination of abilities, including some giants-only death-triggered ones, like dropping spawnlings (spawned swarmlings), healing others, or disabling nearby gems on death.
Only two more posts before the arrival of the summer blog break:
13th of May:
sparks & shrines in action
talisman revisited
27th of May:
achievements update
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