Any word on whether we'll be able to sell/scrap/etc unwanted Map Cores? I'm coming up on 300 Default Cores and I don't see a way to use them without acquiring more.
Big fan of the Echoing Augment. With careful distribution of +Floors and +Fights augments, the increased chances to find Echoing Augments can potentially mean hours, even days of uninterrupted progress.
I'm looking forward to investigating all the new changes since I last played. Glad to see you're still at it, Zero. :D
Just a PSA: I've been experimenting and trying things out for over 4 years. After all this time, I haven't found a better way than what I'm currently doing. I see a lot of players making the leaderboard now. I'm intrigued. Let's see who catches me first.
Day 3, 5:28pm. After making another early-morning prestige and leaving it to grind all day, I've just come back from shopping to an overwhelming amount of Talent Points. The Mage is sitting at 1.125e08 TP now, with SKL of over 2.16e08. SKL Ratings are 7.2 Fireball, 6.8 Icebolt, 3.68 Arcane Explosion. Those values are MULTIPLIERS to the overall power of each attack. This is officially my endgame, where buffs become completely meaningless and the Mage has easily enough power to clear 50-100 Eternal Dungeons. I've added the other 4 party members for a general clvl boost (for gaining IP) and will check back later tonight. Either way, even without the new party members, I'm sitting at 208 IP and haven't even cleared the Endless Dungeon, let alone the Grand Arena. My target IP for this run will be 800-1000...depending on what I can get away with, using the Dragonlancer to power-level my Mage. That's it; that's all I do. If it helps you, fine. If not, that's fine too.
Day 3, 2:23am. I've just dumped another 300k Talent Points into the Mage, taking me up to 517,949. My attack speed has gone from .27s to .04s. This is where the rubber meets the road. I've instantly gone from floor 750 (upgraded Distant Lands) to floor 1750 in one prestige. I'm gaining ~20 character levels per second. From here, it's going to be a couple more prestiges and a direct beeline to endgame. I've invested a little over 5k Talent Points into Tier 4 Speed, nothing into Tier 2. This means that the vast majority of my Talent Points are increasing my base stat and damage multiplier, and that every point of speed I invest is actually giving some concrete benefit (5x what Tier 2 can offer). I'll carry this spending template through the entire game.
Day 2, 4:48pm. This is the fourth time I have prestiged the Mage, taking it from ~29k Talent Points to 56,251. Every time I prestige, I can spend a little more gold than the last time. This prestige has 3.01e11 gold invested, which is enough to one-shot Distant Lands (mlvl 350) with each of the Mage's three attacks. Each attack has a cooldown around 1/4 second, meaning four entire waves are wiped per second...per attack. That's a total of 12 waves per second. Without prestiging my Gambler, I'm accumulating about one character level per second. After I prestige the Gambler, this number will increase substantially.
Day 2, approx. 6am. I've just come back to a little over 4k Talent Points in both characters. The Mage has received 4.64e09 gold and now does enough damage to one-shot Penn Isle with each of her three attacks (66M Fireball, 57M Icebolt, ~8M Arcane Explosion). It's taking about 3 seconds to gain a new character level, given that I'm sitting around +110% experience from Roulette, which affects the base exp/gold bonus of Challenge (+319,375%). That's not additive, either, which makes a world of difference. I'll prestige maybe 4-5 times more, then go directly to the end of the dungeon, clear the Grand Arena, and focus on boosting the Mage by reclassing it to a Dragonlancer for a few hours. The extra experience from Dragon Form will accelerate the process. After that, I'll be clear to add in the other 4 party members for some quick clvl IP, finish off about a hundred Eternal clears, then Ascend again. Could be today, could be tomorrow.
It is now 11:11pm and I've just dumped the remaining IP into Challenge, now totaling 12,775 Challenge. The levels I've gained while afk are enough to support even that level of difficulty with one-shot kills for each of the Mage's three attacks. This is the end of early game. Now I will focus on maximizing the acquisition of Talent Points, spending the same amount of gold on the Mage each time I Prestige her. The Bard will be reclassed into a Gambler for the added experience boost, and its buff may be used to raise my dungeon level for even more gains.
From here, I expect I'll gain enough Talent Points to reach my first Prestige milestone, which will be 1,125 TP. That will give me 1,000 base stat and a decent speed boost, which will take me into Day 2. By that point, I'll pretty much be in middle-game, because the scaling of Talent Points is far faster than that of character level, and I rarely get done spending my TP before it's time to prestige again. Day 3 will be spent leveling the rest of the party with a maxed-out Gambler, like I did today. I gained ~700IP over the course of three days with this method. If that's "poor math", I'll take it.
I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. First, I want to point out that the techniques I've talked about are possible if you know what you're doing. Second, I want it known that this is how I'm achieving my score. If the method is demonstrable and repeatable, maybe more players will be inclined to believe the methodology instead of just instantly dismissing it as "bad math".
For the nay-sayers and the curious, I have decided to document this run. I started the new run at about 3pm today, Ascending to 12,775 IP. I immediately reclassed my starting hero to my Imbued Mage, who has received 80 Imbue Class, which is equivalent to 21x normal power. I started by clearing the training stage and hiring a Bard, who was just there to keep me alive during the initial leveling process. I stayed in Endless Dungeon lvl1 for a couple of hours, starting with 10 Challenge and trickling in new skill levels and new Challenge when needed. After that, I farmed the Dank Cellar for the majority of the day. It's now 8:16pm, I'm sitting at clvl 984, dealing about 71,169dps with Arcane Explosion (which is enough to one-shot the entire wave), and have not prestiged the character. I just dumped enough IP into Challenge to take me from 2k to 7k and am STILL one-shotting the enemy with each of my three attacks. The Mage and the Bard are my only two characters.
Right now, my entire strategy basically consists of: Imbued Mage until clvl 20-30k, in order to gain enough base power and gold to run Gambler until about clvl 100-200k, then back to Imbued Mage for a run directly to the end of the dungeon. From there, it's back to Gambler so I can meet my quota for clvl IP, then back to Imbued Mage for as many Eternal clears as I can get. Couple of hours leveling the rest of the party for more clvl IP, then Ascension. Takes a couple of days for ~400 IP, which goes back into the Mage for faster runs.
The problem there is that I haven't used a full team in ages, because I just don't need to anymore. I might go back to that eventually, but even then...historically, posting an opinion on ANYthing has only ever resulted in a flamewar for me, which often has me wondering "well, why did you ask". Sorry to disappoint you. Blame the dozens of players who got aggressive over the answer to a question. /shrug
Hgiang, min/max damage is static, whereas leveling your character will always give you +1 to both ATK and SKL, which both operate on a multiplier (ATK Rating, SKL Rating). Also, buffs add ATK/SKL, which further puts min/max power behind...until you recognize two things: 1) Everything gets converted into Power before damage is done, so as long as you can hit an amount of min/max equal to or greater than your damage stat * its rating, it will remain relevant. 2) Some classes (like the Dragonlancer) scale cost for min/max power very slowly, so it becomes possible to exceed buff amounts very easily by midgame. It isn't that it's weaker...more that it just has to be controlled a certain way to stay relevant.
Well, apparently Kong is shutting down a lot of its major features soon, so if anyone has questions about the game...ask them now. I wouldn't be surprised if they remove this section, or even the game itself.
Did a little test with the Bard on my last run. Endgame stats on these monsters measured ~6e07. With about 1e15 or so invested gold, the Bard's supposedly game-ending debuff took off about 1M from enemy stats in the Eternal Dungeon (which was the only place where the monsters were strong enough to give me time to measure the debuff, since everything else gets instantly nuked). e07 is tens of millions. So we're talking about 60M stats...and removing 1M from them. So much for making the enemy helpless. Again, the Bard is an excellent early-game boost, but...not "OP" of any kind, and certainly not endgame viable.
Depending on your IP, you can hit one-shot wipes much sooner than that, but I'm assuming you haven't gotten that far yet. The thing about permanent uptime buffs is that AoE single-cast relies entirely on duration and cooldown speed to get more than one stack. The Bard has neither multicast nor duration boosts, so it's entirely a function of tombstones and talent points. The Gambler and other multicast buffers can hit hundreds of stacks by midgame, so the Bard is very much just a stepping stone.
As far as mid-to-late-game progression, the Gambler outperforms any other buffer in the game due to its cheap duration scaling and multicast. Some players only see the 25% fail chance and pass on it instantly, but the more casts and duration stacks you have, the more that fail chance levels out. It ends up being more or less 75% of listed bonus and no longer a risk of a noticeable debuff. My solo Mage runs end up over 120,000% experience bonus. Late-game will see the need for shields and heals completely disappear, as you will level constantly and leveling heals you to 100%. Also, once again, by late-game you should be wiping an entire wave with each hero, on each attack, and should be hitting 0.01s cooldowns on their main attacks. That's 100 clears per second, per hero.
As far as early-game progression, you can make a pretty good go of it by sticking with the Squire for all 6 heroes until you can afford permanent uptime on the Bard's Inspiring Song buff, then push floors until about 1k. That's about the point in the game where you can comfortably start exploring other classes without much risk of party wipe. As far as class choice, I won't post my composition because other players only ask so they can pointlessly cut your choices to ribbons. All I can say is multicast, multicast, multicast. There are "trap" classes which are objectively worse, and it can be mathematically proven. You'll have to explore that and test everything, find out what works best for you and go for it. Remember to use Export File and save it as a notepad file, so you can test other loadouts risk-free.
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