My current favorite is Wizard and Minion Idle. It has a whole page of things you can pay for with premium currency, but you earn that currency at a very reasonable rate, and by end game you can buy all of the premium stuff without spending a single cent. It’s really just a high tier currency that you earn more slowly, and you could rush if you wanted to, but…why? It’s very fairly balanced.
The game itself is not heavy on the clicking - in fact, many of the upgrades allow for more automation, so the game is more about planning how you want to best optimize the use of many many systems to achieve whatever you think is the right direction you want to expand in. As you level up, more and more interlocking systems are introduced that have cool synergies, so it’s very much an incremental/idle, not a clicker.
FWIW, having played this sporadically over the weekend, I think this is a massive exaggeration. I’m now reaching the boss of shard 2, though I doubt I’d be able to beat it for a while longer. That said I do think I’m putting down the game until it’s much further along or changed up. The runs are almost all the same and almost all of them don’t get you anything but wax. It’s just not very fun at the moment. It’s also pretty much impossible to progress offline. Realm Grinder does this sort of build based clicker much better (and has some stuff tied to being offline that you can work on when not actively playing).
That’s good to hear, on the balance front. It’s possible they already tweaked it some (there were something like 4 updates over the past few days).
Given that it’s EA it’s hardly surprising, but I agree there’s work to do. I love the graphics and think they have some good ideas. I would really like to see items expanded (I like the idea of being able to craft/build up an “early game item”, and so on).
A simple fix would be to allow you to refight the bosses each run, but maybe with a lower quality chest for subsequent runs. At the moment chests (or more importantly their contents) are far too hard to come by, so you almost never get to improve your equipment. Combined with no real offline progression (and major obstacles to passive play), it results in a lot of tedium.
Yep, no question. You can’t spend purple shards on gear in the shop because (1) you can’t afford most of the interesting stuff anyway and (2) shards are too precious to take chances on lesser gear. The only real play for chests is grinding the grim chests, which is not going to be satisfying in the least especially since all of that spent wax goes away in the next Shard. That also makes eq slot unlocks after the first less satisfying since it’s a lot of wax to shave up but I don’t think unlocking slots counts towards any chest progression (possibly save achievements, but that’s super slow even for chest progression).
I wouldn’t necessarily object to “higher tier” gear being significant drop restricted (so it wouldn’t show up on subsequent boss kills of a shard e.g.), but I agree they need to allow some better method of gear collection, which at this time means some better method of chest farming. Otherwise, nobody is going to play.
If it improves, I’ll give them some money. But I’ll have to see the improvement.
I gave this a second chance and was able to get over the initial hump in shard 2 and gain some momentum, but that initial grind is brutal. I’m willing to wait and come back later when it’s received some improvements. Also from the forums read that there’s ~25 skills that haven’t been implemented yet.
One thing I did discover - the save file is stored in AppData/Local and is a fairly straightforward double Base64 encoded text file. Kind of defeats the purpose of ‘playing’ but I gave myself a bunch of the pay currency since the current drop rate and shop prices felt extremely poorly balanced.
The quest timers also don’t progress when offline, which seems like a bug. Agree with everything you’ve written here. There seems to be a solid core here but it needs some polish.
I think it depends on how long you stay in Shard 1, as the multiplier is a function of wax earned/spent (not sure which). So if you don’t jump until you’ve earned a lot of wax, you’ll have quite a high multiplier in Shard 2, and the initial grind isn’t so bad. I think I was around 3.5- 4x when I jumped.
i am so far at the end of shard 5 (eight in total) i have spent quite alot on this game but have decided to stop spending as to progress just a little i would have to start spending serious money which can be easily done
Anyone else still poking at this? I finished the fourth shard this morning, still totally F2P (and no cheating), and the game recommended I go back to completed shards for an easy flame increase. They did fix the thing with the quest timers not working offline, thankfully, and they’ve made some improvements in other areas, but we still don’t have tooltips for basic things, and even if I hadn’t bought +10 max mana early on (not realizing that mana kind of sucks in this game!), I still wouldn’t have enough shards to buy +1 SP per level from the shard shop. Also, the skill trees need a lot of balance work, as I haven’t seen a good reason in a while to not just pump strength and nothing else.
Poked in a couple of tiems and I am monitoring progress.
I don’t agree that just pushing strength is the way to go, but I do think things are a bit limited right now build wise.
A bit of strength (for rage primarily, and some points htere) coupled with dex investment can produce a build that can rage for a very long time. Points in firefly appearance up, and also the ksill that grants energy for fireflies, and your auto clicking will often kill them. The “first hit is a crit” mask is very powerful too. I had some more luck recently with that sort of build than going for the mask that increases your strength bonus to damage by 10x, which I thought was slightly odd. I’ve also used that dex/click build to get close to the end of the shard, although I think some updates might have changed it some since that point. Granted, if you wait long enough any build should make it. At one point consensus was that for farming purposes (e.g. just generating a nice pile of candlews and ritualing) one of the dex or strength builds was superior but I can’t recall which.
@Lee_Suttling there is a build that’s strength but uses the flame skill and the flame skill is pretty powerful. But it requires investment (each level adds another “fire thingy” that shoots out, and adds damage I think). I think magic overall still isn’t very good though.
I think I’ll try to get to the end of the shard and see what’s what. I am pushing to unlock an 8k gear slot currently.
Does the game get more idle-y? I didn’t play a lot, but it felt like it required a lot of constant attention. My preferred idle games have periods of activity where it feels like you’re taking your “turn”, setting up your strategy for the next [X] hours, then you can go play other games, etc.
I can’t make any judgement because the game didn’t hold me long enough to beat the first shard. My hope is that the game improves as it develops and gets more interesting/smoothed out, then I’ll revisit.
Weapons come in tiers (something like “poor”, “quality”, etc). The lowest tier cannot have any of what are called charms slotted into them. But if you upgrade a weapon you can get those slots. One charm will auto upgrade a weapon. Some of the patch notes over the past few weeks suggested there was something in that which was configurable, but I haven’t used such charms so I don’t know. I should experiment.
Unfortunately, right now leveling up is not automated, and it’s where you derive a considerable about of power. So that means allocationg skill points periodically. I’m currently doing the rage + dex build, and my energy regen is such that Ib asically sustain rage all the time so I don’t need to cast it more than once. But I still gotta go in and level stuff up. This is am area I am hoping gets some tLC in the future. I wouldn’t mind being able to “repeat last build” or something after ascending. But as we’re still well away from release I don’t know what the devs are planning.
Leveling does slowdown a shitload, though, so e.g. the second half of this run (I’m in zone 31) has been fairly uninvolved. I’m level 19 and I bet I’ve leveled less than 7 times, maybe less than 4-5, in the past 15 zones.
The thing about the all-strength build is, March plus the fire mask is pretty much always stronger than going for crits, especially when you get further along the strength tree and find the skill that increases the per-second damage increase from March (my run that cleared the fourth shard involved +15% damage every second for 150 minutes). The fire sword does some insane damage as well, and picks up all these other damage boosts.
So I found something of note that I won’t have access to for. . . well I don’t know. At some point or another you gain a soul. There’s alittle drop down in the top right of the main display that allows you to set some behavior. Like one of the options will generate rubies periodically. Another will generate energy. You can get more souls - I have 2 - and more things open up. The 10 soul option is “auto increase skill” or something. I have no idea how it would work of course (can you pick the skill), or when I could get to 10 souls. I can’t remember where I got the first two. I suspect they are tied to some sort of milestone.
Boss souls come as a guaranteed drop from boss chests, which are earned by defeating bosses. After you get the boss chest from the first boss, there’s a progress bar that fills up for additional chests - you have to kill two bosses for each of the next few boss chests, then three, and so on. You can also spend a large amount of shards to buy a boss chest, of course, but with how the purchasable amounts of shards in the real-money shop line up with chest prices, if you’re going to spend money like that, you might as well buy the living chest instead, which includes two boss souls.
Still playing, still F2P. Currently on the fifth shard, 13.3 flame power. I have six gear slots now, which will hopefully open up some nice possibilities in the future.
Since I finally reached 300 shards and bought the upgrade that gives +1 SP on each level-up, I decided to experiment with some different builds, but the ones I tried were all worse than the pure-strength March build or the strength/dexterity endless Rage of Darkness crit build. In particular, the pure-wisdom build was even more disappointing than expected, because it turns out over half the skills in that tree aren’t implemented yet. (Good news on that front, though: the dev was talking about wisdom getting some love in the update after the one that’s supposed to hit this week.)
