Here there be Tower Defense discussion

Dungeon Warfare 2 - How do you get past the Plagued Grotto and frog boss?

I’ve tried standard builds, mixes of 8 traps at about the 30ish level and can’t get to the boss. I also tried some successful other builds - mixes of axes, cold, liches and slime and another 3-5 trap variants.

So I tried the singularity method (all points into the skill, use one only of each trap and the reload times go down to under a second depending on animations), which whilst destroys, no, obliterates everything within 3 squares of the entrance including the boss it doesnt kill the mini frogs that pop out of the boss as they kinda jump out the killbox immediately. I also tried a singularity killbox using 7 traps with an 8th being 30ish level liches filling every spot down the centre and the spawn went through that too. Is the only way through this 8 traps with 50+ gems in each and and traps across the map? i.e i need to grind for a bit?

Oof. That sounds interesting…I can’t offer any advice as I am not there yet and I’m not sure if I’m 4 or 40 hours away from it. But the way you’re taking I may be closer to 40 away. Only boss I’ve met so far is the one on horseback in one of the maps in the middle of the map grid.

I had used fire traps for a bit in conjunction with slime traps, but now I’m using the chakram throwers paired with ice machines and slime traps and a black hole trap. Against tougher crowds I’ll augment with a bit of fire and those spike launcher thingies.

What’s been your solution for those asshole flying machines?

On maps where the flying machines avoid my killbox, 2 liches + 3 lightning was overkill (centre one is the booster), perhaps 2 lich+1 lightning might do it if they have enough gems.

Singularity + 1 chakram with 1 cold opposite at about 30-40 gems is insane. It fires 2-3 per second, and bounces and chakram splits to two so you get a blur of chakram bouncing back and forth in front of spawn line and it does so in a nonstop blast of cold slows.

The only downside to Gemcraft for me is that when you get to the point of so many enemies on the screen it slows down tremendously.

Thank you, I haven’t worked with the liches much yet, I’ll start experimenting with them.

I just encountered the first boss level on Dungeon Warfare II. I might have been pretty overleveled for him as he went down quick.

This is a pretty great sequel.

14 hours in, Mindustry is really, really good, and a bargain at $4.99.

Plants vs Zombies 2 had this problem at launch too. Luckily it was solved when I finally upgraded my phone 2 years later.

Here’s the singularity method. Spot the early escapee.

Cool, but I tried that with 9 runes and got my ass kicked. Of course I didn’t have as many points in singularity, that could have made a solid difference.

Great example of singularity. I haven’t even come close to that level, but everything is melting now that I’m > level 170 and have chakram at almost 100 with a legendary jewel that gives chakram kickback.

The combination axe, spinner at the end of the axe to stop escapees with a few slimes and one blackhole, along with chakram to bounce them back into the axe is pretty effective.

Did you get this yet? I got it and also got the achievement of turning frogs into frogs with this setup:

I was using axes and slime very successfully and had them similar to your setup, i.e force them to go left past axes but with slime, lightning and liches in force but not enough points, waves 30+ just went through it all. I think as you said, a few more levels are required.

I beat the frog boss in the grotto. My map looked very different from Tman’s. I am not yet at the level he is (so nice grinding Tman, I think you got the game after me but level 170…wow, I think I’m still around 95).

What I did first was have crates set up similar to Tman to force the creeps around the lap. I used a combination of frog traps and a set of spin traps at the entrance and then a bunch of bolt traps and fire traps along the path. I used my chakram setup (freeze trap and slime traps to slow them as they approach the chakram thrower).

The first time I played this map I didn’t want the bulls to keep hitting my crates and trigging my traps early so I tried to not use crates and defended a straight through path from the entrance to the exit. But the boss spawns so many little frogs and one got through.

Just wanted to comment that I’m not grinding in the traditional sense. I just got a bit more aggressive on using Runes on the maps and always running endless. I also found way too many of the “etheral maps” - > the once used, they disappear. Looking back (and now on my 1st ascendant playthrough), I should not have been clicking on the items to create so many of these maps.

Ok. Interesting, wel congrats anyway on ascending, I haven’t done that yet.

Item management is one of the frustrating things about this game. I just like to play levels. And now when I look in the items inventory it’s just a big jumble of shit. You can’t sort it, you can’t organize by level or rarity and if you overflow the three inventory pages, the rest is sitting in a bag of holding that has no catalog.

There’s not much explanation about the ethereal maps. I think someone on the Steam forums said there are some places where you need to play them to access other non ethereal maps but I have no way to know for sure.

Fortunately it doesn’t seem like not using items stops you from playing so I’m going to keep chugging through.

Ok, so this was something that confused me too and a guy gave a real good explanation on these, but basically you want to continuously combining these. It’s better to leave them unidentified until you get to the legendary because combining 9 unidentified items gives you +1 the average of the next tier.

So basically, combine 9 no backgrounds to get a blue, or 9 blues to get a green/gold and 9 greens to get the legendary. Once they are legendary, then identify them.

9 legendaries combine into a grotesque endeavor which will have 5 or 6 of the 9 stats you combine. It allows you to really put a lot of legendaries on your belt to use.

EDIT: also you can use the transmutation panel to move / organize them into one of the 3 tabs.

So I completed my first ascension and decided to write a beginner guide for Dungeon Warfare 2. This is a very good TD game. It’s a little complicated and overwhelmed me at first, and many people on steam forums were nice to answer a lot of my questions, so I repaid it.

Is Dungeon Warfare worth playing before 2, or is it one of those “sequel obsoletes the original” situations?

I liked the original DW but 2 adds so much, it’s much more like Gemcraft with a wide variety of options.

DW is not a prerequisite, but it would still be in my top 10 list of TD games because the design is so well done.

Possibly worth playing as a less-complicated introduction to the series?