Contents
Guide to Relics
Good Relics
Ember Guardian: Your fire source will be surrounded by four buff tiles with random effects.
You can never go wrong with this and I like how it affects strategy.
Lightning Conductor: When your electric towers attack an enemy, there’s a 20% chance to summon additional lightning to strike the target, dealing 3 damage.
Free damage on electric towers, and since lightning towers target multiple enemies, the chance is pretty high. Missiles/drones don’t benefit as much but it does work with them.
Frost Venom: Your poison effects also cause chill effect.
Dart towers becoming budget ice towers is pretty nice. It also works well because poison takes time to deal damage and the chill creates more time before the monster will exit. Great relic design, it makes a meaningful change to how you play and approach the game when you have it.
Ice Storm: When you kill a monster affected by the chill effect, the frozen energy spreads and slows down other monsters nearby.
This might not be quite as good as it initially sounds because currently, the attacks that inflict chill are already AoE. More slowdown is always good though.
Wealth Vault: At the start of each round, you earn interest equal to 10% of your current gold.
You can get by with very little spending for the first few waves and earn quite a bit from this. It’s fun and interesting to try and get value from this.
Chaos Transmuter: At the end of each wave, 5 of your towers will randomly transform into another tower of the same size.
Placing scrap towers and forcing them to transform into something more expensive is very strong but the randomness of everything else makes this hard to rate. It’s very fun though and it’s a great relic to have in the game.
Suffers From Limits of the Demo
Explosive Demolition: When you sell a tower during battle, you don’t receive any gold. Instead, it creates an explosion that deals damage to surrounding monsters, equal to 5x the selling price in gold.
Being able to upgrade cards will increase their sell price so you can do more damage. I like this relic because it’s funny.
Mercenary Contract: Upon completing a barracks challenge, you receive an additional 50 ember stones.
Multiple worlds are necessary for this to be useful but it seems solid.
Low Impact
Academy Certificate: Reduces the cost of drawing cards by 20%.
You save 1 gold on the first card. It gets more useful if you draw more cards after that but it just doesn’t do enough. It needs to save more than 20 coins to be better than Adventurer’s Legacy which means you have to spend over 100 coins drawing. Maybe 40% would be a good spot?
Craftsman’s Lucky Charm: When choosing a tower after passing a level, there will be an additional option.
Never bad to have more choices but you already have 3 towers to choose from and you can end up getting what you want most of the time already. Not a bad relic, I just don’t find it useful in the demo. If the full version has more specific builds that people are trying to target, this could become a nice pickup for consistency. I like the design too but I just don’t find myself choosing it.
Flamekeeper’s Guard: If the damage taken in a level is 3 points or less, recover 1 health point upon completing a level.
I’d rather have a relic that helps me not take damage in the first place, and 1 hp per level is barely noticeable. I’d change this to negating the first 3 points of damage in a level, or 2 points if it seems too good. Also there’s Ember Guardian so I’d put Shield in the name instead of Guard.
These two that I can’t decide between
Adventurer’s Legacy: You receive an additional 20 gold coins at the start of each level.
Allows you to get a head start on the ideal maze by buying cards or to start off with an expensive 2×2 tower. It could be buffed to 30 coins and still be fine, it’s not high impact but it’s very comfortable to have.Maybe it would be more interesting if it gave you more cards in your starting hand.
Time-Saving Device: The preparation time between each wave is halved. For every 10 seconds remaining on the countdown timer at the start of a battle, you earn 1 gold coin.
In the optimal scenario you get 7 coins per wave, not including the first since it doesn’t have a prep timer. I can comfortably get 5 per wave, but even then I prefer Adventurer’s Legacy for getting a more immediate effect in the start. This relic is perfectly fine design–wise I just don’t like it very much lol.
These end up having similar effects, Time-Saving Device can net you more in the long run while Adventurer’s Legacy is a good benefit at the start. I originally had Adventurer’s in Good and Time-Saving in Low Impact but they’re 2 flavors of decent. Fine relics, good design, idk why I spent so long thinking about them.
Unsure
Royal Command: Recover 3 health points for the fire source when passing a level, but limits your preparation time to 25 seconds between each wave.
Three health per level is nice and allows you to ignore some bigger monsters early on, but I don’t personally like having it. This and Flamekeeper’s Guard both recover health points and neither condition changes the game very much. I’d rather have a different relic and not need to recover hp at all.
Flash Freeze Device: In each level, the first time your fire source takes damage, freeze all monsters for 5 seconds.
One get out of jail free provided you can use those extra 5 seconds to clear the wave. I haven’t encountered a scenario where I think this would help, but maybe on very high difficulty this makes the difference you need.
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