Expert Guide: High Damage Wands

## **Gold to Power and Blood to power:**

* Blood to Power damages you for 20% of your *current* health and adds 0.44 times of it in form of projectile damage. The gained damage is capped at 24K, and can be achieved with 55K or more HP.

* Gold To Power is spent 5% of your gold in and adds 0.5 times of spent gold as projectile damage to the projectile. Damage is also capped at 11k, and can be achieved if the player has 218k or more gold.

Both of these spells can provide huge damage, and in order to use them without difficulty, you can collect several stainless armor perks or use ambrosia to get maximum damage. Also get infinite gold (which becomes such after the 2.1 billion), this will allow you to use GtP without restrictions. The fastest way to do this is by stacking greed perks.

## **Spells to Power**

Spells to Power absorbs projectiles owned by the player currently in flight in a radius and adds their projectile and explosion damage to the projectile the modifier is applied to. It cannot absorb other spells which also have a Spells to Power modifier applied.

This modifier can be used both in the mid-game in order to redirect the damage from some spells to one point, and in the late game in order to greatly increase the damage inflicted, since multiple copies of StP will absorb the same damage.

Some spells consist of several projectiles, which allows us to multiply damage even without additional spells when using StP. Such as Freezing Gaze(despite the fact that it deals ice damage, it has a hidden explosion component that StP can absorb), Infestation, Ball Lightning and Triplicate Bolt. Barrier spells are not as good for StP as they may seem, since it takes more than one frame to make all the projectiles appear, and it also can be very laggy. It is recommended to use only in the early game due to the lack of alternatives.

In order to separate the projectile for absorption in the future using StP, or in other words, the food, from the projectile with applied StP, Luminous Drill with Timer is well suited, since its lifetime allows the projectile to appear and in the next moment be absorbed by StP.

-FG StP example-

Though be careful, occasionally there may be cases when StP will absorb a Luminous Drill with Timer, which will lead to a lack of payload release. In order to avoid this, use the expiration trigger.

-exp trigger example-

In the late game wands, in order to save space, we can use only one projectile both for food and for direct StP target, Wand refresh is used for this:

-ripoff of kali’s wand-

As you can see, the ability to divide both the number of projectiles as food, and the StP itself allows you to significantly increase damage.

It is worth noting that StP in general is very bad for performance. Even a few StPs can slow down fps, and the 16 \* 800 \* 16 expression acts as a limit, meaning 204k operations. For example 16 food and 16 payloads with 800 StP. If you try to get more, the game will just crash.

## **Homing**

Homing is a group of modifiers that will impart some constant force on projectiles to make them home in on enemies. Despite the fact that they all do the same thing, each of the homing modifiers is different from each other and should be used in the right build for it. Let's analyze each of these spells, and understand how and where it would be better to use it.

**Basic Homing:**

Affects both the position and angle, as well as the speed of the projectile. It has a large area in which it will be aimed at enemies, it can be inconvenient if you are between several enemies, it can be difficult to choose the right target, and also projectiles can be aimed at the enemy behind your back, which can create a danger of being hit by your own projectile.

**Short-range Homing:**

It is identical to the basic homing in everything except for the smaller targeting radius, but due to it, provides much more control. It is universal in most cases.

**Rotate Towards Foes:**

It only affects the direction of the projectile, which makes it worse at targeting enemies than base one, but since it does not make changes to the velocity of the projectile, it is ideal for use in velocity builds (see #velocityguide and #expertvelocityguide)

**Projectile Area Teleport:**

Affects only the position, which means that a manual aim is needed, but this type is ideal for use with piercing, since the projectile stays exactly on target and deals damage all the time, and in combination with Rotate Towards Foes good for the velocity builds, since as said earlier does not change the speed.

**Accelerative Homing:**

Works similarly to conventional homing, except that the affected projectile first practically stops and then slowly accelerates to the target. Inefficient for both basic and even velocity builds. Projectiles often do not hit and overshoot a lot. The only adequate use is a combination with rock, as it adds speed, which leads to the fact that the stone causes huge damage since it is essentially a physical object. Otherwise, it is recommended to abandon the use of it.

**Aiming Arc:**

It provides huge control over the projectile, but accuracy can suffer greatly, and it is also not possible to efficiently use with piercing projectiles. Has a limited scope of use.

**Auto-Aim:**

The least influential type of all. It works similar to Rotate Towards Foes, but changes direction only once. In everything it is inferior to its analogues except for the cost.

## **Velocity Damage**

In the previous guide, we got acquainted with the main points about velocity damage. Now we will delve into the details and sort out the smallest details.

As you remember, in order for the projectile not to die from lack of speed, we need to maintain its minimal speed. This can be problematic in many builds, but how do we solve this problem? The answer is beautiful in its simplicity – gravity, and if specifically, the Anti-Gravity and Gravity modifiers.

Both of these modifiers add, among other things, add a flat velocity that is not affected by speed multiplier. This allows you to use an unlimited number of speed-reducing modifiers, without fear of overdoing it. It is worth noting that it is recommended to use Anti-Gravity in order to achieve the most damage.

-wand example-

Keep in mind that speed from the Anti-Gravity is taken into account when determining the final damage multiplier, which means that any number more than one will reduce damage.

The amount of Accelerating shots can be defined as the more the better. Since an increase in their number will also increase the speed of the acceleration of the projectile, which will increase the chances of them gaining maximum speed by the time the projectile will hit the target.

Take into account that the use of drilling shot can cancel the accel effect if it is after Accelerating shot. Both of these modifiers, deceleration inclusive, affect a hidden characteristic called air friction, which affects whether the projectile accelerates or slows down during flight. Drilling shot can equate this characteristic to zero if air friction is already negative from Accelerating shot. To avoid this, just put it in front of the Accelerating shot.
The angle at which the projectile is fired also affects the starting speed. The optimal angle with 1 Anti-Gravity and minimum starting speed is approximately 30 degrees below the horizon.

If you do everything right, the damage multiplier will be 200x just from velocity damage.

Here is an example of a wand that contains all the previous tips:

It does 13 quintillion damage per second. Pretty good, isn't it?

Now, let's talk about a special direction in wand crafting, which is commonly called bugs.

## **“Infinite” Damage Exploits**

* *Hungry Ghost*

The ghost inflicts a buff on the player for the absorbed enemy projectile. Maximum of 2 buffs per ghost. Each buff adds 7.5 damage and also multiplies the damage by 1.25 for each projectile in the hand. TODO: check, add explanations. This means that if there are just two spark bolt and double cast on the wand, then the final cast with one buff is (7.5 \* 1.25 + 7.5) \* 1.25 + 3 \* 2 ~= 27 damage. Now imagine what you can achieve with a lot of projectiles in the hand and a lot of buffs.

The maximum number of perks that can be obtained in a normal way is 5, which gives us 10 buffs (you can collect more by loading perks and picking them up later or using null altar). You can also restart the game in order to reset the time of buffs, and get an unlimited number of them while continuing this action, but we will take into account only 10 buffs in this guide, just keep in mind that you can get more.

* *StP Tentacle*

In order to fully understand how this exploit functions, let's analyze the StP mechanism. StP has two components in it. One is the StP tag, which is a marker that indicates that the projectile has had StP applied. The second is the StP entity itself, which contains the function for absorbing damage from all nearby projectiles. That logic will make sure to only take damage from projectiles that don’t have the StP tag themselves, which prevents StP from looping.

StP looping, namely having StP take damage from a projectile that has already gained damage through StP, is extremely powerful. Since each copy of StP will copy the feed projectile’s damage onto the payload projectiles once, many copies of StP will result in many copies of the damage being added. Basically, casting StP multiplies your existing damage. If you can do many iterations of this process, you can multiply your damage many times. The StP tag is the only thing that prevents this.

In normal situations, this protection works like clockwork. The tentacle, however, behaves in a special way. Because of the peculiarity of the tentacle’s code, when certain entities are applied to a tentacle they are instead transferred to the “parent entity” of the tentacle. The StP tag is one such entity. If you cast a Spark Bolt with Timer that casts a tentacle with StP on it, the StP tag will be applied to the spark bolt instead of the tentacle. However, the damage isn’t transferred to the spark bolt, just the tag. This means that other StP projectiles can eat the tentacle’s boosted damage. StP starts looping.

-tentacle wand-

Since StP applies on the second frame of a projectile’s life, all of the tentacles are already out and ready to be harvested when the first one starts feeding. Which tentacle goes first is chosen somewhat randomly, but they do go one at a time. So the first tentacle will have its copies of StP give it 29 times the sum of the damage on the rest of the 28 tentacles. Then, the second tentacle will go. It will get 29 times the sum of the damage on the rest of the tentacles, including the one that just had its damage boosted. So in essence, after the process completes, the final tentacle will get 29 ^ 29 \* base tentacle damage.