Sir Action Slacks helps us, help you, beat Aghanim’s Labyrinth: The Continuum Conundrum on the hardest difficulty, Apex Mage!
Aghanim’s Labyrinth: The Continuum Conundrum is a surprisingly deep game mode. Unfortunately, even as you play more and more of it, it can seem like it never gets any easier. Check out Esports.gg's Aghanim's Lab Guide here.
And so, in collaboration with SirActionSlacks, we’ve compiled a list of advanced strats and tips for Apex Mage difficulty. Of course, these tips won’t guarantee you can clear every time (You’re still at the mercy of your teammates for the most part), but they’ll certainly help.
Always play for the Final Boss
The point of Aghanim’s Labyrinth: TCC is to defeat the final boss, the Primal Beast. Therefore, selecting any talent that helps you get to the Boss but is not that good during the boss fight is a wasted talent. Instead, pick shards that help will make the Primal Beast easier or even defeatable in the first place.
For example, shards for Witch Doctor’s Ward are excellent for clearing rooms. But you’re never standing still in the boss fight. So investing in damage or range without the talent that allows you to drop it and move is worthless.
Why spend 90 minutes making it to the Boss, then losing. So, let that decision guide you. How does this Blessing or Elite Shard help me kill the last Boss? As long as you can answer that, go for it. But if you can’t, pass and hope you get a better combo later.
Aghanim’s Blessing Choice
Even if you can’t make it to the Final Boss, there’s a point to playing without getting to the last Boss. Aghanim’s Labyrinth is a roguelike, which means every time you play, you get stronger. You get Shards every game you play, which you can spend on permanent buffs from Aghanim’s Blessing. There are many options, but your first goal should be to unlock all the big inner circles.
Good Early Blessings
- Starting Gold: This allows you to get a Tranquil Boot right out the gate, which is great for many heroes.
- Bottle: The Bottle does not get canceled when you’re hit and does percentage-based heal. This means it scales for every room.
- Potions: Will help you in the first few rooms, which on Apex Mage are typically the hardest.
- Discounts on Roshan and Oracle
The overall BEST Blessing
Bottle speed increase. Re-rolls are fantastic because they let you reduce the randomness of the mode, but Bottle speed increase is the best. Here’s why:
Every room you complete, you get one bottle charge. Every boss room you fill your bottle. Now again the bottle is uninterruptible, does % regen this is great. But speed is life.
"The crazy thing about this speed boost is it ignores ALL effects If you're hit by Chilling Touch or slowed by a mob and about to get hit by something massive your Bottle Speed instantly purges that slow until it is empty. That's FOUR times," .
SirActionSlacks
Lives cost 1000 gold, but this speed boost saves lives, so you’re basically buying four get-out-of-jail-free cards for 4,000 gold, each section.
"It is a GOD TIER UPGRADE and it should be your number 1!!"
SirActionSlacks
Later Blessings
After you’ve completed the inner part of the Blessing ring, go for the Shard re-rolls and Elite Shard upgrades. Do this while moving in the direction of a hero you wish to unlock. RNG is life or death in roguelikes. Giving yourself more chances to get a good roll increases that RNG, but limits the possibilities of a useless roll.
Blessings to avoid
Minus 15 seconds death time is useless. You wanna be dead for as long as possible as many of your allies should have spells to cheese the mobs over your corpse, or if you died to Primal Beast you want to stay dead during his split attack for as long as possible till he stops, this one actively makes your life worse avoid till the end.
Apex Mage Strategies
Apex Mage has a few wrinkles that makes it far more difficult than all the other difficulties. And to beat it, you basically 100% have to cheese the game, break it, practically cheat, and use every advantage you can get.
To do that, you need to abuse cheese and high ground. In apex games, it’s pretty common for everyone but one person to die, and they will need to clutch the room. In the basic tips guide we mentioned the “Slack’s Circle” but there are better ways to go about this for certain heroes. The key is understanding how enemy Aggro works and ground target AoE spells.
For this you need to know the three ways enemies Aggro in Aghanim’s Labryinth:
- You target them and attack them, and it draws Aggro. This is a right-click, a single target spell where you select them. If you click on an enemy specifically, it will Aggro, and its friends will Aggro. So if you have something like shrapnel, fire spirits, tombstone, you never click on the enemies, so they never Aggro. This is standard cheese. Finding a place without vision, but can still cast spells on the ground under mobs.
- They spawn in and immediately Aggro. Spawned-in units automatically see you and Aggro. But if you can lose them by going high ground, they do not have high ground vision and will not chase yo. So, if you Slacks Circle some mobs and get all behind you, then go uphill, sometimes they will just stand there for you to AoE clear.
- They always have Aggro, but attack the closest available thing. This is for Room Captains and Boss Mobs. Many of these never lose sight of you, like the Alchemists. However, if there is something else closer and you are on high ground, they are programmed to attack the closer thing. This works on the Axe captains, the Alchemists, Snapfire etc. This is why Undying is so good. He can cheese any room cause he has both things Captains will attack and also two non-targeted attacks. He’s a cheese master. Phoenix is also popular because of this. If you’re having trouble deciding what hero to get good at, try Phoenix or Undying, as they are useful for every difficulty and you can clutch all the time.
And with that you should be able to cheese just about any room in Aghanim’s Labyrinth, even on Apex Mage difficulty!