Magicka: Dungeons and Gargoyles

I finally got around to playing and beating it.  This is the followup to Dungeons and Daemons, and the last bit of DLC ever for Magicka.  Note that for whatever reason it's not in the DLC bundle on Steam, so if you bought that you'll still need to buy this.  The Complete Pack has it, though.

As the name suggests, there are gargoyles you'll have to fight.  But it'd be boring if that was all you had to fight, right?  Well, right.  There are enemy mages who can poison you and summon slimes that multiply on death and can also poison you.  There's also some goblins and dwarves, complete with the annoying dwarven high priests with their instakill boulders.  Also, there's the final boss, which you'll probably never see coming.

The campaign itself is fairly decent, but there's really no chance to do what was so prevalent in the original adventure: move through a level and kill things.  Every time you encounter enemies, the screen stops moving until they're defeated.  Then you move on to the next encounter and it repeats.  It's basically just big battle after big battle.

Overall, it's a decent bit of DLC, but if you're on the fence about it, wait for a sale.  Magicka and its DLC go on sale on a fairly regular basis, so it shouldn't be too hard to hold out.

Strategy after the break.

Against the enemy mages and the slimes, you'll want an EDQ shield since the mages spam water projectiles.  I stuck to spamming ARSE mines on them and largely ignoring the slimes except when there got to be too many of them.  If you get the opportunity, swap over to an ARSE shield and pop off a few QRQREAS ice walls of doom to thin the numbers and wear through the slimes.

As for the gargoyles, well, not a lot damages them.  They take damage from fire, but it's so little that it's not worth using.  My strategy here was to put on a EDDDD shield to extend my life bar, and spam fully charged DQRQRQRQR ice rocks on them until they died.

One particularly annoying encounter involves druids, their summoned trees, spiders, and some other things that can kill you pretty quickly.  I ended up running around with an ARSE shield spamming ARSE mines and QRQREAS ice walls of doom until everything was dead.  The druids will make it rain periodically, so you'll need to use an EQ shield so you can continue ARSE mining.  Mix in some SAFE mines if you feel like it.

Any encounter with goblins involved is fairly simple, they die quickly to pretty much anything you can throw at them.  As for the dwarves, try to take out the high priests first.  It helps that when you encounter them, there's a ton of stuff around and they'll target things that aren't you, so you can pounce and kill them when they're distracted.

Now for the final boss, which is... a questing party consisting of a warrior, assassin, and mage.  The warrior has a fairy just like yours, so you'll have to kill him twice.  The assassin runs around all over the place and can poison you with darts.  The mage summons spirits that use water beams, and teleports around.  My way of dealing with all of this was to once again use an EDQ shield and spam ARSE mines.  The mage likes to be annoying with the teleports, however, it's very likely that the assassin will accidentally hit the mage with a poison dart, so if you see the mage's health bar turn green, you can focus on the other two.  Eventually you'll connect with some ARSE mines and from there it becomes really easy.

The only magick I found in the entire campaign was Haste.  According to the script files for this campaign, which are just XML files, I should have also found Grease, Spray of Judgement, and Teleport.  Teleport would have been handy, the other two I could honestly do without.  You can get a Rod of Emergency Teleport early in the campaign, which can come in handy later on if you manage to keep it long enough.