Instakill

What Is Instakill?

The term One Hit Kill (OHK) is used in many games to mean any overwhelming hit that does enough damage to kill the enemy in one blow. Whilst that can happen in Gems of War, my focus here is on ‘special’ types of OHK that work regardless of the target’s Health and Armour. For simplicity, I’ll refer to these all as Instakills, although that term isn’t actually used by the game.

The Instakill is not uncommon in Gems of War and there are multiple ways of achieving it. As well as a direct ‘Kill’ spell effect, there are also status effects such as Terror and Death Mark that might kill, maybe a few turns in the future. Then there are Transform spells and the Lycanthropy status effect which won’t kill a Troop as such but might just as well. I class all of these as Instakill, even if that’s not strictly accurate. Using the terms “AlmostInstaMightKill” and “AlmostInstaMightAlmostKill” would be just too unwieldy!

Regardless of which spell or status effect is in use, Instakills in the game are (almost) always RNG dependent and there are Traits and Status Effects to defend against them or remove them. This is one of the reasons it can be risky to build a team entirely around a single Instakill Troop when you don’t know what you’ll be up against, unless you can protect them really well. There are almost no Troops in the game where the Instakill is guaranteed, so you need the RNG on your side. (An exception to this is Boss enemies, met during Events, which sometimes do have a guaranteed Instakill).

Instakill status effects can be caused either by casting a spell directly or by matching Heroic Gems on the board.

Instakills, by their very nature, scale well since the Health and Armour of the target are irrelevant. However there are various Traits and Status Effects that can protect against some or all types of Instakill. Higher level enemies – and hopefully your higher level teams – are more likely to have such protection.

Enemies capable of Instakills are especially dangerous enemies in Delves, where losing even one Troop early can ruin your run. For this reason, you might want to avoid rooms such as Treasure Trove (Mimics) and Sunken Treaure (Scylla and Mimic) unless either you’re protected or you’re confident that you can dispose of the threat quickly.