Stacking Glyphs and Combos

The new ability to stack like glyphs together to make a more potent version is great and I was wonder how that worked with combos? For instance say on my bar at one time I happen to have 3 Rends and 3 Trips and I combine those into a "level 3" Rend and a "level 3" Trip if I then combo those two "level 3" glyphs into a Hamstring would it just be a regular Hamstring or a "level 3" Hanstring? What about combining glyphs of differing "levels"?

In the above example would forming 3 Hamstrings and then merging them together work as well? Be better? Worse?

 

Presumably, if could survive long enough and be dealt the right gylphs so as to keep stacking the combos, you'd have a 1-hit kill combo eventually

 

I was able to concoct second stages of hamstring and fiery decay.
I would assume that Chris's description still holds true - increased damage and reduced focus cost

 

Since we're capped at 5 points per skill currently, you can create up to a level 5 combo. That's what I did earlier. Stacked 5 fire arrows and 5 death rays and then combined them into a single level 5 fiery decay. Alternately, you can stack 5 level 1 fiery decays too. I didn't measure the damage or focus cost though.

I did notice that if you combine a higher level stack with a lower level stack to make the combo, you waste the difference. Like if I had a Level 5 Fire Arrow and a Level 3 Death Ray and tried combining them, I'd only get a Level 3 Fiery Decay combo. I think the other 2 Fire Arrows are discarded.

 

I did muck around with this last night and essentially distilled my entire deck down to two combos on my bar. Sadly they didn't seem to do that much extra damage. Though that may have been an issue with the leashed forever regenerating Dark Elf Archer...

 

If I remember right Chris mentioned the strength improves by 10% each stack. The real benefit of stacks is the focus reduction, 5 focus for each level stacked. If you're a fighter that's probably not as big a deal right now, but for a mage it's essential. I've found that if you're a mage and you're not stacking the same glyphs whenever you can, I was running out of focus very quickly. With stacking I was able to fight for much longer.

 

Yeah, I did some more testing of this last night too, comparing my level 1 fire arrows vs. level 5 and level 1 vs 5 combos and they didn't seem to be that much more effective. I didn't pay attention to the focus penalty though.

Yeah, agreed. But the problem that I ran into was that I was now looking at my hotbar nearly 99% of the time during a fight. We need to solve the UI issue! I'm fighting the UI, not the combatant on-screen. But I digress...