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The Guide to Toontown Gags
Cogs simply can't take a joke! While you might explode with laughter while
aiming a squirt flower at a cog, he will eventually explode into little
pieces of metal. As a toon, your duty is to make Toontown safe again and
at your disposal you have a set of gags from 7 different gagtracks: Toon-Up,
Trap, Lure, Sound, Throw, Squirt and Drop.
Your toon will not be able to pick all the gagtracks so you will have
to carefully select which 6 you prefer. In reality you only have 4 tracks
to chose from, since Throw and Squirt are automatically given to you from
the start.
One important thing to note is that when you are in the same battle as
other toons, there is a specific order in what gag will attack first.
It's the same as the top-to-bottom order in your gag selection window
(and also the order I've chosen to explain the different tracks in this
guide), so it should be easy to remember. It is important to know the
order of the attack so you can make the most of your selections in a battle
and avoid mistakes. If, for instance, you and another player are in a
battle and he decides to lure the cogs and you decide to sound, you will
wake the lured cogs since sound comes after lure in battle. A mistake
like that could result in both of you ending up sad at the playground.
The Basics
As I mentioned before, you are automatically given the Throw and Squirt
gagtracks when you start the game. As you progress through the different
playgrounds, you will get missions to train for additional gagtracks.
When you select to train for a gagtrack, you have to learn it piece by
piece by doing missions which reward you with an animation piece for your
chosen gagtrack. Each gagtrack needs 16 animation frames to be completed
before you can start using the first level gag in the track. By opening
your shticker book, you can see how many animation frames you have collected.
The final animation frame won't be available to you until you have completed
the other 15 pieces and involves a series of tasks that your toon will
have to perform to earn his reward.
To check how many gags you have in inventory, or to check on your progress
towards getting to the next level in a gagtrack, you can either click
on your Shticker book and look at the gags page or press the HOME key
on your keyboard. If you hover your mouse pointer over a specific gag
on this screen, you can see additional information about the gag's accuracy,
damage and how many you can carry. On this screen, you can also see how
many jellybeans you have on you. Note that you may very well have more
jellybeans than you can see on this page since it doesn't show you how
many beans you have in your jellybean bank at home. If you want to buy
more gags there is a gagshop in every playground where you can fill up
your inventory. A gag costs 1 jellybean regardless of what level the gag
is. If you lose a battle with the cogs, you will lose all your laffpoints
and all the gags you have in your inventory.
Since you can't learn all the gagtracks, you might be wondering which
ones are the most useful to you. There is no simple answer to this so
lets take a look at each gagtrack and see what they have to offer you:
Toon-up
At the first playground (Toontown Central) you will have to make a choice
between Toon-Up and Sound. The one you don't pick will become available
to you again in a later playground (Minnies Melodyland), so don't worry.
You use Toon-Up to heal other toons. Note that you can't heal yourself
with toon-up, but keeping your teammates alive can be important for your
own survival. In the toon-up track there are gags that heal a single toon
as well as gags that heal a group of toons. It takes a long time to level
up Toon-Up since you can only use it when others are hurt. It has a medium
accuracy but at its lower levels it will tend to fail more often than
it hits. Even a failed toon-up will give your target some laff, though
it won't give you any experience. A failed toon-up is indicated by the
toon your healing only laughing one time ("ha" or "heh").
When multiple toons choose the same gag, they will usually hit at the
same time in battle. Toon-up is the exception to this. When multiple toons
choose toon-up, the one with the weakest toon-up gag will use his first.
If everyone is using the same level toon-up it will go from right to left
(based on gag selection screen). If all the toons are already healed,
by the time you get to use your toon-up, you may receive any experience.
Gaining experience is also dependant on the level of the cogs you are
fighting. If you try to use the highest level of toon-up when you're fighting
cogs that are lower than level six, you won't get any experience, even
if your teammates are healed. The max level toon-up, juggling balls, heal
up to 120 laff points.
Not having toon-up does make the game harder, since some players will
be hesitant to go with you into battle. Since most players do have toon-up,
you can survive without it, though. You can also compensate for your lack
of toon-up by owning and training a doodle to heal for you. Just be aware
of the fact that some will stink you for not being able to heal and you
might have a harder time in elevator shuffles since some will try to shuffle
you out.
Trap
Trap becomes available to you for the first time in Minnies Melodyland
(the 4th playground). The gag is dependant on someone luring the cogs.
To use trap, you have to lay down a trap in front of a selected cog and
then lure it. This makes it hard to use the gag when you're in battle
alone, since you will have to first lay down your trap then take a hit
from the cogs before you can lure. If lure doesn't miss, you are guaranteed
that trap will work. It has a perfect accuracy and it also seems to help
lure miss less often.
Only one trap can be placed in front of a cog. If you try to lay down
two traps they will cancel each other out, so be careful if you have more
than one trapper in your team that you don't both aim for the same cog.
A maxed trap gives you TNT which is the strongest gag in the game and
will do 180 damage, effectively killing a level 11 cog in one shot. In
all other gagtracks you get 3 of the level six gag and 7 of the level
5, but in trap you only get 2 TNTs and 5 trap doors, so save them for
when it really counts.
Leveling up Trap is hard on your own, but since lure is a common strategy
used in battle you can level it up pretty fast. You want to be careful
about making people angry at you for using a banana peel on a level 12
cog though. Make sure that your team won't get hurt by you wanting to
level up your trap fast. Having trap becomes very useful once you start
battling the higher level cogs.
Lure
You will be able to pick up Lure for the first time in Donald's Dock.
Luring a cog means you freeze a cog for 2-4 turns in battle, depending
on the level of the gag. During this frozen state the cog won't be able
to attack. Attacking a lured cog will wake it up again, so you want to
make sure that you kill the cog you're aiming for - or if that is impossible
to only wake up one cog again at a time. There are gags that lure a single
cog as well as group lures.
The lower level lures have a very low accuracy making it harder to level
up. Using a trap will help your lure hit better. You have a better chance
at luring a level 12 cog with the max group lure than you do with a lower
level one. It also seems like group lure and single lure are separate
from each other, meaning if one member of your team uses a group lure
that fails you can still successfully hit with a single lure at the same
time.
You won't gain any experience at all from luring if no attacks have been
made on the cogs before they wake by themselves. If you single lure a
cog, you have to attack him before he wakes up by himself. If you lure
a group you only have to make sure that one cog in the group gets attacked
for it to count.
You can't use drop on a lured cog unless someone wakes that cog up first by
attacking. The reason you can't hit with drop is that a lured cog takes a step
forward when being lured and the drop gag will hit behind the cog instead of on
top of him. You also can't trap a cog that is already lured. All other gags will
always hit a lured cog since he won't be awake and aware of you attacking him.
There is one exception though. If not all the cogs are lured your sound can on
rare occasions miss. If your sound misses it won't wake the cogs up - since they
didn't hear it!
Luring is a good strategy to use when you can't kill all cogs at once.
If it hits you are making sure that you won't be attacked by the cogs.
Also, if lure hits you are sure that any attack on the lured cog will
hit. This makes lure essential when soloing buildings, especially since
you can't heal yourself unless you have a well-trained doodle. Luring
is also a very good strategy when having members in your team with low
laffpoints since you can lower the risk of them being attacked by multiple
cogs at once - sending them to the playground sad.
Another advantage to luring a cog is that you can get a lure bonus on
attacks. Throw and squirt give 50% more damage when used on a lured cog.
The lure bonus is not a guarantee, but it will work most of the time.
Sound
You are first offered to train for sound in Toontown Central. Sound is
a group attack and will therefore damage all the cogs at once. It has
a high accuracy and as you gain experience it will miss very rarely. The
damage of sound is not very high when sounding alone and is best used
with a team. The maxed level foghorn gives 50 damage which may sound very
low. But if you have a team of players where 1 uses a foghorn and the
other 3 elephant trunk you can kill off 4 level 10 cogs with one soundblast.
That makes sound a very powerful gag to have. It's faster than having
to kill them one by one and it takes a lot less gags to get through buildings.
Sound is used frequently in the game. In the boss fights, factories, mints
and offices you will find that most toons are used to being able to sound
their way through a lot of the battles. Trying to get on the elevator
without sound is very hard since many will shuffle you out. It is possible
to get through the game without sound, but it is indeed a challenge and
you will discover that some get very upset when you don't have it. But
if you're looking for a challenge and don't mind being stinked it could
be fun.
One thing you should be careful with is that you don't use sound when
someone is luring. This will wake all the cogs up at once, possibly causing
your team a lot of damage. There are of course always exceptions to this.
There are instances where sounding lured cogs is perfectly fine like when
you actually want to wake them up again giving your teammates an opportunity
to each use a drop gag on the cogs.
Throw
During the tutorial steps of the game this gag track is automatically
given to you. It has a medium accuracy but as you level it up you will
find that it misses less often. You can only hit one cog at a time with
a throw gag. Since all toons have throw, you will find that it is used
quite often. With a maxed birthday cake, you do 100 damage and can kill
an unlured level 8 cog on your own. Using throw on a lured cog can also
give you a lure bonus making it 50% more powerful. That means you can
sometimes kill a lured level 10 by yourself.
Since everyone has throw, you will see it used a lot in battle. In the
beginning of the game it is very tempting to use squirt a lot more than
throw since squirt is more accurate. However, as your cake gets better
you may want to start using it more since once you reach Minnies Melodyland
you will receive a task from "Tom Tom's Drums" to deliver a
Whole Cream Pie (level 5 gag) to a toon.
Squirt
Squirt is also given to you during the tutorial steps of the game. Its has a
higher accuracy than throw but also does less damage. The max level rain cloud
gives 80 damage and will kill an unlured level 7 cog. Like with throw you can
get a 50% lure bonus making it possible to kill a level 9 cog by yourself.
You will see squirt used a lot in battle too, but since it is weaker than
throw, it will very often be used in combination with other other gags.
One much used strategy is to squirt in an attempt to stun a cog so that
a drop gag has a higher chance of hitting. It is often also used to kill
the lower level cogs so that you can save the throws for the higher levels.
Drop
You are first offered to train for the drop track in Donald's Dock. You
can only attack one cog at a time with drop and since it is the last gag
to be used in a battle it can sometimes be hard to level it up since you
depend on the cog you're aiming for not having been killed first by players
using other gags. At its early stages it tends to miss more often than
it hits, making it frustrating to work up. However, once you have made
it past the first few levels it starts getting more accurate and a maxed
piano does 170 damage, making it possible to kill a level 11 cog on your
own.
Your drop has a higher chance of hitting if someone stuns your cog first
by attacking it with some other gag. Generally, people will use squirt
to stun a cog, but you can stun with throw and sound too. As I explained
above, you can't hit a lured cog with drop unless someone wakes the cog
for you first.
So, what Gags do I pick?
It is very hard to give a good answer to this question as it really depends
on how you prefer to play the game. If you want to play it safe, and avoid
being stinkied by other players and shuffled off the elevators, you will
make sure you learn sound, lure and toon-up and then selecting either
trap or drop as your last gagtrack. However if you want a more challenging
experience and want to follow your heart when picking your gags, any combination
of gags is possible. It can definitely be more rewarding on a personal
level to go your own way. It is possible to survive no matter what gags
you choose.
Gags and Teamwork
One of the most important things in Toontown is teamwork. If you and your
fellow partners work together in battle, you are more likely to win, no
matter how low your lafflevel is. The first thing to have in mind is that
there is a 20% damage bonus on your attack when using an attack from the
same gagtrack as another player in your team. This damage bonus only works
when you are aiming for the same cog! In battle, there is an advantage
in working together by selecting the same type of attack and aiming for
the same cogs. Knowing about the damage bonus could save you the use of
your biggest gags so that you don't run out of powerful gags too quickly.
There are some common strategies used in Toontown for battling cogs. Not
everyone will know about these strategies since there are a lot of players
that never read the forums or don't have enough experience yet to have
learned these strategies. But you might end up in a battle where you see
these techniques used. I will give you a quick rundown on some of the
strategies you will find:
Lure left, kill right - This strategy is commonly used for the
VP fight if you go with the CCG (Cold Callers Guild). The strategy works
well for keeping lower level toons that don't have a lot of laff, or toons
that have very weak gags alive during battle. When the battle starts you
use a group lure to try and lure all the 4 cogs so that they can't attack
you. Your team then all aim for the rightmost cog all through the battle
while luring any new cogs that come in from the left. The reason you keep
luring on the left is that by doing so you are preventing the arriving
cog from attacking you and reducing the risk of being surprised by a cog
waking up because you didn't kill it before the lure stopped working on
it. It is very easy to lose track of how long a cog has been in a lured
state when not having a system for attack.
Lure and Trap - Trap makes Lure more reliable and therefore it
can be very useful to have someone trap one of the cogs, while another
does a group lure. The TNT can kill a level 11 cog if its maxed but not
a level 12 cog. You should always back up a trapper with another attack
when they are trapping a level 12 cog. Sometimes a trapper will let you
know that they need help by saying "can you help me?" when trapping.
That indicates that the cog they are aiming for is not going to die and
that you should back the attack up.
Sound - With sound you can take out a whole group of cogs at the
same time. Sound is very commonly used in factories, mints and DA offices
when players are running for merits, bux or notes. It speeds the runs
up and also minimizes the risk of the players getting hurt when they can
get rid of all cogs at once. A player might indicate to you that their
reason for going into an elevator is to get merits, bux or notes by using
speedchat. That generally means that they intend to do the run as fast
as possible and kill all the cogs in there. If your intention is to gagcamp
for anything else but sound, you might want toconsider going with other
toons instead.
Healing - One common mistake in battle is being too eager to toon-up.
It is true that keeping your team alive is important in order to survive.
But not when the consequences might be that you just immediately get hurt
again cause you failed to kill off a cog. Consider the timing of your
heals so that they don't conflict with other players choices. If another
player has already chosen to do juggling balls to heal the team maybe
you should put away your cane and either do a single toon heal on the
juggler or kill one of the cogs? It all depends on how many cogs you are
facing, the strength of your team and other variables of course. It is
also custom to make sure that all the team members are healed at the end
of the cog battles in VP, CFO and CJ so that they are going into the final
boss battle all tooned up and ready for the battle. If not all members
are healed you should therefore be careful about killing the last cog
in the cog round before everyone has been tooned up.
Leveling up your Gags
To level up your gags you want to make sure that when using it you will
gain experience. The first thing to remember is that if you are in battle
with a level 1 cog and use a higher level gag to kill it you won't get
any experience for it at all. However, if you have a group of cogs against
you, the experience will be judged by the highest level cog in the battle.
That means if you are facing a level 1 cog at the same time as a level
2 cog you can use a a level 2 gag to kill off the level 1 cog before you
kill the level 2 cog and get the experience.
One easy way to tell if you are going to gain experience or not is that
if a gag is greyed out when you pick it - its not gonna give you any experience!
By making sure to kill the lower level cogs first you can gain more experience
from the battle than if you kill the high level cog first. However, if
you have low laff you might want to consider killing the strongest one
first so that you don't get sent to the playground sad.
Buildings are good for leveling your gags faster. The skill credit for
experience gets higher with every floor in the building. The higher the
building, the more experience you can gain. However, if you don't survive
the building, you will lose all your gags (and any experience you gained
in the building) and end up sad at the playground - so don't get carried
away and enter a building that is much too hard for you to survive. It
is very tempting to use your biggest gag on the top floor since experience
is higher there. However in some instances it might actually be more rewarding
to use lower level gags on the top floor and slowly killing off a cog.
Let's say I am at the top of a level 3 building (where the credit is doubled)
and am facing a level 8 cog (90 hitpoints). If I was to use a birthday
cake (100 damage) to kill him in one hit I would gain 12 experience points,
but if I killed slowly with a fruit pie slice (10 damage) it would take
9 hits resulting in 36 experience instead.
Invasions double your experience. If you are fighting cogs on the street
you will get twice the experience very fast. If you do a building during
an invasion you will get the advantage of the buildings experience + the
invasion experience. You will gain double experience for any cog you engage
during the invasion. When going into a factory, mint or a DA office in
the busy district you might sometimes find that other toons want to wait
for an invasion before the final battle so that they can get double merits,
bux or notes. By using speedchat they might for example say "lets
wait for my friend" or "I need more merits" to indicate
to you that they want to wait.
You can team up with other players to gag camp or do solo gag camping.
When you gag camp, you basically set out to work a certain gag even if
a battle will take longer. This is not advisable in all situations. It
can be very annoying for another player to find that you are working low
level gags all through a building or factory in order to gain experience,
instead of efficiently battling the cogs in order to finish fast. Know
when to gag camp and when to be efficient! Here are some simple strategies
for working specific gags:
Drop - since drop has higher chance of hitting when a cog is stunned
first you could easily team up with someone who wants to work squirt, throw or
sound. Your partner stuns the cog while you drop.
Trap - works really well when teaming up with someone who wants
to work lure. Since lure has a better chance at hitting when trap is used,
you both have a lot to gain from working together. You can also work up
trap alone if you have lure. The only problem with this is that you will
have to take hits from the cogs since you can't both trap and lure in
the same round. For working up the first few levels of trap this could
be a good strategy though, if you have the laffpoints to survive it.
Lure - is best combined with working either trap or sound. With
trap you get a higher rate of success in luring and with sound you get
an instant wake up call making it possible for you to lure again. However
if you are faced with big cogs you might want to kill off a few first
and leave the strongest one to sound/lure to death.
Toon-up - you can't gag camp this alone since you can't heal yourself.
Going into battle and letting the cogs hit you without attacking them back until
you run out of heals is one strategy. In factory you can always make sure you
get hit by the lights from the goons or stand under the stompers to take a hit
leaving yourself wounded for your partner to heal you.
Sound - doing a lot of factory rounds with a partner or two is
a good way to work up sound. There is a sound barrel in the factory making
it possible to fill your supply, too. Another strategy is to team up with
a partner who wants to work lure and wake up the cogs for him. Since sound
comes before throw, squirt and drop in battles you can use sound even
if nobody else on your team is using it. Be careful if you choose to do
this though. You could get stinkied for putting the team in danger by
insisting on using sound when its not appropriate or for robbing others
of their chance at getting experience in throw, squirt or drop if they
already had it selected before you made your choice.
Organic Gags
A new addition to the game is gardening, which makes it possible for you
to grow your own organic gags. By growing your own gags you can get more
powerful gags than the usual ones in the gag shop. There is no way to
tell if another player is using organic gags or not so you shouldn't take
for granted that another players gags are organic. An organic gag will
give you a 10% increase in damage for the particular gag. Note that you
have to have maintain the trees you have planted in your garden for the
bonus to work and that for the extra bonus to work on a high level gag
means that not only the high level gag tree has to be maintained but also
the lower level trees in that particular gag track. To learn more about
gardening you can read about it in the gardening section on this site.
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