Pollen

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Pollen is a projectile type spell commonly found in the early stages of the game. The projectile it creates resembles an innocuous dandelion seed - but beware - these projectiles have Friendly Fire enabled and can move erratically due to their homing effect. Pollen's early game strength is versatility: it does damage, can dig, and can be used as a shield against enemy fire.

Tips

Each projectile's 10 damage is split equally between Projectile and Explosion types (5+5).
Projectile Repulsion Field will render Pollen almost entirely harmless to you.
Magic Guard and Big Magic Guard can circle around Pollen projectiles. Multicasting Pollen followed by Magic Guard will reliably produce this effect, while swapping the order will attach the Magic Guard to pre-existing entities.
Pairing Pollen with the Light modifier can be used to temporarily illuminate dark areas due to its slow falling speed and long lifetime of up to 11-14 seconds.

Movement & Homing

The projectiles have a brisk initial speed, but slow rapidly and start to fall gently toward the ground. They will home slowly toward nearby enemies, but usually too slowly to catch up to them. This motion can be useful as a way to detect enemies you can't see.

The spell's movement speed while homing is very slow, and will often fail to catch retreating enemies until they are well offscreen. This can be remedied with speed up and homing modifiers.

Behaviour as an Entity

Enemy projectiles can collide with floating Pollen, and a large cloud of Pollen is an effective shield against enemy fire. Your own non-zero damage projectiles can also hit Pollen if they have friendly fire enabled (e.g. Pinpoint of Light or Holy Lance, or projectiles modified with Piercing Shot, Bloodlust etc.) This can be used to create Trigger Loops.

Since Pollen projectiles can hit you, you often want to wait for nearby Pollen to expire before moving forward. Projectiles with friendly fire, a Paha Silmä, or an Emerald Tablet can be used to clear out Pollen rather than wait.
Sometimes Pollen's innate deceleration and homing properties might result in a situation where pollen becomes slower and slower approaching the enemy but never hitting it.
- Previous statement also means modifiers which attach additional damaging effects to a projectile, such as Damage Field and Fireball Orbit, can provide a greater benefit than modifiers which directly increase Projectile damage. Damage Field in particular can deal a lot of damage if Pollen projectiles get stuck on an enemy.

Digging

It is possible to use Pollen to dig through soft materials up to the hardness of rock. This is, however, somewhat unreliable as the projectiles tend to bounce off of sloped surfaces and/or home toward enemies on the other side of walls. It is best to dig with Pollen at point-blank range, so that it hits the material immediately and explodes before it can become harmful to you (Pollen can't hit you for the first 6 frames of its existence).

Pollen Feedback Loop

Main article: Trigger Loop

You can never have enough Pollen

Pollen is one of a few spells that can be used in the construction of Trigger Loops. These are a very powerful wand building technique, enabling you to duplicate a Trigger spell's payload for no additional cost.

Example 1:

A basic pollen looping build

#

Shuffle

No

Spells/Cast

1

Tinker

Since Pollen is an entity, it can be hit by other projectiles that have Friendly Fire enabled. If those projectiles have a Trigger, then the trigger payload will be released. If the projectile penetrates, you will get a copy of the payload for every Pollen it hits.

By adding another Pollen to the payload, a loop is created. This will release a copy of the payload (and another Pollen) repeatedly - usually until the projectile expires.