New Player here, how should I spend my gems?

[Dutch Yourself]

I have around 250 gems saved up and have not spent any yet. What do ya'll recommend spending the gems on?

[archmag]

My order of priority:
1. Double speed.
2. Research tiers.
3. Few levels in Damage boost and Prestige points for a large increase to those because they are multiplicative, but not too much because later levels give smaller increase and well overall those don't help too much.
4. Tournament tiers.
5. Few Max Alchemy Attr.
6. 5xGame speed +5%.
7. Exotic skills
8. 2xAutocast slots
9. Tournament points
10. Some levels in Crit damage
11. Whatever else you like.

There are plenty of gems (more than 250 per day if you do all dailies, maxed certain Tech, collect daily reward and some active play bonuses) so it won't slow you down too much so feel free to invest in whatever you want.

[Snow]

In most cases it is up to you what do you prefer and if you want to optimize your gain to the max. but whatever you do first should be permanent 2x speed.

[Brainy]

how ever, no matter how many gems you get for every day, i find it a bit rude from the devs to charge 50 gems everytime i want to go to the farm map with x3 essence drop, i was kinda neutral till that but now im also pointing abit towards pay2win.....why not give us at least the farm map for free too? come on man.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Brainy:

how ever, no matter how many gems you get for every day, i find it a bit rude from the devs to charge 50 gems everytime i want to go to the farm map with x3 essence drop, i was kinda neutral till that but now im also pointing abit towards pay2win.....why not give us at least the farm map for free too? come on man.

But it is free, is it not? Gems are free, so the map counts as free too. You get 250+ gems per day for free so you can run it five times without paying anything. If they asked for $ instead, yeah, that would be annoying.

[Elvick]

2x Game Speed is what you should do first before anything else. I regret having not done that earlier, it really helps. It's located in Premium, it's the only one you can get with gems rather than paying.

Personally by the time I unlocked magic Essense Storm, I focused for awhile on getting 3 autocasts (for xp, essense storm and gold) and maxing the autocast timer reduction so the autocast happens instantly. May not be the most efficient way, but it's kept me with a steady flow of essense to use and helped earn gold and xp faster each run. Let me max my magic that I actively use. Still need to hit wave 1000 for the last spell and then I'll buy the last autocast for it.

Right now I'm increasing Tournament Points [250] so I can get stuff in that menu quicker. I've put quite a few gems into unlocking different tiers in various menus. Including there.

[jaguarrl]

Great advise in this thread already on where to spend gems. Also check out the Gem Spending Guide.

Originally posted by Brainy:

how ever, no matter how many gems you get for every day, i find it a bit rude from the devs to charge 50 gems everytime i want to go to the farm map with x3 essence drop, i was kinda neutral till that but now im also pointing abit towards pay2win.....why not give us at least the farm map for free too? come on man.

Both the farm and push maps were recently added (November) to the game. Because the maps gives bonuses over the normal rotation maps, there is a cost associated with them, otherwise who would still use the normal maps? But like archmap said, you can gain gems for free in game.