advice for how to use gems?

[Disnag Burnazog]

so far I've been using:
- mana, bloodbound, chain hit gems as first line of defence in towers to farm more mana
- poison/suppression to spawncamp weak enemies
- slowing and armor shred for traps along the killing field
- crit+poolbound as later line of defence to do big hits against those who managed to survive

What are your picks for gem placement along the defence path?

[SympliKrazi]

sounds like you have all the component skills unlocked.
bloodbound is better than poolbound, in most cases iirc

If you invest in mana component and traps skills, you can really start to rack up mana like crazy. You could do mana gem tower and Beam too, but it's limited

adding chain hit gem, allows it to hit multiple mobs and is great for any tower or trap, except in amps.

crit, chain hit, blood bound combo is the kill gem of choice

[Bill Wilson]

Bloodbound is better at higher levels but poolbound is better early on and you can get the poolbound skill sooner.

[Disnag Burnazog]

Originally posted by Bill Wilson:

Bloodbound is better at higher levels but poolbound is better early on and you can get the poolbound skill sooner.

yep so far poolbounds scale much faster than bloodbounds

by the way, from what i've seen it seems that gems don't evenly spread the specials across several colors
so like, is there some optimising that i should be doing or can i just keep doing half/half poolbound/other gem

[astrosha]

Outside of a few specific stages, a gem made mostly of Crit and Bound (either Pool or Blood; ideally Blood) with a tiny amount of Chain hit will be your best bet at a "killgem".

Stick that sucker into a Trap surrounded by 6 Amplifiers (pure Crit) and watch the damage fly. Put a Bolt spell on that gem while its in the Trap and it gets Armor Piercing, which completely ignores the armor on the monsters. A duplicate in a tower surrounded by 8 Amps (again, pure Yellow in the Amps) and you have a good building/Beacon killer.

A gem made mostly of Mana Leech and Bound (again, ideally Bloodbound, but Poolbound will work) and a tiny amount of Chain hit will get you plenty of mana. Ideally in a trap, surrounded by 6 Amps (pure Mana Leech).

For those traps, stick a gem mostly Bound, with some Slow and a tiny amount of Chain Hit into a trap right before the mana leech or the killgem traps, and watch the effectiveness of those two traps jump upward.

The other colors exist, but arent anywhere nearly as good or useful :
Suppression stops the monsters from healing; they dont get to heal when instagibbed by the killgem in its trap.
Poison is a DoT, but it is totally irrelevant when they get instagibbed by the killgem in its trap.
Armor shred is not only totally useless, but can be actively detrimental. You want the Mana Leech gem to hit the monsters as often and as much as possible. You don't want it to kill the monsters, as that stops it from leeching mana off of them. The killgem has Bolt on it, and ignores armor. Bad gem to use.

All that assumes you have all the gems unlocked, of course, as the TC appears to have. When doing stages before unlocking all the gems, the best is still going to be what I've outlined above; but its not often available! in that case, stick with dual colored gems of whatever combination of colors gets you the higher damage.