you trade 1 gem slot. that doesn’t mean you lose offense persé. also, meter doesn’t seem to be a rare resource, with meter boosting gems even less.
as for spending that meter on offense: how much offense can you apply when you are dead? 
and since the gem only activate when you are allready hit, it will ONLY use that meter when it’s useful. on wakeup. and even then, that doesn’t mean the gem will procc, since you need to fail to block the oki. it’s an automatic fail-safe mechanism. that means you can have a strong offense with meter, while having a retarded error correction in the backhand. 1 meter means nothing for your offense in the long run. some need to realise that you don’t lose meter for the gem often.
Well, that may be a concern if each character has it’s own meter bar, which looks like it from screens.
You’re not always going to have autoblock on. You can be knocked down and have no meter to activate the gem, or the gem might not be active for the autoblock to work - and your opponent will know that.
And as far as meter goes, although I have not played the game it seems meter only comes easy if you’re on the offensive. Getting hit barely gives any meter, so you won’t be expecting a full stock while getting hit.
It is confirmed that auto-block is an active gem then, right?
If it was passive even I would think it’s bullshit.
Not confirmed. The stage demo showed the autoblock and tech gems as always on - or so I assume - , but it was on training mode - and it was a stage demo, so it might not be related to the final game - but other info sources were saying the opposite. Take whatever I say with a grain of salt, I’m simply making assumptions and speculating on top of that.
Either way, passive or not, I still don’t think they’ll be that big of a deal.
ABC chain combo system solves both, getting enough hits to activate it AND getting meter. that your opponent considers the gem would make it even more good. heck, if you just by picking a gem change the playstyle of the opponent and force him to consider “new” options on your side, makes it too strong. I hope there aren’t many gems that’ll do that, because they’ll prolly be the best ones. but we need a little bit more information when it’ll activate exactly to get more theoretical.
I’m expecting a gem or multiple gems to be complete bullshit.
It wouldn’t be broken by default if it was passive, but pretty shitty anyway, the greatest thing about it being an active gem is that it would require you to be caught in a good damaging combo for it to activate.
Like the lvl 2 (if I’m not mistaken) damage, that you get from getting hit by 2 specials with lvl 1 still on, it’s easily avoidable and even if the opponent doesn’t want to avoid it, you took some good damage before, since they can go like a bnb with tag cancel ending with special two times and you would need to get hit in order to activate. If you don’t let him hit you you won’t get the lvl 2 because the lvl 1 will run out, if you let him he will take a lot of damage and can lame the gem timer out after.
Passive gems must be minor stuff to be balanced.
And I think it’s pretty safe to say there will be something like a gem-cancelling gem, so if you know how to activate your opponents gem you do it on purpose and deactivate it by using one meter. If the gem is that troublesome, it’s worth it. You can use it as a counterpick if you think you lost to that gem only and force it to come out as soon as possible.
roll in with 5 zod’s. You will never die.
Also with this gem system, this game isn’t looking its going to be for me 
Hopefully TxSF will do something different, although I’d be all for a crazy customization system thats better than tekken 6 and say, a little weaker than saints row 3.
It’s possible, but people don’t ban Wolverine, Phoenix and Yun because of that, why would they ban those gems?
If that’s not your point at all, I’m sorry.
Boy I hope there’s a way to remove the shinyness from the Gem-Active characters cuz red is NOT Ryu’s color 
This is lame indeed, it would be nice to see some visual elements of the character changing according to gems, like changing the hair color, giving you a hat, a belt or something like that. Much better than glowing some color.
ok i took the time to listen to the last gem trailer. I did not know that there would be 100 gems or so at the start. I thought it was 5 XD
Nah, 5 is the number you can assign to each character in a fight.
I also thought it would be a small number of gems so it wouldn’t be creative at all, just dumb, but I like the direction it’s taking, I really do. Was skeptical at first but now I’m in love with the idea of Role Playing Fighting Games lol
I’ll be honest, this sentence horrifies me. But maybe I’m misunderstanding. Lets make it a simple binary choice (which is what it is). If you had the choice between eating a combo or losing a bar of meter, which one would you pick?
Because you can’t seriously be saying this isn’t must-pick gem because people shouldn’t be getting hit. Surely?
Oh no, I’m not saying we should get ban happy with the game.
I’m just saying there will some character(s)+gem combo that will make people reel back in disgust.
Or maybe I’m just expecting the worst and forgot to hope for the best.
At least now i can cover some of my defensive weak spots up and work on my offense for a while and then do vice versa.
I’m sure these gems will help out the use of pandora.
If they cross the line that separates OP from broken.
I seriously doubt there will be broken combinations of gems, but I’m sure there will be a lot of stupid shit to bitch about for months.
There’s gonna be gems that increase pandora time.