So I haven’t noticed any threads about gems really. I know they are tourney banned at the moment but thought it might be useful to discuss good gem combos for different outcomes (as well as gripe or defend gem usage).
To start it off, do people think the assist gems are too good?
Assist gems, specifically the Block/Tech gems are too damn good. Take it from someone who played UltraDavid’s Hugo/Gief combo with 2 meter gems and the autoblock gem. 
I think that what tournaments could do is have tournament standard gem setups. This is impossible at the moment because you can’t have universal gem setups. Only two per character.
I think they’re good for what they do and will fade off when people learn to really play this game. It’s definitely not an equal balance if someone plays a keepaway team and gets enough meter and is willing to sacrifice it for the assist gem procs. Although in that contrast, if someone in equal skill is good enough to get in and deal a lot of damage, that sort of balances it out in theory.
So much orange in the 3 posts here…
To be honest I feel like they weren’t kidding when they said they built this game around the gems. They probably never intended to have the game without gems, then when the community complained, they added an option last minute, not knowing that it would screw up the game. This is why I think we’re getting time-outs much more frequently. If you saw NCR last night you’d see that even in the finals Time-outs were common. I hope they allow gems at some point.
10% extra damage or meter buff gems aren’t going to fix the time out issue. You’ll be seeing more time outs when people start getting effectively 200 or more extra health on both characters in a team from their gems.
Gems are dumb. Why balance the game with gems in mind when you can just balance the fucking game as it is.
I understand what they’re trying to do, but to the people who actually want to play these games seriously, it’s a needless complication.
Well that’s assuming people don’t learn to play the game properly. I’m sure getting life leads, turtling and purposely timing people out is a very viable way of winning for some teams and gem combinations. But when heavy offense versus offense teams start timing each other out, it’s not the timers being an issue, it’s the players.
There were barely any time outs in top 8 at NCRX and people are still barely scratching the surface with the game in the high end. Three weeks enough to break this game apart and call it? When people have the damage gems optimized for their combos, it won’t be overshadowed by defense gems. Because you don’t know when you’re getting hit all the time, you can only hope to block enough to proc them. But when you plan your gems around your big punishes, we’re gonna see 60% combos. Free.
What you can really plan on defense right now is assist gems, harmonize and life force which recover some damage. But I think assist gems are going to be banned at tournaments anyway when the patch hits.
if Capcom had put in some actual default gem sets (rather than 1 pandora-only gem, 1 random gem, and 1 empty slot), then i think it would be a great idea to use the pre-set defaults.
deciding on defaults that everyone has to pick from could get messy. Cause some people might have certain combos / setups for their gems at home, and they’ll complain when they have to use different ones in a tournament.
But I really do wish gems (boost, not assist) would be used in tournaments soon, maybe when the dial-system comes out. And I love thinking about / using gems online.
It took me a while to figure out which activation conditions occur most often. And for my playstyle, they are (in order of most common):
Right now I think the best gems are blue (meter) and orange (vitality). I use the 2 orange gems with Gief (life force and harmonize). They both activate if I get hit by 2 specials. So if I’m fighting a Dhalsim, I will often purposefully jump into his yoga fires because it’s a very inexpensive way to close the distance. Each time the fireball knocks me down, I can roll towards him and cover half a screen length. And if it happens twice, i get so much health back it looks like I was only hit by a jab.
The importance of meter gems should be obvious to everyone. Most people think meter is best used for high damage combos, but I prefer to save my meter for defensive purposes, or for tactical advantages. Like doing a cross rush, but then switch canceling back to your first character because his combo ender leaves him with better oki. Or switch canceling a dying character out at unexpected times, like while doing a block string (I saw Valle and Infiltration doing this a lot last night). Alpha Counters are another great use of meter, although not very damaging unless you have another bar for a cancel.
I also think switch cancelling the launcher part of a cross rush has some great uses that hasn’t been explored much.
But back to gems… blue / orange seem like the best to me. Yellow seem good too, but only the DLC ones (like the +130 incurred reduction with no downside).
Speaking of DLC gems, once all of them are released, the original ones will be 100% obsolete. And the assist ones are the most broken thing I’ve ever seen (seriously, auto-tech and auto-block at the cost of 1/6 of 1 bar? that is absurd)
Is there a list of the free gems coming out next week? I don’t think the current stock ones will be obsolete. There’s slot requirements for some of the Special Edition gems. They might throw in better gems next week but if they take up two slots, you’re still going to have some decision making or swap in the same gems but with different conditions to cater to your team and punish combos.
How many threads are there now where one person jumps in and says Gems will solve the time out issue', then a dozen people follow up withGTFO, they clearly do not’?
gems (non assist) should be the norm in tourneys when it becomes easier/faster to select them.
the dial system is a attempt to make things faster and more streamline for Gems to be used in tournaments…however alot of people already(for one reason or another) have already gave up on it…>_>’
the 60 new free gems that are coming out are not the special edition gems…
these new gems will include brand specific gems apparently as well…
and new assist gems…
the dial system will hopefully be enough for tournaments to allow gems to be used (even if its non DLC gems at first), DLC gems can come later if they are even needed to be adopted into competitive play, we’ll have to see if they are going to be free or sold at a reasonable price to confirm this issue…
currently Gems are banned/outlawed in most major tournaments until stated otherwise…
All I want is an option turns off the shiny thing when they activate. Eyes like OUCH
There used to be an official Gems thread. But it got buried under all these trash threads.
I kinda like the boost gems ATM. They allow me to buff some strategies that would be harder to execute with no gems.
The assist gems are broken and should be banned though.
My bad, I didn’t see any on first two pages. You can lock this up if there are other gem threads.