I've done some research about efficiency of mixing colors - what I've found out:
1) red and blue are needed only in minimal quanity, becouse they have cap/scale slowly on higher grades - I use 1/8 of gem for them. 2) white/anything best mix is 2 white and 6 the other one(s) 3) black/anything best mix is 3 black and 5 the other one(s) 4) black overgrows white about g47, so for ultimate (50g) managain and killing gem I use black then, white before. 5) red hits every monster only once, so in front of eg. manatrap you need slowing gem, which will compress monsters going to you
According to this I use following recipes for gems - all g1 crafted by shift+g together: 1) slowing - 2 blue, 2 red, 4 white 2) managain before g47 - 2 white, 1 red, 5 orange 3) managain after g47 - 3 black, 1 red, 4 orange - I usually craft 3 black, 1 red before to get some hits and then craft with same grade orange 4) killing before g47 - 2 white, 1 red, 5 yellow 5) killing after g47 - 3 black, 1 red, 4 yellow - I get some kills on 3 black, 1 red same as with the managain
or you can make red-blue-black-orange.....and have monsters slowed on top of trap and afterward instead of before....or both, making even more compressed monsters.
red-blue-black-orange is poor (was for me) becouse fourth componnent lowers power of rest - they have 40% instead of 60% power or so. Although, I will try it on lv50 mana gems and check if it works well.
Once blue reaches 90% slow, only add red-black-orange until red is sufficient, then orange-black. Works for me, I can reach grade 48 at wave 15 on hardest settings except mana lock.
What about a Black/Red/2Orange/3White? The orange white combo helps you to increase your mana exponentially and the other abilities increase with your mana pool! Anything here i am not aware of or wrong about please let me know on my profile.
Bloodbound races ahead of Poolbound in late game. 'Nuff said.
My fave combo is Chain Hit (red in this game, lime in GCL) + Critical Hit (yellow) + one of the bound components, preferably Bloodbound (black in this game), but I'll settle for Poolbound (white) if Bloodbound isn't available. Do note that's also the best supergemming combo.
Elikith, black+white is worse than pure black becouse more components = less power of each and bound multipliers (pool and blood) sums - not multiplies.
make a 1:7 red/black gem and (1 grade 1 red, 7 grade 1 black, combine) and then upgrade it to level 7 or 12 or so. Duplicated a few times. Put a few traps at the beginning of the map, or at the "multiple monster paths converge" point, and if you can, drop an amplifier or five with high grade gems to really boost the fire rate. Anger your waves so the armor is more than the maximum damage these gems can inflict, then forget about them. Put your mana traps, etc, behind them.
Many waves later when you're combining gems in the 40s, 50s, 80s, whatever... "Oh hey look I have a black gem with millions of hits. No wait, I have 3 or 5 of them, THAT will come in handy!"
As many people have noted, pure B typically outperforms B+W after a certain point.
Magic number = take the difference between tricolor special% - quad special% (depends on skills) as a decimal. Add 1 and square it. When your B mod divided by your W mod = that number or bigger, that gem would be better as a pure B tricolor than a BW quadcolor.
For me, it's 1.63. So a gem with a 10x B mod and a 5x W mod would be better for me as a pure 10x B tricolor.
As for combining, I usually mix 2 grade 5-6s together (O/B or Y/B), duplicate it, then add a grade 1 red. I'll upgrade the duplicated copy and keep duplicating it as necessary to upgrade my actual gem in-game and save time...or, just mix in pure blacks occasionally. Keeps red aspect as low as humanly possible and doesn't take too long. For example, if I wanna upgrade my grade 30 gem 5 grades, I duplicate the gem I have in stash, upgrade, dupe, etc, until I have a 31, 32, 33, 34, and two 35s in stash...mix them all in except keep one 35 to do it again later. Only takes a few seconds.
Only other gem I use is 1/2 W + 1/4 Blue + 1/4 R for slowing....just upgrade that as is.
