Forums → Games → GC:CS End game tactics after v1.1

Hi everyone,
I'd like to collect here some opinions of more experienced players than me on how to tackle some of the changes of v1.1, as the master source of endgame knowledge (psorek's guide) is now slightly obsolete.
Then we can link the two topics together and have an updated end game guide.

EDIT 29/12/14: scattered all over the topic there are a lot of useful info, I may recollect them all in the future.

DISCLAIMER: I'm an high level MP player, what I write here is from my perspective, may not apply so well to low level/not MP.

1) Hatred, is it worth it?

My observations would say not, but I'm still not sure, I seem to get ~20% less exp from lv 7 hatred than without it, but maybe there is a better balance in between, on the other hand it makes the round shorter, so I could actually do more if I was continually grinding exp.

Of course without MP I guess it's a blessing, because it shortens the number of waves you have to play to reach unkillable monsters and lets non-MP players achieve similar exp levels as MP players.

2) Enraging, theory and practice

Now that exp bonus from enraging is a one time factor (one g1 and thousands of g100 give the same result) it makes no sense enraging to killgem's kill power (displayed_crit*displayed_damage).

What I'm doing now is enraging with tons of g2 to make the armor grow during my mana gathering phase (I use over 500 g2 at the later waves) and killing them all with a throwaway killgem with bolt.

Then I start the exp gathering phase and just bomb them up to 999 monsters using as little bombs as possible to keep their HP low: I seem to recall throwing 9 g62 and 8 g68 per wave are two sweet spots, going for 7 bombs was too costly.

Do someone has a better tactic?

3) Goodbye sharding (and permafreezing)

Peter fixed the two bigger exploits we had to get to astronomical mana values
I found (some confirmation would be great) that if you bomb a shard and don't make it spawn you still get the 5% bonus mana, but it's waaay too low to make sharding a viable mana gathering method.
I don't think there is anything we can do about this, other than discover another exploit.

4) Farming high level talisman fragments

Luckily I had already did this time ago, but hatred has made a full traits speed run of Y6 much more difficult, to the point that U upgrading barely gets me to the end, but I cannot get the 3 endurance fragments.
I've always used a method similar to this, are there better ones?

5) Gem recipes

The only gem changed from 1.0.x to 1.1 were slowing and suppressing, both were improved, so the previous recipes for killgems and managems are still valid.
We (psorek and I) actually built better ones than the ones on the guide, but the lack of easy and understandable diagrams for them precludes their use to anyone who isn't willing/don't have time to parse unfriendly parenthetical/tree formulas.

Is there someone that could help with this?
Recipes can be found there: gemforce results

6) Uncapped skill balancing

Component skills, true colors and resonance were uncapped, great news, but finding a balance between them can be quite tricky.
I may do the math one of these days but at moment, does someone have a thumb rule that gives good results?

EDIT: as usual, thanks to AG forum for messing with all my formatting.

Yay for walls of text
12345ieee

EDIT: I forgot to mention the #gemcraft IRC channel, where a lot of top players reside stably (access from https://kiwiirc.com/client if you don't have a favourite irc program).