Dynasty Warriors: Origins - Every Gem, Ranked

Gems are a unique, upgradeable piece of equipment in Dynasty Warriors: Origins. Each one has the power to significantly enhance your offensive or defensive capabilities in battle, but you can only have one equipped at a time. Choosing the right Gem, therefore, can be a major part of developing your build and overall strategy.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins - How To Craft Gems

There's a lot of luck involved in crafting Gems in Dynasty Warriors: Origins.

While it's likely that you'll switch Gems frequently throughout your journey - sometimes even in the middle of a fight - it's good to know which ones you can reliably fall back on, and which ones to focus on upgrading once you gain access to Moongrass.

5 Ascendance Gem

Provides A Chance To Automatically Block Officer Attacks

The Ascendance Gem is a great idea for accessibility, but its execution could have been better. For players that need it to keep themselves from getting swarmed by officers, it makes the game playable, but doesn't remove the danger of fighting several heroes at once entirely. However, if you need the Ascendance Gem, that means you're stuck using it instead of one of the better options.

If you can block and evade without the aid of the Ascendance Gem, then its unreliability means it isn't adding anything to your loadout. It's the only Gem of the five that's not guaranteed to be useful, so it's better to stick with one of the other four.

4 Wellspring Gem

Provides A Minor Heal For Every 100 Enemies Defeated

The Wellspring Gem is useful early in the game, when you have a smaller stock of Meat Buns to heal from and haven't filled out the Skill Tree yet. Healing can be tough to come by, so having a passive way to restore HP can be a big deal.

Remember, the Wellspring Gem's healing is a flat number, not a percentage, so you need to level it up as your Rank increases for it to maintain its effectiveness.

Later in the game, the Wellspring Gem is eclipsed by the more offense-oriented Gems, but it still has a place in your repertoire as long as you keep upgrading it. In an emergency, especially when fighting a Large Force, you can switch to the Wellspring Gem and cut down large groups of basic soldiers to get back a good ten to twenty percent of your health bar. Once you've stabilized, switch back and return to your main objective.

3 Oblivion Gem

Increases The Reach Of Your Equipped Weapon

The Oblivion Gem can be either extremely useful or next-to-worthless, depending entirely on which weapon you have equipped. Its bonus is percentage-based, so weapons that already have a long reach will gain much more out of it, which short-range weapons like Swords and Gauntlets will barely see a difference.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins - How To Unlock Every Horse

Ride into battle on the mighty steeds of Dynasty Warriors: Origins!

A high-level Oblivion Gem can extend a Spear or Halberd by more than a third, allowing for devastating combos covering a wide area. It's best to use attacks and Battle Arts that make wide, sweeping strikes when you have the Oblivion Gem equipped, but thrusts are also useful for catching officers.In particular, using the Oblivion Gem to extend the reach of a Special Art makes it slightly easier to interrupt dangerous attacks from characters like Guan Yu or Lu Bu.

2 Vortex Gem

Increases The Damage You Deal To Launched Enemies

The Vortex Gem is fantastic for an offensive playstyle, but you really need to know your combos to make the best use of it. Getting an enemy into the air can be tricky if you're just button mashing, and some weapons are better at it than others.

Assaults always launch the target enemy, so at the very least the Vortex Gem will give you a bonus to Assault damage.

Swords, Staves, and Twin Pikes all have easy-to-use air combos, and their medium reach means that they won't typically compete with the Oblivion Gem for that lone slot in your loadout. It's also worth noting that the Vortex Gem should be used for targeting and eliminating officers; basic soldiers might be easy to get into the air, but you really don't need the damage buff to be able to take them out, especially with the wide-ranging whirlwind attacks that usually launch them en masse.

1 Scorch Gem

Increases The Damage You Deal With Parries

If there's one thing that is consistent across all ten weapon types, it's that parrying can be one of the most effective ways to turn the tables on an enemy officer. You stop their combo, deal damage, and reduce their Fortitude, all with a single well-timed button press. It can be hard to get right, especially on higher difficulties, and every attack has a different parry timing, but it's always satisfying.

The Scorch Gem makes parries even better by increasing the damage that they deal. The bonus scales higher as the Scorch Gem levels up, too, so it's entirely possible to see an enormous fifty-percent buff in the postgame. Your parry game needs to be on point to make the most of it, but if you've mastered the timing, it's one of the most efficient ways to deal damage to officers in the game.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins

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