What's a good gem set for crab king if I have no green gems?

[aidankocherhans]

I got screwed over by how few gems I got from the ruins, I've already used up all my green gems without realizing it. The only strat I know for crab king is using green gems and sailing around the claws, so what's the best alternative? I have 2 yellow gems and plenty of every other color, but no green gems.

Also, how effective is a killer bee strategy, and what's the best setup for that?

I'm playing as wortox, so I can't rely on followers, which is how I beat crab king before.

[Arcwell]

If you're using bees: blue and purple are best, red is usable, orange, yellow, and green are all bad.
Here's an example fight with bees, though it is by no means the only way to do it nor is it the fastest (but imo it is the safest):

 Here are some things to keep in mind when using bees:

• Dividing bees evenly between stacks makes them not space out as much.
• Moving one step up or down in between placing bee stacks also makes them not space out as much.
• If the plank of the boat is facing away from or towards CK, bees will be placed horizontally (which makes getting away easier)
• If a cannon is in range of the bees when you place them down, it might fire at them and wake them up early, aggroing them onto you.
• Before you place the bees, make sure there are no items or mobs blocking where you would place the wood boat down.

If you're planning on fighting CK the traditional way and don't have green gems: Orange is good if you can consistently animation cancel or have some other form of multi-hit (like weather pain), otherwise I would say it's a pick between reds and purples. There are some people who say yellows are better than reds, but I personally think they're much worse. Blues are terrible.

Here is an example fight with 1 boat and no boat repair using purple gems. This does not consistently finish with zero repair because the amount of cannon shots that hit the boat is random. You can replace the 1 green gem with 1 blue gem:

Another popular strategy is to place a new boat every cycle, though I do not have a clip of this.

And if you don't care about character switching, you could always just play Wolfgang and trivialize all of this:

Things to keep in mind for the Wolfgang "strategy":

• Red and yellow gems work just as well (as do purples, but avoid them if you can).
• Wolfgang needs shadow alignment to kill in 1 cycle without animation cancelling.
• Boat needs to be placed on the back side of CK to have enough time to kill. To find which tile this is, you can hold a turf over the water to see the 4 tiles CK occupies. Whichever tile he occupies the most is where the ice platform starts to break from, so you need to place the boat opposite of that side.

[Bumber64]

As Wortox, you can probably take advantage of his teleportation to get between ice and boat quickly?

You probably can't teleport into his ice wall, I presume.

[Evelo]

Assuming you are using Pearl's Pear, 1 of each gem (sans green) then slap on a lot of extra reds. I say this because of Wortox's ability to teleport so focusing on the nearby towers will give you a lot of safe room to teleport to the ice platform and back when it begins to break, allowing for sufficent protection from the tower shots. Though Arcwell did an amazing job here.