Huh, ok. So the purpose of Bubbles is to convert them. The way I was looking at it, their purpose was to sometimes randomly move stuff to get additional matches, and you can hopefully remove the correct Bubbles also completely by random using Ice or Elec. Which would make them extremely high variance. But it seems the intent was "these are extra Freeze or Shock gems in the future, but in return, there's a bit of initial randomness."

Ok, I completely get it now. Yes, Bubbles by themselves are really bad. However, Freeze gems are great, especially if you get more of them. And somehow I hadn't actually noticed that when Bubbles Freeze, they *become* P-Attack gems (since that's the gem that gets enchanted with Freeze), regardless of what gem type they were before. So it not only gives you more Freeze gems, but more P-Attack gems too.

Ok. I've played with it a bit more now, at least in the context of Water/Ice. I still don't like most of the Water spells, and later on, you get enough Ice spells that you can and probably should replace Aqua Splash with a superior Ice spell, which will do essentially the same thing except with higher damage and without any of the drawbacks. If you really need more P-Attack gems, Forward Dash is generally better at that than Aqua Splash. So the progression seems to be Ice + healing > Ice + Aqua Splash Combos > back to Ice + healing. I dunno. Maybe it's just not for me, but I significantly prefer Wind.

Well yes, but you can do that without taking Water as your second primary. Pure Ice/Physical is good. There is very little reason to add Water to that. Especially if you're spamming STR because then not even the heal is useful. Even if you do want to use Aqua Splash, that is easily purchasable by the time you have the later Ice Physical skills, and Fire spells get you through the early game a lot better than starting Water.