What are your opinions on what to practice in order to benefit self defense techniques?
My thought was more forms then combative, because forms were basically made to give ideas on what move to use in a certain situations. I personally believe that some of the exact movements of my style could work with the price of practicing the forms reapetedly: the stances brings strength to your movement, putting form into it in a real quick manner could possibly work; chambers(which I'm sure most styles use it), could be for certain grappling techniques.....idk......what do you guys think?

i'll choose to answer your question with a question of my own:

when a baseball player practices throwing a ball, do they practice the motion of throwing the ball without the actual ball, or do they actually throw a ball?

well... I understand that parable, but it seems like the systems either practice more on the forms than self defense, or the other way around. Where I train, we don't practice form application all the time. We try to be well rounded by the Undo Chi Kara(9 moving forces based off of Chin-Na). If not the well rounded part, with the grappling/takedowns and whatnot,
most of the time that I trained, it was always about the forms being requirements of a certain rank until I'm in an advanced rank. Now the applications are being brought a lot more to the light. I don't know about baseball, considering the fact that it's not my sport, but I just started to be introduced more into the application of the form, so a middle block, another middle block, and a punch all in a horse stance is still the way it's basically seen to me, at least for now. So most of the variety of applications off of a few forms is still new to me.