New Skill Gem Vendor System - what do you think?

I've been wondering what players think about the new gem vendor system. I have to say I don't like the fact that you can buy practically any gem you want at the vedors and with the gems already having experience, it's even worse. Why?

1) You don't have to look for gems in game any more. The only thing that's any value now in terms of gem drops is gems with quality and support gems such as Empower or Enlighten. I found Greater Multiple Projectiles with a lvl 33 char yesterday and instead of being overjoyed, I simply threw it away because it's available at the vendors. A real shame!

2) A whole aspect of trade related to gems doesn't make sense any more. Players used to be able to make a bit of currency trading gems and now it's practically all gone. I have to say I can't understand why GGG would decide to take away such an exciting aspect of trade from players. Finding gems used to be a very enjoyable in-game experience for me - now it's gone because the gems are handed to the players on a silver platter.

What do others think?

The gem system was BAD. Limiting the available builds to "nothing", forcing people to play one way or an other - if they choose not to trade for gems. Trading for elementary, in-game skills was e bad decision. I'm glad they've changed it to the better.

In my opinion, nothing about trading base, non-quality gems was exciting. It was an unneeded, artificial block for progression.

That said, I don't like that vendors let you buy unlimited amount of any gem on offer. I think there should still be a semblance of scarcity by only having one gem of a given type at a time. Perhaps like the gems forsaken masters sell - their stocks replenish every day (discounting masters' leveling up now).

I love it. Anything that saves me from having to interact with people via trade makes my life a lot easier.

Im torn on this, In one way I love the fact that its easy to get your build going, but the joy of finding a gem is gone now.

Maybe if they made the avaible gems more like regular items you can buy from the shop, that changes every level. And the cost should be any other gem of equal color and rarity.

I'm not too happy about it. For those wanting to run a new build to end-game every week and theory craft along the way it's great. Everything is available, cheap, easy.

In every other respect, it's a loss. Lore-wise skill gems were supposed to be something special, now they're worth less than a pair of boots and come in unlimited amounts.
For those who like finding nice things, it's one less possibility to have fun, except enlighten/enhance/empower and portals. Even quality gems and GCPs lose value as the masters sell quality for dirt cheap.

I much preferred the old prices. Even a small char will have an alch here and there to buy a skill that would really complement the build. Being able to buy everything this easily makes one crucial aspect of the game boring.

I like the gem vendors, because they save me the trouble of trading for gems. Most gems were already close to worthless anyway, making it hard to find someone actually selling them.
What i don't like about the vendors is that the gem availability is limited by your character class and that gems are spread out among multiple vendors in the different acts of the game. The limited availability means you still have to mule gems from different characters or ask around town if someone is willing to buy the gem for you and i frankly can't understand, why the higher act vendors are not selling the lower act gems. The usabillity would be a lot higher if you could simply go to the act 4 vendor and buy all gems there instead of having to search all acts for the vendor who is selling the gem you are looking for.

"Joy of finding a gem"? Are you serious, there were only a few valuable gems early game before like spell echo, multistrike and cast when damage taken. Later on there were even fewer like empower. All the other gems people would just leave them on the floor.

Haven't you read the patch notes? They've said the idea of making this is allowing people to have their builds early game because they have increased the game difficulty in general.

The old system was basicaly "punishing" people due their bad luck, making them spend all their chaos for a trivial gem (3 chaos for a multistrike early game was ridiculous)

The new system is way better, it allows you to make/change builds early game instead of either "forcing" you to be lucky to drop some chaos to buy that overpriced gem or making you suffer to level up because you don't have trivial gems like multistrike/spell echo.

Until they make a proper trade system, the less we need to trade with other players the better.

In the other hand, selling lvled gems was a bad idea. Since the main idea was to enable builds early game selling a lvled cast when damage taken,for example, or any gem you would link to that CWDT wouldn't be of much help due to the ammount of scours you would spend on that (assuming you have that many scours early game).

It's definitely a bad idea that you can buy Support Gems. The whole point of Siosa's quest in the Library was to get the really good Support Gems.

On the other hand, only relying on drops sucks, too. Of course you had also quests, but what if you have already progressed beyond this point, when the new gems are introduced?

I like buying gems from vendor, but I don't like that they have exp. Make the random gems from masters have exp as a way to distinguish them.

Having the vendor & quest gems start with exp makes it difficult to see the progression of a gem as it levels, especially since there's still no tooltip to say what the stats of the next level gem will be. When it start at 1 and you level it to 2 (instantly) it's easy to estimate what the gem will look like at 20. It's not like it takes a lot of time to get a gem from 1 to 15, saving a portion of that time doesn't really help. I would prefer an "auto-level" feature for gems rather than gems starting with exp.