Why the nerf to gem upgrades?

I'm not QQ'ing as I don't think I've ever spent a single GCP. IMO, the trade value of these vastly outweighs the gains for a gem upgrade.

However, I am curious to know GGG's reasoning behind this nerf. The bonuses from the gems were already very meh, why make them even more meh?

I am a little irritated as well.
Don't go increases of 0,35% upon using a valueable currency item against the design philosophy which Jonathan is explaining here?

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dust7 wrote:

I am a little irritated as well.
Don't go increases of 0,35% upon using a valueable currency item against the design philosophy which Jonathan is explaining here?

This, this and this. I was really surprised as I saw the nerfs.

I mean, there are a lot of possibilities to design for higher impact here.

The most obvious one of them would be to increase the effect of a GCP on a gem from giving it a 1% quality bonus to something like 5% and then adjusting GCP drop rate accordingly. Now GCPs feel five times better when using them.

Increasing your damage by 0,35% is not memorable.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind things being nerfed, I mind things being made boring - and you can hardly argue that it is exciting to use two GCPs and not even see your damage increase by 1% (in fact, you won't see anything on your gem).

Design for higher impact, GGG!

I have to agree with this. Using a GCP is already boring, making it more so is the opposite of what GGG should be doing.

I have to agree here. I've always thought using a GCP was pretty darned underwhelming. Not only the mere 1% upgrade to the gem's quality, but in many cases the quality bonus is so small or downright useless that it is much better to use GCP as trading currency (though, why they're worth so much in trade when nobody uses them is a whole separate mystery).

If anything, I'd rather the see the gem effects toned down slightly and the quality bonuses boosted substantially, or just remove quality altogether (which I really think might not be a bad idea across the board).

Most of the changes were about consistency between the values of quality on gems compared to each other.

Increasing all quality was considered as an option, however attack speed as one of the more dangerous qualities set a benchmark to base the others on. We still may change this.

We will look closely at the trading values of Gem Cutters Prisms in the current league. Understanding our economy is important to us. We already have had a few differences to the value charts we compiled prior to players engaging heavily in trade.

Consistency is also why the critical support gems were improved, even though they are highly valued gems. Critical vales on quality have to be competitive with damage quality on other gems.

If we are more consistant with quality values, then balancing on the base values of the gems becomes easier. A first wave of changes to gems will be going out in 0.9.12s

I've also never used a gcp because of their value/benefit ratio. Their value before was much higher then their benefit on most things and that's even truer now.

I don't think gem quality is intended as one of those "high impact" things. It's more just giving people something to grind away at at end game. 7% attack speed is still more than 2 (non-notable) passives worth.