Why the nerf to gem upgrades?

The more I think about it the more I have to agree with the others that GGG may want to reevaluate the whole gem quality system. The current system presents a lot of issues that really take the impact and joy out of getting a GCP or a gem with quality...

A single GCP is meaningless as a usable currency as you will almost always need or want to use more than one.

Players will always want to max the quality on their skills which makes these incremental upgrades rather pointless. This system works better for gear where the items used to raise the quality are rather easy to acquire.

Using a GCP on a skill gem with no or even low to medium quality is generally considered a bad idea because of how rare they are, so few will actually do this. People don't even trade most low quality gems anymore because no one wants them.

Swapping out a normal, high-level gem for a low-level gem with quality is a setback no matter how you look at it. The experience earned from the original gem is lost.

I kinda like the idea of quality being replaced with a random mod that can be added or rerolled with a GCP.

I've actually spent 20GCP to level up both faster casting and freezing pulse. I did this because they are hard to find on quality form, and are bought quickly. Didn't bother me one bit.

I do like the idea of random mods on gems, but considering were so close to OB, I don't see think these ideas will come to fruition

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D623932883 wrote:

The more I think about it the more I have to agree with the others that GGG may want to reevaluate the whole gem quality system. The current system presents a lot of issues that really take the impact and joy out of getting a GCP or a gem with quality...

A single GCP is meaningless as a usable currency as you will almost always need or want to use more than one.

Players will always want to max the quality on their skills which makes these incremental upgrades rather pointless. This system works better for gear where the items used to raise the quality are rather easy to acquire.

Using a GCP on a skill gem with no or even low to medium quality is generally considered a bad idea because of how rare they are, so few will actually do this. People don't even trade most low quality gems anymore because no one wants them.

Swapping out a normal, high-level gem for a low-level gem with quality is a setback no matter how you look at it. The experience earned from the original gem is lost.

I kinda like the idea of quality being replaced with a random mod that can be added or rerolled with a GCP.

I think it would be great if GGG could find time to add a %quality mod pool so, for example, a quality fireball could get any of:
-more damage
-faster cast
-faster projectiles
-increased area of effect
-crit/crit damage
-stun/duration
-pierce
-ignite
-etc.

It would certainly add some variety to quality and perhaps enable builds and allow for equalizing the quality mods on certain gems that are borderline useless in some cases, and outright inferior to other skill/spell quality mods.

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Charan wrote:

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dust7 wrote:

Well, I am sure GGG could come up with something better than the current state of the gem quality system. Some random ideas which might work:

• Drastically increase the effect of a single GCP, but lower their drop rate.
• Make GCPs randomly upgrade a gem. This would make mid-quality gems more common but 20% quality gems rarer.
• Remove gem quality altogether but let GCPs add a random property to an active skill gem, such as +20 fire damage or +10% IIR. Allow gems to be randomly upgraded up to four times. 'Fully' upgrading a gem would only cost 4 GCPs, but getting your desired combination of mods would be something to strife for in the endgame.
• Greatly increase the effect of a single GCP but adjust the problematic gems (like IAS) accrodingly.
• Give GCPs diminishing returns, so at least the first two or three have a noticeable effect on a gem.

Just a few, unpolished ideas, but I would prefer any of them over 0,35% upgrades.

Yes.

Instead of nerfing the whole system why not just disallow certain skills from being upgraded?

Please explain what you mean by "nerfing the whole system".

The arguments related to impact are well considered. We are definitely open to looking at the values.

I don't like the idea of having them even rarer but 5% per use. That would mean if you wanted to upgrade a 17% gem you'd be "wasting" half of the orb, which would be especially painful since they would be so rare. It is good that the effect of the orb matches the granularity of the bonus. This wouldn't matter if they were common, but since they are rare it does matter.
I have 5 characters in legacy, level 62, 63, 63, 68 & 71. From all those characters combined, I've found a grand total of five GCPs. I've not used or traded any. So that's one per character, if they were five times as rare I might never have found even one. At least this way I could trade them for something if I wanted.

Without changing gem quality to something completely different, the only way I can see of creating more impact is to increase the power of the quality bonuses. But that would only serve to further imbalance the game, as due to GCP rarity your could not reasonably expect players to have quality gems, and would have to balance around non-quality ones.


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This isn't a very original thought, but I'll throw it out there:

What if instead of gems having from 0-20% quality, there were instead several tiers in 5% increments, including low quality gems with a negative amount. Then have a vendor recipe similar to how buying orbs from nessa/yeena works, that would allow you to upgrade them but not to the highest tier. So for instance
3 crap gems = decent gem
3 decent gems = good gem
3 good gems = better gem
Then you need to use GCP to upgrade beyond that point
etc.

This would allow you to be more liberal with quest rewards and gem drops, without giving everyone easy max quality gems. Gem drops would be more rewarding for players, and players wouldn't be content to stick with their quest reward gems. Newer players would be able to experiment more freely with a wider array of gems. GCP would still be valued, preserving the end game grind aspect.

I've heard in chat a bunch of times that a gcp should give something like:
- 5% per gcp up to 10%,
- 2% per gcp up to 16%,
- 1% per gcp up to the max of 20%.

Seems legit, and somewhat maintains the value of a gcp (since getting the 20% gem is 9gcp from 0%).


As always, numbers can be massaged.

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Qarl wrote:

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

Was I selling too many regals before.....

:P

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pneuma wrote:

I've heard in chat a bunch of times that a gcp should give something like:
- 5% per gcp up to 10%,
- 2% per gcp up to 16%,
- 1% per gcp up to the max of 20%.

Seems legit, and somewhat maintains the value of a gcp (since getting the 20% gem is 9gcp from 0%).


As always, numbers can be massaged.

This seems like a neat idea.

I had also been thinking about having the GCP effect be tied to the gem's level:

level 1: 4%
level 2-10: 3%
level 11-15: 2%
level 16-20: 1%

That way you end up having to decide if you want to level up new gems (and use sockets, delay use, use weaker gem) vs. spend more GCPs to get quality on an already leveled gem.