Skill gems feedback

Hi I’m new to POE but been playing ARPGs for a while and I’m having lots of fun in general so far. Thanks for a good game GGG.

Just a bit of feedback on skill gems and levelling:
I wonder if a bit of a hybrid approach can be considered whereby the skill gems you’ve created level up like poe1 and the uncut skill gems still drop like usual. As a player you then have a choice to use it to create a new gem at that level or upgrade your existing gems with a bit of a boost up to that level of exp the uncut gems offers?

As a new player to POE the new POE2 skill system is definitely easier to understand for me personally. I just feel with this slight change I have a choice to grind to lvl up my gems to get a bit more power and hopefully have enough to beat the boss and not feel stuck.

If someone’s already given this feedback or similar apologies for doubling up!

Cheers

If GGG would implement a way to upgrade your skill gems differently, I personally would prefer to go with the Reforging Bench, to upgrade uncut skill gems 3 to 1 to the next tier. This could also be limited to a certain level if so desired.

This way it would fit the theme a bit better I think. In the sense of staying away from gem experience. But like I stated, this is personal preference.

On the other hand in trade, you can simply trade a high level skill gem. So I am not sure how important it is for GGG to limit access to higher level gems.

That’s a neat idea! I think trading is fine , you still have to level it somehow to sell and if you make uncut rare enough it won’t be exploited… or so I think?

Cheer!

Regarding trading, Kripparian mentioned this in one of his videos. Once you reach endgame you will have tons of these gems and most likely not even pick them up anymore. Players who are only just starting mapping could buy them for almost free at that point.

At least that is the current state.

I am not that far into maps yet. But I have about 30 or so level 16 skill gems after maybe 20 or so mid tier maps. Because the number you need is very limited I assume that the need is saturated very easily.

I personally prefer the slow step by step improvements, therefor I will farm them myself. But others could skip a lot of progression with trading.

I have a proposal in regards to how the gem crafting works.

Instead of having different uncut gems for each specific gem base level, they should instead be divided by color, so for example a blue uncut gem would allow you to craft any blue gem, a red uncut support gem would allow you to craft any red support, etc.

Of course, the gems themselves would still have level / stat requirements that can be indicated in the UI, but I think you should still be able to craft them, even if you can't use them yet.

Then, you would level up gems by either by using an uncut gem to increase the level by one, or if they still want the use x level gem to level to x, they could add a new currency item for that. Another possible benefit of adding a new currency is that they could make it more common, while making the uncut gems more rare / purchasable from vendors.


My reasoning for these changes is that I have a ton of uncut gems that are all basically useless to be, as I already have all the skills I can get at the current level, while desperatly needing skills / supports from a higher level. So the uncut gems I have would only be useful to some future character, even though that future character would also be getting its own skill gem drops from quests and such.