Vaal Skill Gem Retrospective

Still think that one soul charge ( with exception being BA and ST) and no way to alter soul gain is a huge design flaw.

Neeeeeeeeeeeeed PvP!

we either need more sockets for stuff like pants or something. or we need the gems to preform as their normal counterpart until souls are filled. otherwise 90% of these vaal gems are almost completely obsolete to any other combo of gems you could have in the sockets like a cwdt setup or something.

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zhirek wrote:

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Raghin wrote:

So your idea for vaal double strike was to create a shadow clone that attacks like the player using said skill, but whatsup with the crazy cost of souls for the small amount of time it exists? Small charge requirements for short time would make sense, large charge requirements for long time existence makes sense. Large Cost, for low existence time.................. the AI on it isnt smart enough to make it useful with low existence times.

Suppose you have cast on death skills equipped. Will this work with your vaal double if it dies?

havent tried but doubt it, and im still waiting on them allowing cast on death to work with conversion trap, really not a lot of love for that gem, as it needs to be a confusion gem instead of conversion, because players cant kill friendlies. or at least something to make it more build savy instead of just increase duration, reduced duration, and multiple traps. dying to make a special build with it.

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solistus wrote:

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As the Vaal are the oldest civilisation that players have yet encountered

I just got a raging lore-nerd-boner.

Heh, that was my main takeaway too.

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Rory wrote:

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ogrec wrote:

After designing powerful vaal gems, what made you decide that you want to disable the use of those in the most challenging fight in the game (apex/abyss)?

We decided on having monsters that grant no loot or experience give no souls as well - This was to prevent fights with massive numbers of summoned minions granting an unlimited number of Vaal skill uses and trivializing content.

We're all for having you use a Vaal skill with stored charges in the Atziri fight, but not charging them up during the encounter (as with other boss fights). Obviously it may be hard to justify giving up gem slots to do this. Whether this cost is worth it to players is a choice we were happy to let players decide for themselves.

Can't you make it so you gain less souls from summons instead of none? I would make it more entertaining for sure.

I've been thinking about it, and I have an idea that might make everyone happy.
The most common complaint I see with the Vaal gems is that you only get to use them every so often, maybe once or twice in each map. And honestly, I think that was working as intended, that the gems are supposed to be primitive... but what if you could modify it?

So, if it were me, I'd just add a third resource: souls, . Just like you charge souls in the gem, except it would be inherently attached to a character, and perhaps you could go into the passive tree and invest in your resource (such as 'can hold 10 more souls' 'chance to steal soul on crit' or something). It would give some more incentive to use the gems, which are a really cool idea, and if you coupled that all with a slight rebalance of the gems and made it so souls didn't reset when you go into a new instance, you could have the best of both worlds, to where you only get the one or two uses of the skill at a time, BUT you can circumvent that penalty if you specifically build that way such that you're a Vaal character.

Just a thought.

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theloveduck wrote:

I've been thinking about it, and I have an idea that might make everyone happy.
The most common complaint I see with the Vaal gems is that you only get to use them every so often, maybe once or twice in each map. And honestly, I think that was working as intended, that the gems are supposed to be primitive... but what if you could modify it?

So, if it were me, I'd just add a third resource: souls, . Just like you charge souls in the gem, except it would be inherently attached to a character, and perhaps you could go into the passive tree and invest in your resource (such as 'can hold 10 more souls' 'chance to steal soul on crit' or something). It would give some more incentive to use the gems, which are a really cool idea, and if you coupled that all with a slight rebalance of the gems and made it so souls didn't reset when you go into a new instance, you could have the best of both worlds, to where you only get the one or two uses of the skill at a time, BUT you can circumvent that penalty if you specifically build that way such that you're a Vaal character.

Just a thought.

Good idea imo, needs some thinking and work from GGG ,but could make vaal gems viable even in Merciless, where the soul cost is too high (except BA and ST).
And also some passive - keystone? - that could also increase vaal gem use storage.

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Good idea imo, needs some thinking and work from GGG ,but could make vaal gems viable even in Merciless, where the soul cost is too high (except BA and ST).
And also some passive - keystone? - that could also increase vaal gem use storage.

Yeah and honestly, that's not even the only way you could go. The introduction of the Vaal orb has also given us the ability to create white sockets on items, sockets which can accept any color gem... but you could also reverse it to where Vaal gems are white and can ONLY fit into a white socket, so doing that and maybe decreasing the cost of souls would allow you to 'sacrifice' a perfect linked or ideal roll item for the possible ability to have an ultimate primordial skill... you could also combine the two ideas in some form or other.

In either case, it fits with this really cool concept of sacrificing for something greater that defines the expansion. Whether you're sacrificing points that otherwise would have gone into a node on the tree you wanted, or needing to corrupt and destroy a bunch of items in the hopes of getting access to this ultimate skill, you could make the choice to sacrifice have some real significance...

Not to mention the wild build diversity you'd be able to encourage doing something like that.

I just don't like the idea I've been reading about giving up on the idea entirely, or stopping Vaal gems from coming out, because I really like the concept a lot, and it's not hard to tweak it.

But yeah you're right, it seems a shame that you can't really make much effective use of them once you get to the Merciless difficulty.

@GGG
I heard a while ago "Vaal Gems potential not realized yet."
Any tips? :D