[Suggestion] Adjust Gem drops and Gem experience gains to make them more valuable

Hello GGG, community and Mark.

With the recent talks in the community about wishing the ground loot was to be better I wanted to participate, and decided to give myself a focus with something that has not been suggested often. Since I'm somewhat of a masochist like Mark, I don't mind extra challenges when they feel meaningful. This biases me towards suggestions that don't necessarily make the game easier. What I care about more is longevity, giving players constant things to do and consider at all stages of progression.

Apologies for the length of the post. I have a writing problem. Usually I write short and let readers to fill in the blanks, but this time I wanted to go deep to both see and show how I perceive the game.

### Current player experience with aquiring gems and leveling them
(For the following, I'm ignoring double-corrupted and exceptional Gems.)

It has been really easy to acquire a specific skill and support Gems, and to max them with 20/20, for for quite a while now, both in trade and SSF. You can simply buy a bunch from an NPC vendor, put them in your unused weapon-swap slots, and quickly level them passively while killing monsters. Soon they're level 20, and you can sell them uncorrupted if they're meta or corrupt them yourself. Rinse and repeat, no ground loot involved.

Meanwhile, gem drops rarely matter. Most of them have no experience of quality to them. The only real value is the vendor recipe for Gemcutter's Prisms, or the occasional level 20 meta skill gem. It's basically pointless to target any specific level 20 skill gem from the ground when you can deterministically buy and level stacks of them from a vendor and max level them before finding one on the drop pool. I for myself do this because I have a grinding problem.

### When skill gems are hard to level up, the curated skill gem drops become more valuable
PoE2 makes players switch with different skills by introducing them via Uncut Skill Gems at regular intervals. This creates meaningful build decisions and lets players naturally shift their builds as they progress. The Uncut Skill Gem drops also match the area level they are in, reducing the number of unnecessary drops.

Imitating PoE2, I'd like PoE1's dropped skill gem levels to match the area level, and for overall drop rates to be much lower. Maybe 0-4 per area. This alone wouldn't change much because your equipped gems level fast enough to keep up and triumph over any skill gem drop.

I have a masochism problem for saying this because it's devious:
Skill gem experience requirements should be increased so that they lag behind area level by 1-3 levels on average.

A 3-level gap would be the maximum before the catch-up XP kicks in naturally with the amount of experience required for a skill gem level up. This also means that you have less of a reason to just pick one skill at the beginning, and then level through the whole campaign with it regardless of the lag. You can still do it anyway, and I have no problem with that.

The rate where the skill gem levels lags is an important to get right, because too fast makes things tedious, but too slow makes players "forget" they could swap skill gems to improve. The 3-level lag could develop in the span between of 1 to 2 acts. Players could continue grinding to become more powerful, or they could check the skill gem drops for swaps and upgrades. Swapping gems with drops is incentivised so players have a reason to adapt their build and try different skills via RNG on the fly.

### Quest reward gem levels
A special note for skill gem levels from quest rewards: This is the closest way skill progression is similar in PoE1 than in PoE2. We're introducing different skill gems at regular intervals to different classes to encourage swaps and combos. Even more so if the rewards have high levels, for example +1 to the area level the quests last phase was completed in.

### Level 20 skill gem economy
Similarly how acquiring level 20 skill gems in PoE2 is somewhat rare, so should they be in PoE1 as well. Not to invalidate level 20 drops, grinding skill gem exp in PoE1 from level 18 to level 20 should be an meaningful achievement. Most meta skill gems at level 20 would be a lot more valuable than before, but other skill gem drops at level 20 are also more valuable. Most end game skill gem drops would be at level 18, with the occasional valuable level 20 drop. Level 18 skill gems are well enough to do Pinnacle bosses, so I'm not concerned about player power levels being too low.

### Corrupting skill gems
While corrupting skill gems has been more of an end game thing, now corrupting them during the campaign can give players a small but meaningful oomph, if one would want to sacrifice a Vaal Orb for that. I might do that, because I have a gambling problem. A quick powerup if lucky for a short while. Vaal Side Areas are now also more valuable, with their Vaal Skill Gem drops being somewhat more desirable when they are of the highest level available, in conjuction of providing a powerful Vaal skill.

To get a level 21 skill gem in the end game would also be a different matter, since level 20 skill gems are more precious now. Even in PoE2 level 21 gems are easy to get by just corrupting level 18 skill gems until they get a +1 to levels, then just upgrading it to level 20+1. In PoE1 the skill gem needs to be at level 20 before corrupting for it to turn to 21, which gives a nice sink for uncorrupted level 20 skill gem drops, be it for self use or trading.

### Should support gems be difficult to grind as well?
No, because that would be too much, and I would have a personal problem with that. You can't realistically think the support gem drops are going to align with any specific skill you might use. Imagine a situation where your socket colours would change, or you could swap skill gems that requires different supports. If players felt swapping a skill gem meant losing support gem power for a long time, they would refuse to experiment, and just force themselves through the campaign without changing most of your gems or gear. That's the opposite of the goal.

In conclusion, support gems should be easy to level up and swap. Their drop behaviour can mirror skill gem curations, as in level 20 support gem drops should remain rare. Even though leveling them yourself stays easy. The support gem drops could at times even be in relation with the skill gem drop, so that they are usable with the drop to encourage experimentations. The downside with this whole suggestion is that level 20 support gems are going to be more common to a point they are not worth much economically. They can't benefit from the same corruption sinks as skill gems.

### There's going to be non-valuable, unwanted support and skill gem drops anyway, no matter their level
The answer is more sinks.

We have the Labyrinth that can eat gems to gain their experience in Facetors Lenses. Players can then apply these to their main skills, but that is not going to disrupt the gem economy much, even if the chance to eat gems or the Facetor value is increased. The unwanted skill gems are going to be preferrable anyway because of the higher experience pool they have. On the other hand, if the Lab would receive a big update, this could also be taken into consideration. For example having the ability to consume a bunch of high level support gems at once for a bigger Facetors Lense value, since the stash is there to easily trash from collections.

One more sink with high capacity would be the ability to vendor gems for a fair amount of gold, that increases with their level and quality. This also means you buy gems from vendors with gold instead of currency you could be using for early crafts. If a level 20 support and skill gems had a bonus to their vendor value, it would give them an inherent economic value. The great thing with this is that you can bulk vendor quite a lot of both support and skill gems in one go, which would benefit the gem and gold economy. But to be honest, this is a guessing game, where facts depends on the sell value and if players would be vendoring their failed corruptions and level 20 support gems. I have a problem where I can't foresee the future.

If we were to add more sinks or other restrictions for gems, it would preferably need to come after we know how the previously mentioned methods would work. A possible idea would be to change how a Vaal Orb affects quality by rerolling the value between 0-20, but it also has drawbacks in aquiring Q23 gems, and would also be applicable to level 18 gems and not effect the economy for level 20 gems in an intended way. Another example would take from Final Fantasy 7, where some of the sockets stiffled materia level growth.

### Closing thoughts
To improve the ground loot we'll need to make changes to it one section at a time. The main thing to keep in mind is to keep things interesting throughout the whole experience from the campaign to the mapping and end game grind. In the case of gems, there should be reasons to pick them up till the end of time. And if I could add one more thing, then IIR should affect the gem drops somehow, but the best I can come up with is to have it affect the end game level 18-20 drops, which would not affect the campaign. With my suggestion one should also be careful exceptional gems do not become too rare, but on the other hand using Facetors Lenses can be used on exceptional and skill gems to offset much of the difficulty of acquiring maximum level gems.

If you managed to read this huge wall of text, I applaud your persistency and dedication to wanting for this game to succeed and remain enjoyable for a long time.

Lets start by saying that gems got added to vendors some time ago as a much needed quality of life so i doubt they will go back on that.

gem leveling is fine, Gemcutters could be a bit harder to obtain but with most gems quality being mediocre at best it wont make much of a difference.

a crazy idea could be to give droped gems the scourge treatment, Droped gems will come with 2 implicit based on the gem quality, 1 positive and 1 negative.

positive:
+1 to gem level every "x" quality
-1% skill cost every "x" quality
-1% skill atribute requirement every "x" quality
gain life/mana/ES on hit every "x" quality
+1% more AOE every "x" quality
added flat (elemental/chaos/phys) damage every "x" quality
% of skill damage is converted to chaos every "x" quality
(insert long list of low impact mods)


negative: more or less the same plus some troll mods
+1% skill cost every "x" quality
1% less AOE every "x" quality
-% damage effectiveness of added damage every "x" quality
+1 second cooldown every "x" quality
1% of damage done is reflected back to the user every "x" quality
etc..


the odds of droping the desirable gem with a positive that has great sinergy with it and a negative with minimal impact will be super rare and as such very expensive.

"

Iamterribleatnames#6579 wrote:

Lets start by saying that gems got added to vendors some time ago as a much needed quality of life so i doubt they will go back on that.

Yes, they've been there since the beginning, with few changes during the times, to my recollection. At first town vendors sold only the class specific gems from quest rewards, so you still needed alts to get the skill and support gems from alternate vendor lists. Then while still in beta, GGG added Siosa to the Library area, but he was just reselling the stuff previous vendors were selling, so you still needed an alt character to buy different kinds of gems. That's because ground back then and today doesn't necessarily provide you with the skill gem you've been looking for, as it is unnecessarily gruesome to delay players the skill they have decided on when creating the character.

When Lily Roth was introduced in 3.0.0 she started selling every non-exceptional gems in Act 5 town, albeit at level 1. Other vendors had levels to their produce, but the levels have been of no consequence, because the gems are easy to level up.

I think Lily Roth is the QoL thing you were talking about. Worry not, as I have no intention of removing the ones mentioned above. They just work too well so ground gems are basically ignored. :D For this reason I'm making a distinction between dropped and bought gems.

"

Iamterribleatnames#6579 wrote:

a crazy idea could be to give droped gems the scourge treatment, Droped gems will come with 2 implicit based on the gem quality, 1 positive and 1 negative.

I've entertained myself with this idea, or with similar ideas as well. Like enchants for example. It's just that currently the transfigured gems already do a god job with the drawbacks and niche power while not introducing too much RNG.

I'd worry finding the correct Krangled gem would be a near impossibility. But still as a concept, there could be a possibility for a separate Krangled Support gem, which by itself has nothing going on for it, except for the randomized Krangled mods. Kinda like the Legend Support Gems in PoE2, as an end game drop to get.

The last thing POE1 needs is anything resembling the awful POE2 gem system.

Unlike POE2, POE1 has had a good working ground loot system in the past, they've just ruined it trying to shoehorn POE2 bullshit into POE1. Removing the POE2 bullshit, and undoing the numerous hacks made over the years as a result of its introduction into POE1, fixes the problem.

The last thing we need is GGG injecting more POE2 bullshit into POE1 to try to fix something that's only broken because POE2 bullshit keeps getting injected into POE1.

"

AxiomOfAnarchy#7408 wrote:

The last thing POE1 needs is anything resembling the awful POE2 gem system.

Thanks for the response, and sorry for the distraught for thinking this is about bringing PoE2 features to PoE1. While it could be intrepreted that way, both PoE games are a case study of game multiple mechanics. It wouldn't be wise of me to not view things with neutrality, since these mechanics could be from any game. PoE games are a familiar point to discuss from.