Would it really hurt so much if there was a JC transmute recipe which took, say, a Seaspray, a couple of primals and maybe a Living Ruby and turned it into a Spinal?


[e] oh, and for the OP, straight up armor gems would be lovely. Armor, BV and Stam in combination or pure would make for compelling tank gearing alternatives.

The problem is that 1.5 points of stamina is just better than 1 point of defense. You are saying that 1 stam is roughly worth 2 defense (since the theoretical trade you propose is -4 stam for +8 defense). The current system says 1 stam = 2/3 defense, and you think 2 defense is more appropriate.

Well what if they made each point of defense give 3x the benefit that it does now? That would make a 7 stam/5 def gem give the equivalent of 14.5 stamina. While I think 3x is overboard, I definitely think that virtually every rating stat doesn't give enough benefit for the rating. Dodge, parry, hit, crit, defense, block... None of these are as good as raw damage, healing, or stamina.

This is ultimately what I would think would be the easiest to implement. We would be looking at Xmute Mastery and Gems going well together (No socket/bonus changes and gems be able to be moved around easier, but not too fast). Consider Talasite to Living Ruby "the next big money maker."

Spell damage + resilience. Other than that, one thing they could do to up the value of yellow gems is up the amount of crit rating you get - it lags pretty far behind spell damage/str/agil for most classes.

I fully expect to see this dealt with in 51 point talent trees. Given the spirit changes, the pally changes, and a few of the other recent talent adjustments, it feels although Blizzard is looking to increase the synergy between talent points, base stats, and level of gear. The root of this problem is that no high end player wants to trade any primary functionality for secondary viability. As a rogue, I will always chose marginally more damage over even a moderate increase in survivability as long as I remain over the threshold required to live through encounters. In response to this, certain talent builds/trees have become "cookie cutter", the accepted de facto builds for raiding. The recent response has been to enhance less-used abilities in less-used trees so that they synergize with (a) other abilities and (b) scale in interesting ways. The gem problem is solved by creating specs that read like: spec 1 is superior until you reach point V, once you have V then spec b starts to pull ahead, UNLESS you fall into category N in which case you want spec c. When you have talent trees that allow for a person to maximize their primary role in different ways, then the ability to customize gear becomes much more important.

A quick and dirty way to change things up may be to vastly improve the socket bonuses themselves.

Historically, Blizzard has had a tough time with stat allocation and while they have shown improvement, there are still some things that make you shake your head. The players who trial and error in the live version of the game find the 'sweet spot' for every gear level. In that respect, gemming is a nice addition but then again, is it really customization if everyone with item X either sockets 3 LR's or is not getting the most out of it?

Its a little disappointing that much of the shiny new healer loot from ZA (especially cross class, ie 'bling') is loaded with haste....errr, I play a tree. Because of the level of my gear, I have to balance a little and don't straight stack +heal...I use alot of purples. My 'other main' is a prot warrior, though I don't raid on him currently. I've matched sockets on one or 2 items but in general, its straight SSoE.

I've paid for epic flying skill for 2 of my characters and one for my wife on Jewelcrafting so I'm not complaining. Despite all that, purple, orange, and Yellow cuts sell juct fine, but at half of what Rubies go for. Of course it will vary by server. The epic BT/Hyjal gems I imagine are the same dynamic in terms of demand.

If they add anymore cuts, I suppose assigning them to the less used colors like green, blue, and yellow would be a good move, but even so, what would it take to break the stranglehold red gems have on your gear?

The more I think about it, the more I think augmenting the socket bonuses would make it more interesting but then again, people would feel more forced into matching than doing what they want with thier gear :/

A Hit/stam green gem was my immediate first thought given the current possible gem stats. It really seems to be an oversight, it's not even among the "oddball" heroic epic gem drops, but I bet almost every tank would use one.

I always thought that pyrestones and the 'split' colors should follow the general itemization formula and have slightly superior stats.

For example, equal ilvl gloves might have 20 stam/20 int, or 30 stamina. Why doesn't the caster pyrestone have 6 crit/7 damage?

Because you choose which ones you want, so you would use those all the time. 2 oranges > 1 red + 1 yellow. You don't control the itemization on items.

This. The whole idea behind the socket bonus should be that you actually want to fulfill it, so the item becomes 'better' than it would be without the socket bonus fulfilled. So far socket bonuses have been really unimaginative and underpowered. More creative socket bonuses (not just base stats, but possible affecting abilities and such) and higher base stat increases could go a long way to making them more desirable.

Also, as said, the socket colors don't always match the intended use of the item. Or rather they match Blizzard idea of what a class should have, but not the actual practice. Non-set items of course pose a problem there, but the plethora of blue and yellow sockets on supposed 'hunter' kit is worrying.

To whom exactly are you proposing these anyways?

Realistically, I'm not sure how to discuss this topic. Even if we did come to a reasonable conclusion as to a bunch of new gems to implement into the game, who will implement them? Is this forum meant to be a batphone to the devs?

If that's the case, then here is a list of things I want:

A pony.
A green gem with 33 healing, 22 spell damage and 18 stamina.
A magical rainbow, with a right click effect to summon a leprechaun.

Any other ideas/criticisms?

I've been thinking about this for a while. My thinking developed from the lack of healing/sp. crit and healing/stam gems. Here's what I came up with: add in a JC ability to merge gems. For example:



Take [Solid Star of Elune] and [Teardrop Living Ruby] and using this new JC ability, combine them... end up with 2x [Solid Teardrop = 9heal/6stam].

Or take [Gleaming Dawnstone] and [Teardrop Living Ruby], end end up with 2x [Gleaming Teardrop = 9 heal/4 sp.crit]



I'd also agree with your suggestions for pure gems covering expertise, haste, and other stats which aren't covered. Once the pure gems are covered they can then be used to combine into whatever gem you require.

Apologies for the double post, but if by this you mean "Block Rating" (I assume you do as you list "Block Value" further down your post") I don't see it happening.

Because Stat allocation for Block Rating is so cheap - it would be far too easy to be uncrushable just by gemming for it. While Blizzard seems to be aiming towards block rating/value in T5-6/ZA gear, its unlikely they'd make it this easy. I wouldn't mind a Block Value, or a Stam/Block Value gem. Perhaps even an armor gem.

Blizzard has stated they dislike the crushing blow mechanic as it is too random. The combination of parrys + crushes + shield block charges is even more rediculous but don't get me started.

What I think think they really should have done is made gems with 2 stats have more power than those with 1. A green out of the AH would have 4str and 4 agi or it could have 6str. Why would gems be 4str and 4agi or 8str? it should be 4/4 vs. 6 or it should be 6/6 vs. 9.

That would be excellent, knowing your (and our) issues with Spinels , attach a reputation requirement to attaining the xmute (hyjal or bt or.... both??) to keep it from being massively abused, and away you go.

I am sure servers differ, but last time I needed a healing gem for a yelow slot I picked up 4x 4 int/2mp5 gems for 5g each. 4 int/+9 heaing were 55g and 60g.

I beleive Blizzard would regard gems as a success, people have taken it as a profession in abundance, their is large number of people involved in supplying, selling and reselling and pretty much everybody uses them. But they are a "tax". A new blue geared protection warrior alt got lucky in Kara last night and walked out with 5-6 upgrades. I was only half joking when I said to him afterwards, "Well you got sucked in, its going to cost 500g to gem that lot, let alone enchants"

/derail

Is their a batphone? I have no idea, but hot topics seem to spread from here to other forums and sometimes even get acted on. Chances of someone from Blizzard at least reading the topic header? Greater then zero. Chances of somebody in Blizzard has a memo/To do list - "New gem cuts?" Greater then zero.

Yes. The ideal situation is to allow the 'cuts' to apply a specific bonus to the gems, irregardless of gem color. Believe me, I would love to be able to cut Runed Talasites, it might hurt my living ruby market, but Jesus H. Christ I have a 24 slot bag full of talasite and dawnstone stacks on my JCer and nothing to do with them. This would increase the value of worthless gems (talasites!) and decrease the price inflation of rubies/spinels to a more reasonable level.

Another thought is, as Heel mentions above, to apply school specific damage bonuses to 'runed' cuts of certain gem colors: IE: Blue=frost, orange=fire/arcane, green=arcane/shadow, etc. etc.

If you want to be really creative, you could have your meta gems truely be "meta" with respect to the gemming system and make them interact with your other gems in certain ways. Like increasing the bonus of all your yellow gems by 25 or 50%--especially if it increases the red or blue bonuses from orange and green gems. There's still an element of min-maxing, and a 'best' setup at any given time, but if there were a "more red gems than yellow" requirement on it, you would have to consider gems over your entire gear rather than piece-by-piece to figure out the actual min-max of using it or not. Even if it ends up creating another cookie-cutter gear build, at least it will be a more varied (read: not just all-red-gems) gear build, and it makes it worthwhile to consider socket bonuses in more cases. Perhaps a meta that increased socket bonuses.

Sadly, there isn't enough room for "interesting" socket bonuses because they only get like four points in the itemization budget. I would love to see more complicated ones, like class-specific effects, but with such a small budget there's not really much that can do that's more than cosmetic. Perhaps the chest or gloves could be given a special, more highly-budgeted bonus in the way that the help slot is the only one to recieve a meta socket. They might end up having to increase the budget on socket bonuses anyways, to make them worth specing for more often. There are currently very few situations where one particular stat isn't completely dominant in a spec (that could also be solved with class balance redesign, but more difficultly).

Uh . . . no, not quite. One of the major points of the gemming system is that colors matter for something. If you get to cut Runed Talasites, then the colors don't matter at all, and the system becomes less interesting. The goal is to correct the discrepancy between red and green usage - red is off the charts, green is nearly nonexistant. The only thing that has to be done to achieve this goal is to break the rules with one cut. An 11 shadow damage Seaspray works well because for Warlocks and Shadow Priests, it's equivalent to or slightly superior than a Spinel in most situations because of socket bonuses. Warlocks and Shadow Priests would suddenly prefer Seasprays; this alone would do a great deal to correct the imbalance in gem usage. In addition, the gem mini-game is not diminished, because the mini-game doesn't really exist for those two classes: with very few exceptions, the correct gemming method is to put a red gem in as many slots as possible while still satisfying the meta gem requirements. In fact, it makes things somewhat more interesting. So, adding this one gem - and only this one gem - kills two birds with one stone.

I agree with Treesurgeon on this - I think the gem system was largely designed well, right up until the point where the socket bonuses on low tier gear were "+2 int" or "+2 crit rating"! Those bonuses just aren't enough to justify people gemming to meet them. The socket bonuses should be equal to a single gem of the same tier, then people actually have to think a little about whether to meet them or not. Even a shadowpriest might choose to meet a red/yellow/blue requirement if the bonus was +12 spell damage (on BT gear, say +7-9 on lower tier gear).

Put in proper socket bonuses, buff the amount of hit/crit rating that the gems give to put them closer to a par with the red & purple gems, add an expertise gem and a "steady seaspray emerald", and you are pretty much done.

Don't fool yourself though - JC was always intended to be a "new gear tax" just like enchanting.

Was typing out a long statement on gems and the issues pertaining to the lack of use in the yellow/blue department, when I realized this is more of an overall stat imbalance. And it will always be a stat imbalance, unless you force the stats to not be available on a Orange or Purple gem, and force Yellow/Green selections.

This provides more diversity over sockets, and makes the difference of slight gear differences in players to be more equal in the end. One player can gem for all haste/armor pen and still be in line with the player who wants all hit/crit/ap instead. Both lead to the same end stats, but vastly different play styles.

Very very true. I walked out of a pair of runs with 3 upgrades and immediately had a bill for 5 gems (while I waited for the epic requests to come through) an epic thread and two enchants. Total cost was in the neighborhood of 700g with guildies suppling nethers for free and no enchanting fees. Worth it in every way imaginable (three new pieces of gear that are final pieces until Sunwell? Hell yes.), but there's no denying that JC is intended to take gold back out of the system.

Honestly I wouldn't look forward to new overpowered replacements for the "standard" gems. I love my Royal Shadowsong Amethysts, but I don't feel constrained because I'm socketing the same thing in- I prefer that I get the most out of my gems. By adding more powerful alternatives into the system all you do is shift demand and require folks to regem everything. Profitable for the JCers... but they've already got my cash =P

I'd actually be interested in seeing more unique-equipped gems for the non JCers. It's the thing that really stuck me when I was planning out socket bonuses with my heroics gems and had to do some juggling. 11healing and 4crit isn't a bad little epic gem. It's certainly not something I'd replace all my Royals with, but it makes a nice addition to snag set bonuses. I'd be very happy if they released powerful but unique-equipped gems in a large variety of cuts so you were likely to break out of standard gemming to get them- but they wouldn't change the entire system. Make them cutable though so that players can control the supply and range. There's nothing more depressing than getting terrible epic gems out of a heroic. It feels bad to destroy them, but who's going to socket it? Ugh. If bosses dropped the uncut gems, and crafters could cut and distribute them, it would be much better... and players could regem or destroy them to move them about without knowing that they have to go run heroics for them.