Invigorating Gemstone, Mirinae Teardrop of the Starweaver, Moratorium, Mutilation Guard, Pain Enhancer
While some of these have very fringe use cases, such as pain enhancer in impale dh or invigorating gemstone with stone gauntlets, they have fallen very far behind compared to most other gems. I would personally like for these gems to be reworked into something more widely applicable. It would be great if we could have more alternatives to bane of the trapped for instance, and the only defensive gem you ever use won’t be esoteric alteration.
3 Likes
Pain Enhancer, Mutilation Guard and Invigorating Gemstone are fine.
Pain Enhancer scales well with pet/clone builds and most trash killer (TK) specs utilize this gem to scale their massive attack speed by bursts from large area of effect spells. Mutilation works on Followers, allowing you to have much more useful cooldown or all-skill access tokens instead of invulnerability.
Lastly, Invigorating is the way to for LoD/LoN builds to not get stuck and relief for zdps specs for their healing spells to work better. Just because you don’t play zdps, doesn’t mean this gem is useless and entire game has to revolve around dps dealers or solo players.
However, Moratorium was the PvP gem before power creep made it fall out of scope. It can not be useful until you make Brawl mode somewhat functional. Mirinae got nerfed, but it was only done by changing its interaction with one skill; it was broken before because its triumph relied on only Bone Armor.
If anything, they can make Mirinae and Moratorium work together; by making Mirinae nullify the damage you staggered if used together.
You already have them. Those are called Taeguk, Enforcer and Zei’s. You don’t need to get stuck to BotT. As long as you have ways to increase effective cast distance, you can put them to use.
Taeguk gives you extra armor per stack if you can incorporate it into your channeling build. For keeping up Squirt stacks you can use Molten Wildebeest’s gem, to not rely on Shield Pylons in the Greater Rift. Most builds don’t rely on defensive traits of the gems to clear the content though.
4 Likes
yes, some gems have niche uses, but overall, the gem balance is horrible.
2 Likes
Threads like this should have suggestions for the improvements that the poster would like to see.
Almost any build that can conceivably fit BotT will use it as the condition is easily met and the multiplier is quite high. Enforcer will sometimes usurp it in LoD builds. Basically any solo build is running BotS and BotT for pushing though. I’m not a huge fan of BotS but I acknowledge it’s kind of necessary given absurd rift guardian scaling and the requirement that you abuse AD for high end pushing
iceblink rework: your cold skills apply chill effect that slows enemies by 25%, chilled enemies take 25%------- 75% more cold damage. lvl 25: all cold damage increased by 45%
invigorating gemstone rework: each hit increase healing recieved by 5% also increase your life pool by 5% stack up 10 times lvl 25: gain 50% more armor and all resists, also you are immune to impairing effects
Mirinae T.o.f.S.: 20% on hit to smite a nerby enemy for 3% of the current mob hp, as holy and heal 3% of ur maximun life, lvl 25: smite nerby enemy every 3 seconds and your holy damage is increased by 50%
Gem of Toxin: poison damage poison enemies for 120 seconds, poisoned enemies take 4% mor damage and deal 2% less damage, this effect can stack up 5 times lvl 25: stacks from poisoned are doubled to 10 also ur deal 50% more poison damage
Gem of ease: monster kills grants xxxx more experience, also the level requirement of the item this gem is socketed into is set to 1. lvl 25: double all the xp gain in rifts and greater rifts
something like that
2 Likes
Or maybe they could just let us put legendary gems into armor sockets so we have more choices than the few that give the biggest flat damage boosts.
Build diversity-wise, I suspect pet builds that benefit from Attack Speed like the Inna Monks would rise to the top again, but it’s not like they haven’t endured nerfs before.
Are you aware what these changes would do to support builds?
I love group play, but we have enough buffs already thanks. 
And ice blink would be the strongest dps gem out of all them by a wide margin even in solo. Making a different gem OP beyond all the others isn’t going to solve variety, only change the mandatory choice.
In general, to give meaningful choices, you need gems that trigger based on playstyle. Right now they almost exclusively depends on the build, not on how you play it. As in:
generator build → simplicty strength mandatory
channeling build → taeguk mandatory
build that applies cc (turns out this is all builds) → trapped mandatory
pet build → enforcer mandatory
builds that scale with density (most builds) → stricken mandatory when pushing
your ice blink change would just add cold build → ice blink mandatory
The only gem that really depends on playstyle is zeis, where you can get a bigger multiplier than other gems (well taeguk, but additive…), conditioned on how you play. And in fact the few interesting gem choices often revolve around changing playstyle to accommodate zeis over another weaker gem. So rather than just buffing the now useless gems (ice blink and toxin are not useless btw, mandatory and strong in group play) to be stronger than the existing ones, making them mandatory instead, you’d need to make their power depending on more interesting conditions.
3 Likes
True.
Taeguk and Zei may harder to apply but these also offer higher multipliers compared to BotT.
Some high paragon players replaced BotS with BotP for this season it seems. Correct me if wrong.
All of these changes only make already strong builds even stronger. I don’t think any Holy, Poison or Cold skill using build need any more buffs. Crusaders and Necros already topped everyone at that.
With those changes, when Seasonal theme creates a power creep, it’d easily undermine the effort and threshold paragon levels you need to hit before replacing defensive options with straight elemental damage.
The reason for this is that the season buff is so strong that BotS is simply unnecessary at a certain point. If you’re clearing a 150 in 3 minutes there’s not really any need. Especially because tal rasha has pretty insane single target that also happens to cleave in a huge aoe. It’s still something you need when pushing with most builds though.
In groups wiz has dropped CoE for bastions of will actually because of how crazy the DPS is, you simply don’t need to wait for the arcane cycle to mow down mobs in seconds
I’ll just point out Taeguk is only usable when there’s a channeling cost so it’s not used for LoD Rapid Fire or Tragoul’s/LoD blood nova.
1 Like