Considering how unpopular defensive gems that is not named Esoteric Alteration, do you think it would be a great idea for those defensive gems can be socketed on off-hand and shield as well? (these gems still can be socketed on jewelry)
I am talking about Invigorating Gemstone, Molten Wildebeest’s Gizzard, and Moratorium, and possibly Esoteric Alteration as well, although I am not sure whether I should classified Gogok of Swiftness as a defensive gem.
Or is it will be too Overpowered?
Nope.
It’s power creep, because instead of having to use one of these gems in the three slots you normally have available, you instead move the mitigation gem to the offhand / shield, and incorporate a damage gem into the freed up slot.
It sounds interesting and I would like to try. Would probably need a chance to get this to PTR and see what happens.
Because offensive gems are clearly dominating the available slots, so I feel that maybe if we give a slot that is not competing with the offensive gems, players will finally use the defensive gems.
That is how I feel.
Let’s use an existing example. Multishot DH with a Squirt’s Necklace. To mitigate the increased damage taken portion of the neck, some players make use of a Molten Wildebeest’s Gizzard to provide a shield as damage happens to the shield rather than the player’s health. They opt to have 2 offensive gems and 1 defensive gem. By allowing them to have the Gizzard in an off-hand (i.e. a quiver) this allows them to have three offensive gems, i.e. they gain an extra offensive gem over what they previously used. This is power creep.
Power creep can come indirectly. By having defensive gem in offhand item, one can now roll more offensive affixes on gear and have all other gems offensive, trading existing defensive properties to offensive.
Also this is a disadvantage to dual wielders.
Why not just make it so that if theres a socket put a legendary gem in it
and with only the offhand/shield getting it is this just a ploy to kill off the WW/rend barb and other builds that use 2 weapons
I didn’t think of that. I guess maybe making that gem can be socketed on Helm is a better choice than off-hand/shield then.
I have seen a lot of class that using Squirt’s Necklace doesn’t even use Molten Wildebeest’s Gizzard. In fact, even the UE DH that I have checked so far in the season 20 leaderboard that using Squirt’s Necklace did not use any defensive gems.
Also, I don’t really care about the power creep. I only care that items that get neglected or overshadowed by other competitors should get some love and attention instead of maintaining the status quo. If these items can’t compete with the powerful item in the same slot, maybe the weaker item of that slot needs to be shifted to less competitive slots.
And there’s the problem.
Some items are better than others. It’s the way things are. Deal with it. You don’t have to use esoteric. Eso is still a very good gem early on, for some support builds, and even some DPS builds have used it (thinking of condemn crusader, roland crusader for example).
Some gems really are worthless, especially Moratorium, but these gems should be buffed to be competitive with other gems instead of giving them a special niche place where they could (but never would, like, you’d never see moratorium used on a quiver as long as esoteric exists) be socketed.
It would be like saying “hey, Leap quake is not a competitive barb build, we should create a new gear slot for ankles, and only leap quake could equip this new ankle item that would quadruple the damage, making it competitive”. No, you don’t do that. Instead you buff whatever (Blade of the tribe, Lut socks come to mind) to buff leap quake without creating a new “ankle” item slot. Or you can create a completely new boot item (the boots of the ferocious kangaroo, let’s go), if that’s what you want. But not an ankle slot.
There will always be items that are weaker. If you want any kind of decision making when players create builds, you have to give them at least 1 decision to make, and in D3 that decision is most of the time “wear item X or item Y”, and ultimately, if a player chooses X, it’s because Y is weaker. If you buff Y to be stronger than X, X becomes weaker than Y.
I see a lot of power creep arguments, but this might be one way of addressing the zmonk/zbarb group problem. Most solo builds lack enough DPS rather than mitigation, so I don’t think this would impact as much.
You can’t go higher than 150 in groups anyway, so how about letting some other combination besides zmonk/zbarb/RGK/trash killer make it to the top. Right now any GR115 or higher game needs one zcharacter and anything over 125 needs 2.
It may be worth an experiment as a season theme.
How? By allowing heroes to have four legendary gems rather than three, this would just allow support monks / barbs to be even tankier and/or have more utility, meaning taking anything as a support even less likely.
What I mean is that if they allow a 4th socket for defensive gems only, then you may be able to play in groups without a z character, or maybe just one, which would open up a slot for another dps. If you look at the group meta, zmonks and zbarbs can already survive 150 so they don’t need to be tankier. One of the design flaws of this game is that they tried to give characters a choice of 3 gems and mixed in both dps and defensive gems. Well guess what, most people will opt for 3 dps and not use the defensive, which brings in the need to carry a zcharacter in the group. So adding a 4th slot just for defensive gems may make them actually useful. And added mitigation will allow more characters to do higher GRs without z characters. It might even solve some problems like Necros not having enough mitigation.
Just a thought, as I understand that this may introduce all kinds of unknown dynamics. So many defensive gems going unused suggests that the designers never thought this one through, and this might be one potential solution. Actually, if you implemented this and allowed Barbs to use a two-handed weapon with one hand you might bring back the sword and board barb. There could be some new combinations if you took this direction.