I would like to see a flawless royal diamond be a part of caldesanns dispair.
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You’re using Demon Hunter as the class to make your point with. The one that can use the fastest-attacking two-handed weapons in the game and a quiver that adds 20% attack speed in the offhand at the same time, swap the 2H for an even faster 1H, or even just dual-wield two 1H crossbows that attack faster than almost everything else in the game. The one with a GoD set that lets it strafe while attacking with its primary skills extremely rapidly, with a bug currently existing that causes it to fire extra projectiles, but only if you’re within a certain sweet spot on attack speed, with too much attack speed causing you to actually attack less. The one that can reach 4 attacks per second. And you’re saying they don’t sacrifice vital stats on amulets, which can roll 20% Elemental Damage, 1000 Primary stat, 100% Crit Damage, 10% Crit Chance, or a Socket for a Legendary Gem, but roll the same measly attack speed bonus that any other equipment rolls, and that’s proof that Attack Speed is not sought by anyone else in the game.
I don’t think you chose a good example to prove your point.
I have already stated that Attack Speed doesn’t give as much of a bonus as other stats, but it’s not because Attack Speed is useless for builds; it’s slightly more useful than damage, but the developers overcompensated for this by making items give less Attack Speed than they do other bonuses. Nobody’s going to go for 7% Attack Speed on an Amulet when they could get +20% Elemental Damage, +10% Crit Chance, +100% Crit Damage, and a socket for a Legendary Gem. 10% Crit Chance for most players is 12-20% more Damage. A 10-12% Attack Speed bonus might be able to compete with the other bonuses for some players. But for the most part, you’ll only see people get attack speed on offhands when possible, their weapon, and if their build requires it, their rings or occasionally but rarely gloves. You definitely won’t see it on Amulets for anyone but followers. One thing to bear in mind is that Attack Speed is both a defensive and offensive advantage, so if its bonus to damage output kept up with pure damage affixes, it would be overpowered. When you gain attack speed, you’re also gaining increased crowd-control, increased procs, and increased rate of healing from Life on Hit.
I don’t like AS break points, either. They probably are for the purpose of ease of code, not gameplay. Your suggestion for the Ruby doesn’t fix that problem. I mentioned breakpoints because they’re the real problem that needs to be fixed. I wasn’t citing them as a good thing to support.
The 2-handed weapon deals more damage. You don’t hit as often, but when you do, you do more damage. The same with crits – you don’t crit as often, but when you do, your crits are bigger, because they’re scaling from bigger damage.
The problem lies in issues that have to do with the available builds for classes. For the Wizard, Necromancer, and Witch Doctor, two-handed weapons are avoided generally because they have very effective offhands.
For the Crusader, you are using two-handed weapons with a shield. The two-handed weapon has become useful this way, but that shouldn’t be necessary to make it work.
One of the things that really holds 2-Handed weapons back is the Kanai Cube. Every legendary has useful affixes, now. 2-Handed weapons can’t get affixes that are twice as good as 1-Handed ones because all of the abilities take the same 1 slot in the cube. People can use two 1-Handed Legendaries for two effects, or even a 2-piece weapon set with a set bonus that usually blows a 2-Handed Legendary affix out of the water. There are only two solutions I can think of for this. Either give 2 weapon slots for affixes in the Kanai Cube and have two-handed melee weapons take two slots so that their affixes can be made much stronger than 1-handed legendaries, or increase the damage of two-handed weapons so that they can gain a buff that doesn’t get exploited in the Kanai Cube. But people would complain if two-handers got a necessary buff just because their egos would be shattered by someone else’s sheet damage being bigger.
I’m not trying to force Rubies into the 1H. You are. I’m just trying to make it a potential option if a player can come up with a build that utilizes it. I don’t intend for it to be useful to every player, because most of the community doesn’t seem to want that.
The attack speed of skills changes because different skills are meant to function in different ways. Hammer of the Ancients is meant to be slow and powerful, and Whirlwind is meant to be light and rapid. Their attack speed isn’t the only difference. They also do different damage. With HoTA, you gain a lot of Damage. With whirlwind, your damage per hit is much lower. They both still benefit both from Damage and Attack Speed. Making them the same won’t make gameplay better.
The Ruby and Emerald are both Gems. They are always going to have to compete with each other for a spot. That’s what gems are meant for. To give the player a choice. If you make it so that they can essentially ONLY put a ruby in 1-handers, and ONLY put an emerald in 2-handers, as you have suggested, then you’re not increasing diversity, you’re reducing it. I would rather just have the gem give damage, no ifs ands or buts, and then let the player figure out how they will take advantage of that bonus. Let them make their build instead of prescribing a build to them by dictating what kind of weapon either gem will work in. The game already does enough of that as it is; players end up having to choose everything that goes along with a particular build, with no room to make their own decisions and variations. At least let them decide what gem to put in their weapon. If they’re going to be able to choose, then there have to be multiple viable options for their build. If there’s only one viable option for each kind of weapon, then they don’t get to choose, they just grab the gem that was designed for them and that’s it. Yet another illusion of choice.
I never said leveling was difficult. But that’s the niche for the Ruby at the moment. At least my suggestion would make it continue being useful after you hit 70 for a while until you get your crit chance built up, instead of immediately replacing it with an emerald.
I could balance it so that it would actually be equal to the emerald, but we both know the player base would be furious if anything was as good as the emerald.
Increasing numbers by a substantial amount is what’s lazy and pointless. It causes imbalance in the opposite direction, and then more changes have to be made to fix that. It’s better to make adjustments here and there. There are several different circumstances that contribute to the overall problem, so several things have to be carefully adjusted to really fix that problem.
There are a lot of issues that lead to the uselessness of the ruby. The lack of damage. The lower maximum for attack speed rolls on items. The break points for attack speed on certain abilities. The bugs involving attack speed for particular abilities (there always seems to be one broken ability at a time). The fact that a ruby adds damage to only one weapon while an Emerald adds critical hit damage that affects both.
These are all problems that have to be addressed separately. You can’t just increase one damage number up until it’s useful for pro players. By then, it would become absurdly overpowered and absolutely gamebreaking for newer players.
You’ve put in a ton of thought, but none of these gems compare to an Emerald yet. You’d probably need a Diamond at at least 40%, and Ruby probably needs to be at least 600 damage
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Yes, because Demon Hunter is the one hero that has the potential to attack insanely fast, but is pointless to do so. Why? Because AS is useless compared to critical hits.
This is a great example of “limiting choices and diversity” and a great example of why “AS is bad compared to other stats”
Whether AS is limited for the purpose of code or anything else, is irrelevant to the fact that it is inferior to other stats that improve damage.
Ruby, if gave proportionally higher base damage to fast weapons rather than slow, would be more useful for fast attacking builds (if fast attacks were useful). It fixes a problem where you have to throw emeralds into 1h that has bonus AS as affix that you don’t want to change. Instead, you’d look at the item and say, “Oh, this weapon is good for attack speed build. Let me go farm items with AS.”
Again, here’s where my idea of redesigning weapons to give them proper identity and use case would come into play. You can design certain 2h to be best for slow builds, certain 1h for fast builds, and most neutral. Just add good and useful stats on items that can be used by players based on their imagination.
You don’t need to push all items to one certain thing only.
If a Necro wants to use 1h and Offhand, fine. You can still drop AS + ruby in your 1h and offhand for AS build, or go for emerald + CHC on offhand for a critical build. No one’s stopping you to change your build.
Again, this idea doesn’t limit the choice, it empowers it. Just because you can make more use out of ruby in 1h with a lot of AS, doesn’t mean you can’t use an emerald with CHC with 1h. You misinterpret it as Ruby for 1h, and Emerald for 2h. NO, Ruby best for REALLY FAST ATTACKS; and Emerald best for REALLY BIG ATTACKS.
“You” here doesn’t mean YOU THE GUY. It means “person making a build; designing items; w/e; someone”
There lies the problem with AS being useless. If skills cannot be improved by AS, but can be improved by other damage boosting stat, there’s a major design flaw.
Sure, there are abilities that have RPG requirements, but that doesn’t mean they should imbalance the stats in a way that makes certain stats obsolete for everything else.
For example, you could have one skill gain more from critical bonuses, making it more useful in critical builds. It could be a rune, w/e. But there has to be a skill that makes use of good attack speed as much as it does from other damage stats.
Diamond is also a damage gem that competes with Ruby and Emerald. But it has its use, except AGAIN emerald beats that use.
If you make Ruby give (idk, let’s say 1000dmg) You could use a Ruby in your critical damage build, if you compensate for the loss of critical damage through other ways, but what’s the point? Two gems trying to do the same thing. It’s not a “choice”; it’s “competition” for a #1 spot.
Why not have gems have a separate use case? Ruby for AS build and Emerald for critical build? No competition here, you use one, if you want to boost regular damage, and you use another for critical damage.
AND you have an actual choice here: you either go AS build or CHD build.
You didn’t, but it’s implied in a way you described new characters would use Ruby. New characters already use it and it’s fine. It’s just an additional pointless damage to get you through content faster so you can start using emerald faster. It’s silly! It’s already used as filler until you can make better use from Emerald, so yeah…silly!
Okay, this part drives me nuts. I understand you misinterpreting some other things I said, but repeating what I said and completely reverting my original statement, so your statements looks more legit is what really angers me about your pointless long quote-comment nature with zero argument potential.
You did it couple times earlier, and I ignored it, but this…is outrageous:
Regardless, I don’t see my suggestion being implemented in D3 at all because it’s too much work to make something that’s going to die, when D4 comes out, better.
The best we can hope for is increasing the values on the gems to the point where they are on par with other gems. Anything less, would still render them useless in the long run. So, it’s power creep or nothing.
At least, the D4 devs will hopefully learn from this discussion that item identity and use cases matter a lot. Adding choices just for the sake of having choices is stupid – choices need to matter.
Yeah that is it, bit of both yes but mostly my opinion. Think this is a topic that could have cool discussion and have had the same idea but then think meh I am not going to put in the effort to theorycraft on my own even though it is intresting.
great ideas, gems should and need some of these great changes.
i hope dev’s look at these great suggestions!
Those are the exact numbers that would be required for the Ruby and Diamond to actually be brought up to par with the Emerald. I didn’t suggest those because the last time I brought up this topic, years ago, it wasn’t very well-received, so I wanted to suggest something less radical this time. But based on you guys’ responses, maybe the community is ready now. Even the people who’ve argued with me are on my side, we just disagree about what to change. I think people are finally ready to see the mighty emerald stand on even ground with the other gems. I’m going to edit my original post to put in those damage numbers.
I support this post. Time for adjustments for sure…
not an accident 
Unfortunately, there’s a large amount of people who simply can’t think. And they don’t realize it. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I generally will try to improve a bad idea instead of mocking it. And I always reflect on my posts, which is why I’m a notorious multiple editter
Sometimes I can't help myself. I'm a wizard, not a saint.
I didn’t think it was an accident. I originally thought the same numbers you did, I just didn’t originally post them because I figured people wouldn’t be able to handle the real change needed, so I make every suggestion compromised a bit to appease them. But it turns out that might not be necessary. Based on the responses here, I think people are more ready for the real changes needed than I thought.
You may have noticed I tend to edit my posts as well. I try not to edit anything by the time people have read it, but I usually edit my posts shortly after posting them. The edits aren’t always needed but still assist in getting the message across the way it was intended.
I can see the value of imbuing with diamonds, but what is the end result - resistance to all elements or increased elite damage? Or neither? The obvious might be resistances but it’s worth asking.
Really good post! More options, good option 