Good reasons why Soulshards should Stay

There are MANY great reasons soul shards should just remain in the game PERMANENTLY (season and non-season)…

  1. First of all, if you look at them closely once they are ranked up to 3, they are essentially “Prismatic” Flawless Royal gems with 2 properties that give each a different feel from the others…
    a) The helm shards all get: X% to life (close to a FR Amethyst’s), Cooldown reduction (FR Diamond), Resource cost reduction (FR Topaz), %Bonus to Exp (FR Ruby), and %Bonus to Gold Find. The other 2 “unique” properties have some positives and negatives that give them different “feels” in gameplay.
    b) The weapon shards all get: Thorns (Topaz), +Damage (Ruby), +% CHD (Emerald), +% Elite Damage (Diamond), and +Life on Hit (Amethyst). The other 2 properties just provide different traits to emphasize in builds.

  2. Second, they are not even close to Etherials in power, but even more so, they are NOT etherials and should not disappear at the end of the season. We are talking about the stones that hold the demonic essences of the Evils themselves–they are powerful artifacts central to Diablo’s lore and the idea of them disappearing completely from gameplay would be contradictory to the Diablo story itself. Also, they SHOULD be better than the standard gems (non-legendary ones), but the positives AND negatives keep them from becoming too overpowering.

  3. The rank 125 augments from using a rank 3 soul shard are NOT going to break the game at all. Those alone will not help “casual players” magically complete G-150…far from it. Most of your mainstat (I’d estimate at LEAST 75%) comes from your paragon levels by the time you are getting up that high, so while they might be a nice boost early on, most players will not be augmenting anything with a 126 or higher augment for a VERY LONG TIME…

  4. Salvaging shards for gems doesn’t really impact how fast you get to the higher quality gems–they are just a minor extra source for them if you use them that way.

  5. Hellforge Embers are actually quite rare (compared to the shards), so whether you are powering up the shards you want to use OR planning to upgrade them for augments, it’s going to take a fair amount of your time either way.

  6. The different “flavors” (2 unique properties) granted by each gem allows for more build diversity, which is good for the game. Also, when you consider that it takes a while to upgrade them to the max (finding embers), there will be quite a few players that won’t even be able to experiment with different maxed shards of every type before the season is over.

  7. Unlike the etherials, if the shards disappear, you don’t even get to keep their transmogs–gems don’t have those, and the 125 augments are actually minor boosts considering how much time and development is necessary to become strong enough to do Greater Rifts 140-150. For low-level players, they might at most give their builds +4/+5 Greater Rift levels (if every slot has 125 augments)–up to maybe GR-90. Beyond that, it will taper off quickly.

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Ahhh yes… The bargaining began. No use friend. You’re not the first to try reason whit logick. It is how it is. Get used to it.

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Mate, some shards like Dregs of lies or the Ring of fire shard are far more powerful on their own than Ethereals were. Combined they are borderline game breaking.

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Maybe you need to (re-)read the patch notes?

Lastly, Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers only drop in Seasonal play, and will not transfer to your non-seasonal character when the season ends

https://us.diablo3.com/en-us/blog/23746130/season-25-|-the-lords-of-hell-|-now-live-12-10-2021

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Although I disagree with soul shards staying, it does highlight that there should be a more compelling way to level legendary gems. Specifically, one can imagine a system like the current legendary gem leveling system except that the first upgrade for solo clear is equal to the current GR minus 20. Therefore, if a player solo clears GR 120, their legendary gem becomes level 100 upon its first upgrade.

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Or save upgrade points and then massdistribute it among our equiped leg.gems. Shift+klick 5 points, ctrl+klick all points.

Even though soul shards will (as they should) be gone, maybe they could become random regular gems, leveled accordingly.

In addition, a new, consumable item (similar to embers) could start dropping, after the season 25 ending and beyond, that allows gem upgrading up to level 110-125.

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Its a seasonal theme, enjoy it while it last / move on after s25.

Good things are only great when they dont last forever.

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You lost all of your credibility by saying the sould shards are nowhere near the power of ethereals. That’s just false, they are more powerful.

They’ll disappear after S25. Accept it. It was made abundantly clear.

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Remove one zero from all sets and LoD/LoN. And I think soul shards can stay.

The one good thing about it, is additional items to chase/ improve that extend longevity by a bit , which reduce focus mostly on paragon farm after 2 weeks

Which make it batter than other seasonal theme like extra cube item, since these does not add to the loot hint.

Players like Wudijo stated, even after their nerf, they are more powerful than etherials.

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There are no good reason for them except player happiness with overpowering everything that realistically uses them. Not every build does and many of the shards are marked as “do not use” on guides and such… if they were actually universally useful for all builds, that might be something.

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As someone who are lazy and occupied with work lately, I’d like a duration expand to this Season 25. But Soul Shards staying? Nah. Just grab your augments and live with it.

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I would love the overhaul of the legendary gem upgrades where the gems in your jewelry would gain experience when you do, similar to PoE’s skill gem leveling. Then Urshi could be used to set which gems outside of your gems in your jewelry that you want to also gain experience for. The experience the gem gains would be a flat rate based on the difficulty you are playing at along with the difficulty of the GR you are playing. That way it would take many years to get a gem to level 150 if you were trying to do that playing only normal difficulty and GR1.

1.) This will mean you are getting more than just paragon when you are playing. You are also leveling up your gems for either augments or your main gems.

2.) It removes the rng of leveling gems which is a headache for some when they have had a bad streak of fails at 60% chance to level.

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I had a 90% chance of success, 3 times, on an empowered GR - it failed 4 of 5 times. 90% chance of failure, more like it. I notice it the most at going to level 10 or 25.

This is the one part of soul shards that should stay. Grinding an augment gem up to 125 is tedious and boring. By the time I do the required 325 speed GR’s to get 13 augments up to 125, my season has long been over.

With the soul shards, I dont have the users regret of spending a couple of hours to get an augment up to 125, then finding a piece of gear that is a slight upgrade. Meaning, I wasted those couple of hours as I now have to grind another 25 speed GR’s to get an augment for the new piece of gear.

Hopefully, they can find a way to keep this system of getting a decent augment for future seasons and non-season. If you want to grind one up over the 125 limit, there is still the old way. For a temp/transitionary piece of gear, the way the shards become augments is far more user friendly.

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And the only part. The others are useless.

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25 grs are like done in 1h though? D3 is all about grinding. Finding better items to augment doesnt mean u wasted time on augmenting your previous gears as those did their part and helped u farm. Infact farming GR is the most beneficial so doing anything other than that is sort of waste of time if something

They should stay but with a rework and more options , to help the lesser build have a route to endgame(150)

Which this season actually proved , that many build can get there easier ,but /shrug who i am to say … im just a casual 1/7 season playing with off season under 1k paragon :stuck_out_tongue:

Na. Doing Speed GR’s is like watching paint dry. After 5-10 I get sleepy. I could never get 25 done in an hour. Physical time, ya, but no way I could focus on that many back to back to back to back.

MIndlessly grinding mindless paragon/gem augments might be your thing. I would much rather grind loot hunting. I would much rather run bounties and regular rifts as I am constantly getting drops. This for me is fun. If I can run less GR’s and more actual loot finding runs, I am way more engaged. Allowing players to get augments through bounties, rifts, and GR’s rather than forcing a 1 stop shop is a good thing for the game.

It is no fun for me getting that replacement piece, then knowing I can’t use it for a while until I get another stupid augment leveled up. It has been nice getting upgrades this season, slapping a 125 augment on it from extra shards, then throwing it on my character. Upgrades get hard to come by very fast, having to wait longer to use it is not fun.

This is why the game is still very broken and why the player base drops off so dramatically after the start of the season.
Want xp? Farm GR’s
Want shards? Farm GR’s
Want souls? Farm GR’s
Want gem levels? Farm GR’s
Want augments? Farm GR’s
The only thing you farm outside of GR’s is bounty mats, dbs, and GR keys. Now we can farm augments. Diversity is a good thing. It opens up options. The narrow pigeon-holing everybody into GR’s is not.

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