Legendary Gem Rework Suggestions

General Discussion
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To my dear friends in the patch 2.7.2 waiting room:

For your entertainment, I’ve written up legendary gem rework suggestions.

There are 23 legendary gems, 10-11 are satisfactory and few are reserved for support/speed builds. The main issue is this game is centered around rift pushing and many gems won’t benefit our damage output. The choice for which gem to equip is often too clear when setting up a build. That said, I recommend injecting damage or strong utility to justify including those avoided gems.

LEGENDARY GEM REWORK CANDIDATES
Bold text scales with gem level, values based on max level.

:gem: Bane of the Powerful
The damage pales in comparison to Bane of the Trapped. Given the elite pack kill requirement and loss of buff on death, this gem’s primary property should reward a 50% damage bonus – giving it slightly more juice than BotT vs elites.

  • Gain 50% increased damage for 180.0 seconds after killing an elite pack.

:gem: Gem of Ease
Underwhelming at level 70. Monster Kills grant +XXX experience should become a percentage based exp bonus, reaching 7.5%.

  • Monster kills grant +750% more experience (+7.5% at level 70).

:gem: Gem of Efficacious Toxin
Let’s change the second property to help poison builds. We’ll remove the 10% damage from all sources benefit. In exchange, we’ll double the defensive benefit since WDs and Necros can be squishy.

  • All enemies you poison take 55% increased damage from your poison abilities and deal 20% less damage for 10 seconds.

:gem: Gogok of Swiftness
Buff the attack speed benefit up to 30% total.

  • Gain Swiftness with every attack, increasing your Attack Speed and Dodge by 2.00% for 4 seconds. This effect stacks up to 15 times.

:gem: Iceblink
Raise the cap to 150. Allow this gem to benefit builds that use cold skills via extra additive elemental damage. This gem ultimately becomes +28% damage for most builds with 10% critical hit chance.

  • Your Cold Skills now deal 40% more Cold Damage and apply Chill effects and your Chill effects now Slow enemy movement speed by an additional 25%.

:gem: Invigorating Gemstone
Turn it into a tanking gem. Gain more max HP and damage after getting hit. Change the primary effect to:

  • Each hit done increases healing received by 4.00% for 5 seconds. Each hit received increases your damage and maximum health by 4.00%. Both effects stack up to 10 times.

:gem: Mirinae, Teardrop of the Starweaver
This effect is quite visual, which is great. Let’s make it recover resource and health while granting a small bit of damage. With the effects cited below, Mirinae will likely offer between 20-30% damage depending upon the skill used.

  • 25% chance on hit to smite a nearby enemy for 12,000% weapon damage as Holy and recover 2% of your maximum resource and life. Each enemy that you smite increases your damage by 2% for 3 seconds.
  • Smite a nearby enemy every second.

:gem: Molten Wildebeest’s Gizzard
This gem has a nice personality, it synergizes with Squirt’s Amulet. Unfortunately, it is always weaker than a DPS gem, therefore, it needs a small bump in DPS bump to reward the wearer for the effort made to dodge attacks. Change secondary effect to:

  • After not taking damage for 4 seconds, gain 32% increased damage and an absorb shield for 200% of your total Life per Second.

:gem: Moratorium
Let’s make this another gem for tanks with a small utility benefit so it gets picked up in niche builds like Heaven’s Fury w/ Ivory Tower. Change to:

  • 65% of all damage taken is instead staggered and dealt to you over 18 seconds.
  • 15% chance upon being hit to clear all staggered damage and reduce the cooldown of one of your skills by 1 second.

:gem: Mutilation Guard
This gem provides moderate defense, but Esoteric Alteration is superior. Let’s make the secondary effect permanent, without condition, so it serves as an option to replace Illusory Boots.

  • You may move unhindered through enemies.

:gem: Pain Enhancer
Overall satisfactory, but terribly weak on the RG. Consider adjusting Blood Frenzy to grant 20% Attack Speed as a baseline, then 2% per bleeding enemy.

  • Gain Blood Frenzy, granting you 20% attack speed plus 3% increased Attack Speed for each bleeding enemy within 20 yards.

:gem: Red Soulstone Shard
Never used. Allow gem to only be socketed in ring slots. Remove the stun component and change the condition of the secondary like so:

  • Every 5 seconds unleash a ring of Fire that inflicts 17,500% weapon damage to enemies it passes through.
  • After killing an elite pack, your resource costs and cooldowns on skills are reduced by 30% for 60 seconds.

:gem: Wreath of Lightning
This is just a utility gem, let’s make it an option for GR pushing. Change secondary effect to:

  • While under the effect of the Wreath of Lightning, gain 25% increased movement speed, 25% attack speed, and 25% lightning elemental damage."

SATISFACTORY LEGENDARY GEMS
These can be kept as is.

  • Bane of the Stricken
  • Bane of the Trapped
  • Boone of the Hoarder
  • Boyarsky’s Chip
  • Enforcer
  • Esoteric Alteration (because it offers incredible defense and stands strong as a pure defense option)
  • Legacy of Dreams (when rebalancing sets/skills consider raising cap to 150)
  • Simplicity Strength
  • Taeguk
  • Zei’s Stone of Vengeance
22 Likes
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Boyarsky’s Chip - 15 yard thorns aoe instead of taunt

3 Likes
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I would love if you could actually (via Kanais Cube) combine different gems together.
Requirements could be:
Need to be level 100.
Special materials or just the same as for Hellfire stuff.

And then you get something cool. Okay that`s way to much work.

Like your ideas. Makes them strong/combarable do the other most used gems.

But Invigorating Gem Stone should increase your vitality instead of your health. Maybe then it`s better to use Invigorating Gem Stone over Bane of the Trapped. And Heart of Iron instead of Acquillas. But the damage benefit it sill very low. ~6%

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I considered doing more with that gem, but the constant raw damage Boyarsky offers to all thorns builds is substantial enough to leave it as is.

I believe it is the strongest gem from a percentage damage standpoint in most cases, beating out Simplicity Strength when the player isn’t dual wielding with Topaz.

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Raising Vitality instead of Max HP is a better take on it — sometimes 6% damage is enough to catch it up to the next best gem.

1.06 * 1.4 = 48.4% damage gain and possibly more if you pumped points into paragon for vitality.

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I don’t know. I like that there’s one gem out there that’s obtainable at a max level for SSF sloggers like myself. Not everyone plays in groups and has access to level 150 gems.

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There is nothing wrong with having some gems that are only used in certain situations. Not every gem can be top tier choice, nor should it be. The danger is just switching one gem for another since we only have three slots. I don’t think that there needs to be any changes to the gems.

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Actually I did the calculation with the D3 Planer. Its better to invest in main stat then it is to invest in vit with paragons. But the net gain over Trap in this case is probably not so bad, cause you wont loose that much toughness. 50% from the new iteration of Invigoration + the 40% vit increase together is 6% increase over the 60% Trap provides.

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Most of the existing effects were kept in place with the exception of Toxin Gem, Pain Enhancer, Red Soulstone Shard and Moratorium. The goal was to append and improve, not destroy.

These revision requests support NEW gem combinations and synergies that may even change gear picks, skills or skill runes.

  • Mirinae for instance provides a way to recover resources, could Inna’s Tempest Rush become a more viable after S24 ends, what about LoD LTK? Builds that carry a generator can opt to pick another skill by slotting Mirinae?

  • Red Soulstone Shard is centered around speeds. It synergizes with Captain Crimson and push builds that can kill an elite within a minute. The player can swap out CDR rolls for provided gem’s buff can be maintained.

  • S6 Impale currently has a flexible 3rd gem slot, but even more combos open up: Trapped + Powerful + (Wreath of Lightning or Iceblink or Invigorating Gem or Moratorium w/ Echoing Fury instead of Dawn).

  • Roland’s Sweeper gem choices substantially improve too. Currently the 3rd gem choice is between (Gogok, Powerful or Zei’s) – Roland already achieves 5APS, is a poor elite killer and fights at close range. How ironic?

  • Gizzard Gem is now a rewarding option for UE6 Multishot w/ Squirts.

  • N6 Rapid Fire, which has terrible survival at low paragon, can improve recovery with Invigorating Gemstone.

  • Blessed Shield thrives with attack speed, but Gogok was never enough over Pain Enhancer. Which gems will serve it better, Gogok, PE, Wreath of Lightning (w/ SoJ?

I won’t try to change your mind. :laughing:

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I just want to add some links to older posts with ideas too possible gem changes. Just for some ideas.

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Making an actual decision as to which gems to use would be nice. I’d still like to see a third “Primal” option unlocked when you get the gem to a certain level, based on its relative strength now to make that choice a little harder.

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I completely missed these posts. We’re echoing comparable edits, even in the comments.

Rage’s suggestion for Mutilation guard is decent. Going that route, I’d keep the 60% melee damage reduction and add a 25% attack speed reduction AoE triggered under 75% health.

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Like if you level the gem to 100, it unlocks a new effect? Those subpar gems then receive new effects to make them more appealing and balanced with each other?

In a separate post somewhere, I mentioned another use case for legendary gems to extend the loot hunt, similar to D2 Runewords, but as rarer, more time intensive augments.

Essentially a Gogok Gem could look like this:

Gogok of Swiftness
Level 150 Legendary Gem

  • Can be inserted into jewelry with sockets.

  • Gain Swiftness with every attack, increasing your Attack Speed and Dodge by 2.00% for 4 seconds. This effect stacks up to 15 times.

  • Gain 1% Cooldown Reduction per stack of Swiftness. (Requires Rank 25)

  • Augmentation Bonus: 2% Attack Speed and 2% CDR

If you augment gear with Gogok and 3 Flawless Emeralds, your gear gains +750 dex, 2% AS, 2% CDR.

But if you augment with Gogok, Esoteric Alteration, and some other rarer gems, we’d gain 750 dex, 15% AS and 300 cold resist. Those better legendary gems would require more time to find and level up – extending the grind and making the end gear worthwhile.

2 Likes
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Yes.

I posted a very brief concept on it here:

(that was a PITA to find; the forums search feature is not good.)

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This sounds amazing. Keep it going. Maybe you can save and post it in the new PTR. So maybe it is going to be read.

2 Likes
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Working some of the legendary gem’s power into the augment could make for a great season theme!

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hot garbage gems that never get used definitely need a buff. There’s no reason to have 20+ options if only 5 are viable, and 5 are niche.

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With all builds two of the three gems are ones that cannot be changed. It is that third one that is different for each build. The defensive ones are there primarily for hardcore or even to make glass cannon builds more defensive, not to increase damage and defense.

Adding damage to defensive gems and even utility would mean that you might as well homogenize all gems where they are all equal with the strongest gem in the game. Then each gem is a different flavor of that gem. Sure it might be boring as hell but that is the only way. How dare devs make gems have have niche uses. Where only certain builds will gain buffs from them while others won’t.

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Okay this will be a long one…
https://maxroll.gg/resources/legendary-gem-mechanics

Give this a read as I get some of my directions from there. Bad gems existing is not a bad thing overall because if all of them would be insanely useful then you’d have a hard time augmenting your items when playing multiple classes.

Buffs to the Necromancer, they would be crowd control immune also heal back in no time from blood spells and insane life regeneration. Do you think Necromancers need more buffs?
Also it’s a buff to the zdps characters which doesn’t even die in Greater Rifts. With this gem only such builds would need no augments or it would minimalize their need to use augments… Was that your intention?

Buff to already tanky thorns builds directly. It has no threshold or limitation, just eliminates the use of illusory boots in cube from the related builds.

Gem of Ease does NOT meant to be used on your level70 character with 2k+ paragon level but for your Follower as they share the 20% efficiency of it with you. Making GoE ramp up to 7.5% extra experience simply making it leagues better than Leoric’s Signet, Flawless Royal Ruby on helm and Hellfire ring, as their bonus gets down to a fraction with 3.0%, 4.1% and 4.5% respectively.

To add; after the Followers revamp, it allow your Follower to easily wear Custerian bracers while your character equip or cube Nemesis bracers. Proficiency such as gold find, magic find or higher experience gain will always come with drawbacks.
You’re asking to trash Hellfire ring and Leoric’s Signet, also giving a 150 rank GoE to Follower simply +1.5% experience bonus at worst. There’s no drawback from that at all.

It’s an easter egg for a one time gig per year. It’s not supposed to be mandatory. If you make this gem a mandatory then people who missed the event will fall behind off-season for a year and no developer would want that as there should be always space for new players to catch up to the masses.
Every 5 seconds, 17500% weapon damage is quite frequent. Also this is simply a lesser, separated version of BotP to outplay Gogok.

Gogok is one of the top tier gems. Why are you buffing it? Honestly, you never realized or seen this gem being used? It’s widely popular with any build that requires heavy cooldown reduction or use Captain Crimson.

Damage over time

Promoting the use of massed damage over time inflicted to multiple targets are not good for server performance. This creates the same issue with area damage lag; desynchronized mass calculations.
You ain’t really supposed to promote the use of long duration damage over time effects to be fit for high Greater Rift tiers. Developers usually will keep them this way because these gems are not supposed to climb up in GR tiers.

Numbers don’t correlate; 2% is not same as 3%. Also it’s a buff for Pet builds as Pets scale nicely with attack speed. You might have just buffed Inna’s, the top Monk Set performing GR150 runs, LoD Boneringer Necromancer and Zunimassa’s Fetish Darts without knowing.

Necros or Witch Docs are not squishy in the least. Each class has the same vitality effectiveness; same amount of health gained per point of vitality. Why do you think some builds can be squishy exactly when all of them have 6 action slots and very similar defensive triggers embed at each Set?

Passive constant damage increase

While every gem is balanced or restricted with procs, range or affliction, you’re suggesting constant passive damage increase on every gem without any limitations because they’re “not up to par” for your own playstyle. This would make some items obsolete instead of creating diversity.
Looking at top tier damage dealer gems, even Stricken requires consecutive attacks and its direct damage bonus against Rift Guardians is separated from that, as in; not the whole package. Another top tier damage dealer gem, Bane of the Trapped requires you to inflict crowd control or get close enough to afflict targets with your slow aura; distance is limited or forces you to optimize your build. And finally, Zei’s gem requires positioning also comes with slight drawback of messing up RGK’s crowd control cycles.

By design gems supposed to get feedback from your elemental damage multiplier which Convention of Elements and Stone of Jordan do just fine. Other way around is questionable for me.
Characteristic of cold elemental may seem dull but it’s widely reliant on cooldowns or winding up stacks and offer great area damage. Characteristic of lightning is usually scattered blows instead of area damage but it also has great sustain overall. There’s a reason why some elemental damage bonuses on items are lacking compared to another; sustainable characteristics and impact.

Cobbling elemental damage passively on top of gems is just gonna make key legendary items obsolete to some degree. Why would anyone grab 20% damage increase passives that would require interaction while they can get it passively 40-50% from a simple gem? If there’s no trade off wouldn’t that create a problem? Interaction required is one of the elements you need to compare with other options here when deciding the numbers.

That would remove the need for 20% damage increase passives on some builds and somewhat eliminate BotS from some builds with that flat reliable numbers. Bonuses on BotP already good when you’re dealing with elites while zipping around. 50% flat damage bonus is insanely good; BotT at rank 150 increases damage against control impaired targets by 60%. Why do you think it’s justified?

20% damage increase from this gem is just there when you can easily kill stuff and sustain it with speed. It’s a characteristic for speedfarms and keeping it this way would ensure diversity and differences between builds.

Why is it a bad thing? And how you concluded the 32% damage needed on a defensive gem? Gizzard is pretty strong when paired with Squirt’s and Gogok for dodge effects hence you maintain your absorbing shields longer. While mechanically dodging a projectile indeed rewarded for absorbing shields, dense combat at close distance is not always under control.

Gizzard ain’t supposed to be an offense gem when it’s meant for zdps character also providing utility for Squirt’s, which is one of the most powerful damage multipliers in the game. By amping the Gizzard like that, you’re actually making Squirt much more favorable than Focus and Restraint duo.
F/R Bastions of Will damage multiplier: 1.5 x 1.5 = 2.25x
Squirt’s with new Gizzard: 1.32* 2.0 = 2.64x
Have you did the math on this? How is it any fair or balanced?

Speedfarm builds use it and synergizes with Warzechian. It’s a gem for speeds and it does its job fine. You’re simply asking for a near constant Frenzy shrine with 25% increased attack speed at random procs.
Pain Enhancer increases attack speed but that depends on amount of bleeding targets around you hence there’s a feedback; while Wreath grants it by sheer luck. Why do you think the gem needs it? More importantly why do you think top players have to carry a frenzy shrine on demand?

Support zero-DPS builds use it also used on speedfarmers. Cold elemental is one of the widely used elementals out there; widely favored at certain builds of Demon Hunters, Monks, Witch Doctors, Necromancers, lately Wizards favor this elemental.

When I make a decision between 25% more damage to rift guardians and abit more if I keep attacking or 40% direct damage increase to cold attacks which my character use, I’ll pick the cold damage boost. If you have mathcrafting to tell me otherwise, I’d listen.
This is kind of making the line between zdps support and trash clearing builds kind of fluent to remove profession of their roles.

Class roles

There are zdps supports, there are speedfarmers, there are group/solo pushers, and I think it’s fine. Each role picks a gem tailored for their role, this creates diversity. Not every build or every Set has to be funneled into one role because it’s “more fun” or “more effective” from your perspective.

You can’t balance a game just by looking at its statistics at all, there are different parameters for their use. Profession and purpose of a build are different parameters that developers and designers decide when looking at systems. Not all gems have to be capable of GR150 tanking or soloing in a game where position heavy combat is the core of dynamics.
It’d be more clear if you put reasoning for the changes without evading the questions or pointing at gem being underused from statistics nobody but the developer team has.

What I liked and said a “maybe”:

Moratorium is a zdps gem and they most likely already have Messer or Executioner at their build, this is a buff to zdps Barbarians for keeping their shouts but it’s open to debate. Also 15% chance is rather questionable anyway and honestly I believe it does nothing but I donno. Being hit is pretty often when standing at area denial attacks of elites.
Comparable bonuses to this gem are; Messerschmidt’s which gives onkill bonus and Zodiac ring which requires a spender. This takes interaction and any zdps with some immunity amulet can keep their cooldowns a float if mechanics work that way.

If changed properly it could be a good PvP brawl gem as it offers Holy damage, until that time it’s useless. To add, 25% chance would still be subject to proc efficiency, and when Inarius managed to exploit it before that, it got a heavy nerf. I wouldn’t count on them changing the gem by buffing its proc rate.

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First, thanks for taking the time to review and respond. I value all feedback, even if you disagree.

Overall, I sense that you are okay with bad items in the loot pool. Personally I am opposed to this approach in D3, because we don’t have control over what drops, we farm in volume to find specific items, we do not farm specific enemies to find specific loot. This game does’t phase out bad loot based on our progress either. The same with gems, we get them all by default. Therefore they should serve a purpose where they can become best in slot, not just for <1% of the community who like to experiment with junk loot.

IMO the quality of the affixes in combination with whether our build(s) can use the item should determine if we keep or salvage what we loot. I don’t like how all Bul Kathos rings are crap and therefore I salvage them sight, same with choosing to always use Mirinae as the gem we augment with because it is junk.

Having a hard time deciding what to do is a good problem, having more meaningful options is mentally stimulating, having no options is boring and lacks peronality. The thing is, even after proposed buffs are in place, there are still gems that you can easily delegate for augment: play from a distance, augment Moratorium, don’t use Squirts, augment Gizzard. Don’t use poison or cold… use Toxin/Iceblink. Have other chars that do: move those gems via shared stash… like we do now.

Yes, i think some buffs are still needed. Do you remember how squishy necro is outside LoD/Burning Carnival? Think Rathma, Pest or Trag’ouls Corpse Explosion/Corpse Lance.

Zdps characters are sharing hits with the group. zDH and zBarbs are in motion — they aren’t taking consecutive hits, they aren’t dying much either. Most will use Gogok, Toxin and either Eso/Wreath/Iceblink anyhow.

Red Soul Shard as recommended is not a mandatory reward. Besides, why should yearly events produce a poor rewards? It takes more time to get this gem than completing a level 1 grift. Why does it need to be terribly bad? That event is chopped liver at this point, the lack of rewards is part of the problem. Make the gem good, then give us a History Goblin that lets us return back to Tristram to find revamped D1 loot and a Red Soul Shard.

If you are using Gogok with Gizzard hoping to gain DPS, your setup is suboptimal.

If you look at the UE6 Multishot use case, you’re choosing between Gizzard vs Trapped vs Stricken. The latter is mandatory. So we compare:

Squirts at 20-30% uptime with Trapped vs Squirts with 80-90% uptime with Gizzard. The first scenario tends to always win out, it is consistent, enables more aggressive play too. A clan mate of mine Dieoxide played quite a bit of Gizzard+Squirts. If Gizzard gave 32% on shield, it would become a BiS gem over trapped and it would truly reward the player for the extra effort and RNG encountered when fishing. You can read more about the multiplier comparisons here:

Because 25% run speed is not balanced with 60% damage. Only when you can 1-shot everything does extra damage not matter. For paragon farming and pushing, more dps gem options are welcome. Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that in the intro.

The math comparison is straightforward. Iceblink gives 10% CHC, that’s worth 15.625% damage and then another 28% in cold damage (40% → 80%), which multiplies out to roughly 48% extra damage.

Assume a high end push uses all 15 minutes.

Look at these real simple examples:

N6M4 Cluster Arrow ~2.00-2.2 APS without stricken, the weakest gem is 60% damage. The breakdown is 11:15 rift and 3:45 guardian kill. No benefit here.

UE6 Multishot 3.0APS with Stricken has very comparable clear times, but it is AoE focused. While cold isn’t an ideal choice, change out Stricken for proposed Iceblink:

  • 5:51 rift
  • 9:09 left for guardian

So it becomes a matter of:

1.48x vs 1.25 * growing stricken stacks

In the stricken setup, the DH makes 675 attacks, each growing by 2.2%. Which totals up to 5019x, factor in that multiplicative 25% and we can say that Stricken gives 6273x damage total damage over 675 attacks or 9.29x damage.

The iceblink setup gets 9:09 time, or, up to 1,647 attacks to kill the guardian, each hit is constant at 1.48x for 2437x total damage. The RG would not die within 9:09 if using Iceblink. It would take 23:33.

This is the very reason why they made stricken, they knew how bad RG kills are for AoE builds. Builds with strong single target damage, like Impale, can get away with using Iceblink.

The reason is clear as day, for the second time: 12 of 23 gems do a poor job contributing towards empowering our character’s damage. Even in the Maxroll post you linked wudijo writes:

There are many insane Gems to choose from in Diablo but some of them are outdated and could use a mechanical change or a buff to make them useful again! Here you can find some suggestions by Wudijo . Enjoy!

Wudijo goes as far as suggesting
adding damage to Esoteric alteration, i thought i was conservative in my suggestions by not eclipsing the power of the strongest damage gems.

I’m glad you see Mirinae as poor, I was beginning to worry you thought all of the gems were wonderful. Skills already have different proc rates, I tried making the point that some skills may benefit more from this gem than others due to proc rate, and that would be interesting if Smite procs actually did something helpful.

The Inarius set bonus had a 100% proc chance on an AoE style effect, that was clearly a winner at the time, though probably not so much by today’s power standard.

Thanks again for your feedback.