Legendary Gem upgrading is a slog

General Discussion
1

I find the gem grind for augmentation and alt spec/character leveling really tedious.
Thirteen slots at augment rank 125 would take, like 325 empowered rifts with no deaths not including the 3 gems you’re wearing. And that’s a single spec on one character… seems a little much is all I’m sayin. They should add a option to use five Keystones at the start of a Greater Rift to be able to level your gem five times more per run. Five levels per upgrade if you spent 5 Keys.

2

It is the way it is and has been for, what, ten plus years. Hey, just upgrading equipped gems is a slog.

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3

Keep an eye out for Petrified Screams. These drop from Greater Rift guardians at a roughly 5% drop rate. what you do is pop one of these into Kanai’s Cube and then start an Ehchoing Nightmare, eradicating waves of mobs for as long as you can. If you can manage to keep the rift going until a LV 126 wave spawns, you will have the maximum guaranteed rank of 125 for the Whisper of Atonement gem that drops from the chest at the end of the Echoing Nightmare run. You then combine the Whisper of Atonement with three Flawless Royal gems of the corresponding stat you wish to augment your gear with and get an easy peasy high level augment.

It will take a bit of time to get enough screams for all of your slots, but they are much more preferrable to level up than regular legendary gems are.

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4

Thank the Prime and Lesser Evils this made it to NS. A new activity plus way of fast tracking augments really improved the game.

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5

To add on to this from TheTias:

EN levels aren’t the same as GR levels. You can push an EN 25-30+ levels higher than you can push a GR. Hit the Power pylon around 100-105 and the Conduit around 110-115 and you should be able to get it over level 125 without a Flavor of Time. Put that on your follower, and you can hit the Pylons a bit earlier.

Another nice part about the Whisper is while 125 is the max rank you can get from the EN, you can then level those higher up to 150 through GRs.

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6

You should always run EN in a party to share the screams. For me at least they are super rare. Paragon 800something and I found only two screams and two ramas yet, and one of each was needed for the altar.

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7

Yes, this is the best way to do it, especially early in the season, that way you 2x to 4x your number of atonements. By the middle of the season, if I am playing a lot, I have a big stack of screams, so having a share group is not that important. SSF is another story, where they can’t share.

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8

Drop screams is easy just do gr in60-90s

I have 1200 para And have 20+screams

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9

If they ever remade this game, they should consider the following improvements to gem ranking:

  • Gem uprades are redeemed in town, and items from the boss are given via a cache, so we don’t have to wait for that sleepy players to close the rift.
  • Ability to batch spend all gem upgrade chances at Urshi. (Select the gem, then check the option to spend all upgrade chances on this gem.)
  • Earn extra upgrade chances if you clear the grift in under 7:30 (+1 upgrade), 5:00 (+2 upgrades), 3:00 (+3 upgrades).
  • 15% chance for Urshi to award an extra gem rank when the upgrade is successful. (more fun RNG).
  • New legendary item effect that increases the extra rank chance to 50%. (This item is a power trade, you wear it when you want to level up your gems quickly, maybe Gem of Ease could become this item? Losing 130% CHD will slow us down in push)
3 Likes
10

I’m doing 100-110s, maybe that’s the problem?

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11

You’ve had bad luck. I’m playing Solo. P778 and have nine screams and about nine rama so far.

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12

It’s more likely you having extremely good luck…

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13

Just do gr in 60 -90seconds - more gr=more chance

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14

The GR level does not affect the drop rate, so you can have 1000 GR1s or 1000 GR150s, it won’t change anything.

The only thing that changes is how you prayed RNGesus

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15

Two things I would love to see with Urshi as I am on the far other side of this spectrum:

is to make:

  1. have the leveling chance be 100% all the way up to the GR you just cleared. It is stupid to have a 60% chance to upgrade a level 98 gem when you just cleared a GR100. RNG for the sake of RNG.
  2. Let gems have basically xp. When you complete a GR, you get so many “gem upgrade points”. The higher GR you clear, the more you get. To level a gem, it costs more “gem upgrade points” the higher the gem gets. This way, you complete a GR100, you could level a rank 1 gem to say 50 or level a rank 90 gem to say 95.
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16

Yes. Last season, I was like Stu, complaining about the lack of rama.

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17

Fun fact: GR level doesn’t matter for this. It’s a flat 5% drop chance from the rift guardian in a greater rift. You’re just as likely to get a scream at GR1 as you are at GR100.

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18

I’ve been farming GR100 - GR110 and so far I’ve found 2 Petrified Screams.

  • I Sacrificed one to the Altar.
  • I used the other one to run an Echoing Nightmare for a Rank 125 Whisper to Sacrifice to the Altar.

I had to upgrade my Bane of the Powerful to Rank 30 to use for an Augmented Weapon for the Altar. I have not Augmented any of my equipped gear…   yet.

I will add that: I completed the Season tonight (Americas Region) at 11 PM EST (my time). That’s the fastest I’ve ever completed a Season (5 days and 3 hours). That includes the Season Journey through the Guardian Chapter and the complete Altar of Rites.

Now, I can spend three months either pushing GRifts, trying to beat last Season’s 2300 Paragon Points and finding useful Primal items (two at a time). Or doing something entirely different.

I’m playing Solo Seasonal (SSF).

Cheers!  

2 Likes
19

I couldn’t get screams for a really long time.

After like P900 they started dropping like Candy (I always try to be sub 2 minutes on my speeds, but Necro not the speediest one).
I had over 20 normal Puzzle rings drop, actually had to re-roll one to ancient for Altar. Of course, next rift an ancient one dropped…
Couldn’t get Primals to finish Altar either (well, I got a usable Primal Iron Rose, so not complaining) - P1200+ to finish Altar completely… (usually I get that done before P1000).
GR150 solo done, too. Not even Pylon for Boss, but got Hamelin, so there is that.
In some things you are lucky, some things not, and that’s why I like D3, as it always is a bit different.
Parts for Staff of Herding I had to farm for less then usual.

2 Likes
20

Of course last season it was way easier to augment because of the Soulshards.

I don’t particulary enjouy ENs, but it’s way better than leveling gems like we had to several seasons ago. That was a slog. Now it is not.

Don’t stress about augmenting. Speed farm and get your close to perfect ancients, then augment. You will have plenty of screams

1 Like