Long story short :
There’s Legendary Crests and ETERNAL Legendary Crests.
Shop sells ETERNAL ones which are far superior. Every other in-game, free reward gives you Legendary Crests which offer bound gems and cant be sold at the market.
How pathetic Blizzard. Now if that’s not p2w, then I don’t know what it is
Interesting. I have not gotten that far yet.
What do you win by being able to sell gems in the Market? Does that grant power or a currency that grants power? A currency we can’t get other ways easily?
I guess I need to go look up how the shop works.
So, I looked it up. You can buy and sell in Platinum - which you get hundreds of per day for free. This does not seem rare or special, but I have not gotten to end game crafting so 
People sell legendary gems for platinum on the in-game Marketplace. As you need legendary gems as “ingredients” for upgrading your own legendary gems, obtaining platinum = obtaining legendary gems = obtaining legendary gem upgrade materials = upgrading your own gems = more Combat Rating.
What do those do???
Legendary gems give special effects. The higher ranked they are, they give more of the effect, or get extra effects.
I see. I can make Legendary gems to use in my own upgrades though right? I don’t need to buy them? I know the Jewel person has a list I can make if I want to.
Oh, here is a funny story about how I am an idiot at times. I did not realize what the game was using to do Leg gem upgrades. I just went “oh the game wants me to do that? Cool!”. Next thing I know my + dmg after killing an elite gem was gone. Then the little light went off.
sigh
Yes, doing Elder rifts will result in you getting some type of dust, and there’s an NPC nearby that turns the dust into runes. The runes can be used at the jeweller NPC to make legendary gems. If you make random ones, they’re unbound so could be sold. If you make specific ones, they’re account-bound. Purchasing extras from the Marketplace just means you can upgrade your own gems quicker.
If you do 4-man Hell 1+ dungeons, each boss you kill has the chance to drop unbound, non-legendary gems. These can also be sold on the Marketplace, to earn Platinum to buy legendary gems with. Tourmalines are popular sellers (as they give +damage to heroes).
The only way for a free2play player to sell gems in the market is only through crafting which is very expensive and slow since there’s a weekly cap on the dust you can get.
On the other hand, somebody that bought a bunch of Eternal Legendary Crests with $$$ can flood the market with the gems that doesn’t need, get platinum in return, and buy the gems that he/she misses from the market when the time appears.
How is this not an extra advantage for the whales? They have almost exclusive access to the market that f2p players don’t.
I have a bunch of runes and made a couple gems so the runes also drop right? Elder Rifts I think? The ones with the crests.
At some point soon I will probably finally hit level 60. Got my butt handed to me in the last story dungeon so need to level a bit to finish that. I think I am 53 or so.
Is there anything I critically NEED to be top geared for? I hate PvP. I just like to sort of explore, farm stuffs, etc. I can do that without any serious gear I think. Just sort of whatever I have on hand. Right?
For the campaign you probably don’t need top end gear, though apparently Skarn on Hell 1 is a brick wall for a lot of F2P players, so be aware of that. It also appears that there is a soft cap of five gems (of any kind)/legendary drops per day for F2P players as well. Once you hit those caps the drop chances are effectively disabled outside of extremely good RNG. Same thing with the side quests. Five a day and after that the rewards stop. Ditto for dungeon running. This is sadly how they decided to push F2P players into feeling like they have to pay if they want to grind.
I’d feel a bit less angry about the whole MTX thing if things like the Boon of Plenty and Battle Pass didn’t expire. Miss a day? You don’t get that day’s rewards. As an added insult to injury there, with the Battle Pass, missing a day means you can’t max out the rank for the BP either, so you not only miss out on the items for the day you’d log in, but also the best perks of the BP itself, just because you didn’t or couldn’t log in and do tasks every day. Had it been something that didn’t expire and you could just accumulated logged in days at your leisure without losing what you paid for players wouldn’t be so angry at that aspect of the MTX shop. Unfortunately, you snooze, you lose, literally. Miss a day and you just threw away the money you paid.
I really wish D:I’s gameplay wasn’t being tarnished so badly by the predatory MTX model ABK forced into the game. The combo of loot hunt + gemception (gems within gems and ranking both up to empower your gear) is an interesting concept. Unfortuntately you are virtually guaranteed to be locked out of building the most powerful characters if you don’t fork over huge sums of cash. There’s just no way a F2P player can grind for these things in any realistic or even remotely reasonable timeframe, especially once you factor in the hidden daily soft caps on drops.
You’ll be able to finish the story, but you can forget about a loot hunt endgame if you don’t sell your house and fork over the cash. 
Ok, we get it. If you are rich you have an advantage. Kind of like real life I guess.
No one has ever claimed that paying players wouldn’t have an advantage. I just don’t get the outrage over something that was known and has been known for years un this industry. Oh wait, it’s Blizzard.
Fair point, but the question is by how much? Should $$$ give them a slight advantage or a BIG advantage?
cause if its slight and f2p players can catch up in a REASONABLE amount of time, fair. But that’s not the case.
P2W should not allow you skipping the grind of months or even years. That’s just absurd.
No. If you run 4-man Hell 1+ dungeons, each boss can drop unbound, non-legendary, rank 1 gems. Depending on type, these can sell for 200-400 platinum each. Tourmaline is the best seller as this is the +damage gem. You can then use the platinum earned by selling non-legendary gems to buy legendary gems, to turn into materials to upgrade your equipped legendary gems.
The fee to list the non-legendary gems is 20% of the platinum price you set, paid in gold, i.e. if you list a gem for sale at 400 platinum, you pay 80 gold to list it. That amount of gold is completely trivial, as individual mobs you’re killing at 60 can drop that.
Is this slower than for a player that spends money? Absolutely, but it’s wrong to say a F2P player can’t obtain legendary gems / platinum. They can, they just have to farm 4-man Hell 1+ dungeons like crazy for the unbound non-legendary gems to sell.
Hundreds per day just doesn’t compare with getting a 100,000 from selling a gem though.
Obviously it had to require 4 players. Just because.
I don’t think leveling is going to help as the monsters appear to increase in power with you. Yes, your skills improve and you get more life and whatever, but the real thing you need is better gear… like always.
Yeah one of the more serious streamers that had played until a certain paragon explained it, that as a f2p when you levelled you actually relatively became weaker compared to the monsters you had to face and ofc progress through gear upgrades is pretty limited to f2p though is there through battlepass, red gems and aspirant keys, heliquary and such.
You can sell gems on the market for platinum and then buy gems you potentially want for platinum too. Other than a drop (which is extremely rare) that’s the only other way of getting a 5* gem. You get some platinum from doing daily activities, I think it’s 300 a day, and even 1* gems go for like 3000 or so on the market (at least on the server I was playing at), so you obviously have a big advantage when you can sell the gems you don’t want.
Well, if you just wanna farm stuff, you’ll be fine, but your returns will be extremely slow. For pushing challenge rifts for example, after you reach a certain cap it might take months for you to actually be able to progress again. In my opinion, continue just playing the game while you enjoy it, and if it gets frustrating, you can just go back to D3. If you don’t want PvP, D3 is just that much better. In fact, a friend of mine who had never played Diablo before (he played a lot of PoE but was looking for something more chill) tried D:I, liked the gameplay a bit but hated all that monetization and daily grind stuff, so he actually bought D3 now and is having a blast.
D:I turned out to be a great advertisement for D3 lol.