I really love that you have added back gems dropping as loot for Season 11. It’s a great idea (especially for new players) to see a gem drop as an item and realize that they can socket that into gear to increase their power and that sense was missing by only dropping gem fragments.
I wonder if this is an opportunity to revisit the idea of gem fragments? Here are some observations:-
- They were originally conceived because of stash space issues. That issue is no longer present since there is now a socketables tab in the player inventory.
- The notion of gem fragments and salvaging excess gems into fragments (then using them to craft a bigger gem) is silly.
- Getting rewarded with gem fragment drops is dull and boring. Acquiring enough gem fragments happens by osmosis and does not feel rewarding (there is too much of this in D4) and something you realize accidentally when you check the jeweller.
Here is my proposal that I think would work very well for D4.
- Completely remove gem fragments and salvaging gems from the game. Gems are now acquired as drops only.
- Excess gems are now traded to the Purveyor of Curiosities for Obols (and perhaps added to certain recipes or future crafting mechanics)
- Obols no longer drop from World Events or from Pit runs and those activities instead have a higher chance of dropping gems. The only way to acquire Obols is now by trading items to the Purveyor of Curiosities or by killing the Obol treasure goblin. This also kills a second bird by giving players that are frustrated with the Obol cap a second store of Obol value by farming for gems that they can stack in the Socketables tab quite easily.
I think this is a much more narratively coherent idea. It makes no sense that a Succubus outside Kyovashad is carrying a bunch of special coins that the PoC will trade for random items. It does make sense that a shady character would take items of real value and exchange it for a worthless token that can be used to gamble for something worthwhile.
More importantly, it replaces gem fragments which have never felt rewarding and really just pollute the looting experience with garbled, overlapping text without any sense of the player being rewarded.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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I agree with your assessment of why they decided to make gems drop again. However, I’d like to point out it messes things up now.
I’m not sure how many people realize this, but all of the Magic and Rare rune drops will fit in that inventory tab. You end up with four slots left over.
For those of us that play SSF, this meant we could keep all of our magic and rare runes on us at all times. As they built up, it was easy to spend a couple of minutes at the jewel crafter and combine all of our blues and yellows in the hope of getting a legendary. You’d have four spots to hold the legendary runes you might generate crafting. You’d then go to your chest and dump your legendaries before heading back out to battle.
With this new change, there will no longer be enough inventory slots to hold all of the magic and rare runes, as well as the gems. This means we’ll now have to spend more time dumping rare runes into our stash every time we visit town, and pulling them back out and dumping gems into stash, every time we want to try and craft legendary runes.
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I agree about rune space issues. I find every season I am dedicating a stash tab solely for runes. It would be great if there was a dedicated tab for socketables in the stash too and I would also like them to add a character stash tab (so that every character had at least 1 tab that was fresh in whatever realm you make it on.
If they proceed with the dedicated socketable stash, they should also be able to link it to vendors and other mechanics that might need the runes/gems.
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So the big downside of these are that they are white items and your pet doesn’t pick them up. Which is to say, I leave most of them on the ground.
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Yes, good point. I think they should also look at revamping the item labels for loot that drops.
For example, they added a star icon to ancestral gear so that you can easily identify it so we know that adding an icon of some type to highlight the item is possible.
They should look at doing this for most drops. They could shorten the item label for gold drops by adding a coin icon and dropping the “gold” from the end of every label. They should add icons for potions, sigils, lair keys, gems, runes, materials etc.
This would also double as an accessibility feature for people who are colorblind since they can easily identify a drop based on the icon in the label and not have to be worried about what color the text is.
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I hope they do a season to fix socketables as a whole, or lets say, try to fix it, haha. A better variety of gems would be very nice.
One thing they cant do wrong is the inventory problem. It just needs to be done, better yesterday.
I think gems are mostly dropping in lower tiers directly and it should be that way.
In higher tiers your inventory is full of runes, you haven’t got the space to pick up all gems.
And of course gems and runes should be auto pick up.
I would love to se my pet doing some crazy stunts when picking up such items, maybe even with some light effects and the pet could even have something to say, some happy Miau / meow for cats for example.