Gem Changes
- The drop quantity of Gem Fragments now increases as you ascend Difficulties.
- New Gem Tier: Grand
- Requires 100,000 gem fragments to craft.
- Grand provides a 50% increase in power from the previous tier, Royal.
- Some Gem effects have been reworked
- Ruby armor effect changed from % Max Life to + Strength.
- Amethyst armor effect changed from +Strength to +% Barrier Generation.
- Diamond armor effect changed from +% Barrier Generation to + All Stats.
- Many Gem stat bonuses have been adjusted to better reflect Patch 2.0 numbers.
- Gem stat updates, starting with Chipped, ending with Grand:
- Ruby (+ Strength), Emerald (+ Dexterity), Topaz (+ Intelligence), Sapphire (+ Willpower): +25/50/75/100/150.
- Amethyst (+% Barrier Generation): +2/4/6/8/12.
- Diamond (+ All Stats): +8/16/24/32/50.
- Skull (+% Healing Received): +4/6/8/10/15.
PTR Patch notes were recently updated to include this.
All credit goes to CtrlAltDel who let me know of this change.
18 Likes
The forum GOAT is looking out for us. 
He also gets a big
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To be fair I was only notified by CtrlAltDel. They knew before I did, I’m just posting it here.
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Glad to hear that they’re doing something with gems but not sure if I like the new “tier” tbh…
I was kinda hoping that we’d be more put in a position where there would be some (not a lot but some) struggle to find-out how to “fill in the gaps” and the blanks around meeting AllRes% requirements after down at -75% or -100% at the highest difficulties
But now just looks like need a tripple Royal craft of Diamonds or something
Don’t get me wrong, that’s a ton of gem fragments required but still, not quite a fan of this 
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Do the skulls suggest I will be getting healed by the Barbs Whirlwind in the expansion?
Fan the flames my friendly Barb healers!
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Well let’s see, Grand only offers a 50% increase from Royal. So a Royal Diamond now adds +8% All Res. 3 gems in your jewelry for a grand total of 24%. However we currently only have -50% All Res in World Tier 4. So in total you need +120 All Res to hit the cap (disregarding elixirs, mythic uniques, etc.) So that puts our 24% All Res from gems at 20% of the required resistances needed from the total of 120%.
So now Grands will offer +12% All Res. Grand total of 36%. However, the increase in negative resists will increase by 25% for each tier, so now Torment 4 will decrease your resists by 100%. So taking this into account, we need a grand total of 170% resists to cap out now. So that 36% All Res is now only 21.18% of the total we need in hitting our goal of 170%.
Not that big of a change if we’re being honest. This doesn’t account for any affix changes for Ancestral Gear mind you, which if increased will make it easier to hit that cap, but if they stay the same, people may be struggling a bit more.
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I was wondering if they’d change the gems with the runes coming in. Removing the %health on rubies will hurt less when you take them out for them.
whatever.
they can even do TURBO UBER GRAND gems and it still wont be used cause of runes
a pathetic gem design to an underwhelming game 
What do you mean? You cant use runes in every slot. You can only have 2 active runewords.
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oh well, anyways
+30 crit damage is still a pathetic boring useless stat
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But I want life from gems
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Gems should be made to have more interesting interactions. They started out boring, and have continued on that way.
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So they are now just D3 gems? Kinda boring, everyone is going to use runes.
Wow, that’s a huge nerf for 90% of the builds, especially since Runes will be needed, which meant less available slots. The stat squish is going to be immense.
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Can only ever use 4 Runes, 2 total runewords in your gear. So you’ll have 1 piece of armor that you can slap a couple of gems in.
+150 mainstat is just absurd. Especially compared to everything else. It shouldn’t be more than +80 or something.
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The entire number system in this game is absurd.
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id put the runes on a 2h weapon and helm. then diamonds for all stats in the armor. going to be nice
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Blizzard: We give you choice; +15% healing or +150 mainstat?
…
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Yep, we knew higher tiers would be on the horizon eventually, just a matter of time. Not sure how I feel about the elimination of % Max Life though. Maybe the goal is to get people to use some of those extra Paragon points to get more life and resistance than they tend to currently. Reducing us to 5 boards while having another 100 points will also help with this as the minmaxing of each board will be a little less severe and leave room for more quality of life picks. 