I posted to Reddit but wanted to place it here too.
Here is my idea for gems to have a more in depth gem system.
Instead of gems dropping we would find Gem shards. These shards would be in the base colors that we see in the game currently. Shards would be a material so it wouldn’t take up inventory space. You can then go to the jeweler and craft gems of different quality with the shards. Shards would drop in small, medium and large piles with treasure goblins having a large amount of gem shards dropped of all various colors. Pure gems would be salvaged down at 100 percent the cost to make them.
Example of system.
100 sapphire shards = 1 crude sapphire
1000 sapphire shards = 1 flawless sapphire
(Numbers can be tuned by devs)
The next layer to this is combination gem crafting. With a shards system you could effectively make new types of gems that give you combined properties. These gems would share stats across items but at a lesser rate.
Example.
50 sapphire and 50 emerald = crude turquoise gem. The stats would be 50/50 sapphire and emerald.
You could mix and match through experimentation and as you do creat unique gems or a mishmosh of effects. Because you can craft at random, finding the perfect blend would get you gems with the stat effect combos you desire most.
Maybe you want a resist, percentage life gem. Or maybe you want a gem with life steal and vulnerable.
The 3rd layer to this would be the tri combo gems. These recipes could be guessed at random or farmed throughout the game. If you have gems to burn you can craft the recipe and if you are lucky a tri combo gem could have a special bonus if the correct amount of shards are used.
Example.
20 diamond, 40 sapphire and 40 emerald make “brilliant turquoise gem” this gem would have a blend of the 3 stat bonuses from the original pure gem but because it’s a perfect combo it would have a new special effect like “increase AOE spell radius by 2%”
Lastly we could have a green specific tab in our inventory for crafted gems we want to hold on to. That way if we discover a cool recipe by chance we can save the gem. Discovering a recipe on random craft would be a new way to find cool unlockables (unlocked account wide).
Sorry for the long post. What do you guys think. Would a more robust Gem system be nice? What combinations would you want if you could create new gems?