Gem splitting purpose?

General Discussion
1

I am trying to work out if this is only a QoL update as a vast number of people seem to have had the green wristbands for quite a while. Composite gems were discarded according to a much earlier BLUE staff post. That would have made sense but other than that, I see not a lot of use unless there is another coming feature of changing the gem type?

Do you get an echoing crystal no matter the level (other than 1)? If so, then that’s good.

2

The way I read it, if the rank of the gem you’re splitting needed echoing crystals to create, when you split it, you’ll get the three lower level gems and the echoing crystals back. It’s not a way to get free echoing crystals.

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3

Clearly that composite gem feature is coming soon.

Even so, i guess it is still better to have option to split the gem than none.

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4

I suspect that this is, indeed, a leftover from when they intended to give us composite gems, as this would be a way to break them back down into their different constituent gem components, e.g. if you’d combined a tourmaline and a ruby, you could split the composite gem back into the tourmaline and ruby.

However, it’s actually still quite useful even without the composite stuff, primarily because, apart from rings, set items don’t have a fixed number of gem sockets. For example

  • Amulet - Always has Red and Yellow sockets, sometimes has a Blue socket
  • Bracelet - Always has Red and Yellow sockets, sometimes has a Blue socket
  • Belt - Always has 2 Red sockets, sometimes has a 3rd Red socket
  • Gloves - Always have 2 Yellow sockets, sometimes has a 3rd Yellow socket
  • Boots - Always have 2 Blue sockets, sometimes has a 3rd Blue socket

So, let’s say you have boots with 2 sockets in them, and you have a Rank 5 Sapphire and a Rank 4 Sapphire in them. Then you get new boots, and they have 3 sockets. You equip the new boots, the Rank 5 and Rank 4 go into them, and you need to fill the 3rd socket, but all you have is a Rank 1 Sapphire. You remove the Rank 5, split it into three Rank 4s, put two of them into the Boots, and you now have boots with three Rank 4 gems, which provides you with more total Armour Penetration than having a Rank 5, Rank 4 and Rank 1 in them.

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5

Good analogy.

What would be far more useful with the gem splitting in my opinion rather than composite, is the ability to change the type of gem, rather than splitting them as the only option. Not too dissimilar to D3. Requiring a specific number of any gem to create a different type… e.g. Citrines to Topaz, Rubies to Tourmaline…so on and so forth. That’s only my opinion though. As an example, if you have 27 rubies and you get a green piece with a blue slot, you can make 9 of either an aquamarine or sapphire…