General Support Discussion

"

Vipermagi wrote:

"

Ayu87 wrote:

Edit#2: Posted here since I couldn't find a topic specifically for "cyclone" skill :(

It's a Skill gem, not a Support gem, so it's in the Skill Gem Feedback section :)

Oh God, good call.
Sorry I'm really tired, overnighter :(

SUPPORT GEM REVIEW

If I don't mention the gem, I don't have anything clever to say about it. (For some of these what I have to say might not be clever either.)

Added Lighting Damage: This is what an elemental damage support should look like. It adds some damage, but the quality bonus gives it an exciting chance to stack shock stacks... which leads people to build around it, famously so in Kripparrian's case. The only thing I'd suggest here is to remove the added shock duration in the quality bonus; keep the chance to shock only. I'll get to why later.

Added Cold Damage: Now this is taking the lesson from Added Lightning and applying it all wrong. Increased chill duration? If you're doing more cold damage, aren't they dying fast enough to make this not matter? Make the quality bonus a chance to freeze, and then you've got some excitement; if you're not two-shotting them, the freeze chance is relevant. Would it be very good? Um, yeah. Just like its competition.

Added Fire Damage: Now this is a disaster. You can add Added Lightning to a Lightning spell and enjoy how shockingly good it is; you add this to Fireball and... nothing happens. What it should be instead is "% more Fire damage" -- increasing from 20% to 39% -- and "% physical converted to Fire" -- this time going from 20% to 29% (slower climb). The net result is about the same results on the physical damage conversion (at max level, 29% with 39% more is 40%), but now you can Add Fire Damage to a freaking Fireball. Oh, and make the quality bonus chance to ignite at Added Lightning Damage rates.

Chance to Ignite: This gem needs to be scrapped completely. An elemental status effect shouldn't be its own gem; it's not for Added Lightning Damage. Get rid of these and refund them all with equally leveled/quality redesigned Added Fire Damage gems.

Lightning/Cold/Fire Penetration: These are all very well designed in terms of their level-up effect. However, the quality bonus -- a flat damage increase -- is just boring. What should go here is increased burning damage for fire, and increased shock and chill/freeze duration for the other two. After all, when you're facing a heavily resistant foe, what you're worried about is how long your status effects will stick; furthermore, increasing the duration also increases the minimum threshold for an ability actually triggering (read the Mechanics thread if you didn't know this), so the elemental status will be ignored less often, another concern when fighting a resistant foe.

Cold to Fire: This gem has the level-up and quality bonuses switched. Level-up bonuses are supposed to be consistently good things that you always want; quality bonuses should be tricky little things that you might make a combo out of but aren't always what you want. So level-up here should increase both fire and cold damage, while quality should increase the conversion ratio.

Added Chaos Damage: Why is this a blue gem? Everything else chaos-related in a green gem. Either start making some active skills to bring out a shadow-poison-evocation side to the witch, or move this over to green; I'd actually prefer the former. The quality bonus is a little boring but it's not like chaos has status ailments, so it is what it is.

Blind: Awesome design; great synergy with damage-over-time, but the synergy isn't force-fed to you, you need to actually think about it.

Culling Strike: I'm a fan of the Culling Strike mechanic itself, but this gem is a disaster. Despite its name, what it does currently is make all kinds of modifications to you cast/attack speed and damage. Nothing about culling strike itself is changed, which considering it's based on a number (10%)... but that's the really interesting part of the mechanic. Treating your enemy's health as 10% lower is pretty much the same as 11% more damage... assuming your enemy doesn't have energy shield. If they do, things get a lot more interesting, making this a gem of interest in chaos builds, if only it would gain interesting benefits as it levels. A better design would have that 10% insta-kill rating climb higher as levels are gained, with a quality bonus that gives the user some kind of benefit proportional to the life "culled" from his enemies -- drop a monster from 50% to 0% and gain nothing, but drop it to 10% somehow and get a reward in life/mana/ES/something else. Although the chaos synergy is cool, you don't want to spell it out directly; you want to keep it subtle, like with Blind.

Chance to Flee: Interesting effect, but really unimaginative quality bonus. Something like "reduced movement speed while fleeing" would be awesome.

Concentrated Effect: Another example of cool concept, but why that quality bonus? It's almost like the mana cost multiplier is artificially high because they're trying to push you into using GCPs on it. This would be far more interesting if it had a greater initial penalty to area radius, but quality would let you get some of that radius back.

Increased Area of Effect: This should get increased area damage as a quality bonus, although not so much as to threaten Concentrated Effect.

Faster Attacks/Casting: Now these are gems where Reduced Mana Cost would actually be a very clever quality bonus. That's because the faster you attack/cast, the more you activate your skill, the more mana you use. Getting reduced mana cost from quality would allow you to increase your speed without as big of a drain on your resources, and would be much better than the unoriginal quality bonus they have now.

Increased Critical Strikes/Damage: The quality bonuses on these should be switched so that you don't need to find room for both gems to be effective (no one does); instead, you pick a focus and get a secondary amount of the other stat.

Item Quantity/Rarity: Same concept, switch the quality bonuses of these two so you don't get the level bonus from quality.

Increased Duration: Does anyone use this on anything except Summon Skeletons? If you're going to make a support gem for buffs, make it really support them by stealing a bit of Inner Focus' thunder and adding it as a quality bonus.

Knockback: Quality bonus should be knockback distance or something. Increase the base chance per level to compensate; needed a buff anyway.

Minion Damage: This gem needs to be eliminated, because any damage support gem already works with minions; the only thing that keeps it from being redundant is that it boasts pretty big numbers. However, just buff the minion base damage, then allow players to equip their minions with the wide array of non-minion damage gems instead of having this mismash.

Minion Life, Minion Speed: These two, on the other hand, are just fine. The only thing I have to say here is that Minion Life should help totems. If this means the current Minion Life support is too strong, buff normal minion life, then nerf the Minion Life support so totems could still use it.

Stun: Just wanted to say this is a beautifully designed support gem.

"

Vipermagi wrote:

Removing Chance to Ignite would be horrible. You wouldn't be able to make a halfway decent Ignite build until you grind for a high Quality Added Fire.

Chance to Ignite exists because it's a build in and of itself. It's a viable source of damage. Removing build variety is never a good thing when that's something you advertise with.

I think you're ignoring that Added Fire Damage's suggested new form would add a lot of Fire damage. I think Fire builds might work a little differently (less emphasis on ignition, more emphasis on pure Fire damage), but still be fine.

"

Vipermagi wrote:

And would make them needlessly stronger. Eh. They are already incredibly powerful and have a low Multiplier.

Then increase the multiplier.

"

Vipermagi wrote:

"

Scrotie wrote:

Increased Duration: Does anyone use this on anything except Summon Skeletons?

Firestorm (fantastic), Poison Arrow, Viper Strike, Dominating Blow (hilarious), Immortal Call (terrible skill), Molten Shell (eehhhh), Puncture, Conversion Trap, Frost Wall (mostly useless otherwise).
Also, for some reason people want to slap it on Blood Rage.

So giving it some "% increased effect of buff" would be pretty awesome then; it might open up new ways to use the support, without changing the current uses very much.

Do you have any positive criticism on that wall of text, or just focusing on the negative?

hello GGG, i never read this thread and have no idea whether someone talked about this before, but since u are continually adding new skill gems in the game, u should make some kind of change to the mirrored items so that people may have a chance to recolor it to fit the new gem.

just make something like every time u add new gem in the game, people will be able to recolor their mirrored gear, and the mirrored gear cannot be equipped unless they confirm the color of the sockets and make them unchangable again(till next patch).

I was really looking forward to that power charge support gem, but I realized that as a spell caster, and even if I get all four power charge (3 +1 powercharge and the 1 +2% spell damage from power charges) This gem will still be worse than both "faster casting" and "Increased Critical Damage" because spells casters already have so easy acces to Spell Crit.
So this will be a boost for only the spell casters who have acces to a nice 6L chest (which is what 2% of all players? due to insane rarity, not that many people have 1000 fusings or 25 exalted to buy a chest)
Or for maybe people using "attacks" instead of "spells" who have worse acces to critical strike chance.
I had tho really hoped this would be a nice new dimension for casters, but Im not sure its gonna be usefull for about 90% of the spell casters out there...
It seems only way to use this, is if I and other go a chinese farmer/botter/hacker site 500$ for a mirror :/

GGG should consider an Armor Penetration Support Gem. I feel physical damage-based builds are rather outclassed atm by elemental damage-based builds.

nO sEARING bOND GEM SECTION YET?