General Gem Discussion

Is the Ballista Totem Support's duration not being affected by increased skill duration working as intended?

Boring new skills for 3.10 that dont add anything to the game.

Even a milk carton falling over is more interesting. Wake me up when something for melee comes out.

Can you add Kinetic Bold thread/post, so I can give my kinetic feedback?

GGG, where the heck are posts for new gems?

1,5 month later... still no recent gems added.

Do you even still care about feedback at this point?

i love you GGG for the great work again !

the new skills are very fun to play (generals cry and earth ehattering is in so cool idea and give me a lot ways to building), the chieftain feels like an monster , the rework is realy amazing.

finaly 2 handed melee is strong, smooth and feels like an big boy.

thanks for it !

have fun in harvest all.

"

Ydoum wrote:

1,5 month later... still no recent gems added.

Do you even still care about feedback at this point?

Hmmm...


Anyway, since there is no other place to put it, here is my feedback on Penance Brand:

I've been having a lot of fun playing penance brand. It is very dynamic in terms of how it can be built. However, I've found what I believe is the ultimate reason why I will be looking for something else, energy stacking.

Penance brand builds up energy stacks until it has reached 20 of them. At this point, it will pulse with damage until it expires, culminating in a big explosion. The explosion will remove all energy stacks. The removal of stacks makes it difficult and sometimes clunky to fight bosses with.

Consider the case that I have entered the boss room and placed my brands on the floor. The fight starts, energy starts building up, the pulsing starts, the first brand expires and blows up, all of the energy is reset, and then the second brand blows up. The first brand has 'stolen' the energy that the second brand had been making, resulting in the second brand dealing very little damage with it's final blast.

And that is just the first actions of the fight. The offset of the brand's expiration has been defined by my cast time. As the fight continues, I am not able to constantly cast the brands, and as such, this offset becomes greater and greater. In a longer fight, I will start to notice that I am no longer generating pulses at all. This is because each brand is expiring and removing the energy that the next brand is trying to build up. I will find myself casting brand recall in the corner and waiting for them all to expire, so that I can recast them onto a boss with a smaller offset between them.

It is possible to cast brand recall and get the full 20 stack explosion from both brands. The downside of this is that doing so would lend itself to ignoring half of the skill's mechanics.

Overall, it's a fun skill that would be made better if the energy stacks behaved differently. Maybe even give a node on the tree that reduces my max brands from 3 to 2.

It would be lovely if the effects of gem quality were visible on a gem's in-game tooltip.

There's a few gems (Vaal Earthquake, for example) that show additional text (ailment help, in the case of Vaal EQ) when you hold ALT over the gem, that would be a great place to display it.

Saves players the trip to POEDB or the wiki to look them up.

Revert static strike changes introduced during harvest, you know since you clearly regret everything about harvest, and if you don't also regret this change you clearly haven't asked anybody who actually was once acquainted with static strike how they felt about the recent changes.

I did, and they regret trusting you with your own game now.

general feedback:
The green support gems seemed less helpful than the other colors, for doing a mono build.

As I'm new, I tried to keep things simple for my first chars; I first did a marauder (2hand hammer), and after trying some stuff, I settled on using only red gems to keep things simple. Then I tried a summoner witch with all blue gems; then a bow ranger with all green gems. For the ranger the support gems didn't improve the overall damage output much; no matter which gem I used it'd only increase the damage output by 10-13% percent even for the best of them. Whereas for the marauder and witch, there were plenty of good gem options which would often add 30% more damage or thereabouts. This meant a huge difference in how valuable it was to have more linked sockets.

One possible factor is that if you pickup the pierce passives in the skill tree, then the gems for chain and fork become largely useless. And that passive is so useful it seemed largely better anyways. It's not like those gems can truly multiply damage anyways versus a single target, as there's still the each enemy can only be hit by one arrow from the volley effect.

Another factor may be that as I focused the passive tree on things which gave "damage with bow" or "projectile damage", and the bows often do best with a mix of damage types, that using the gems which focus on specific types of damage like physical don't actually help much.