Transfigured gem logic

I have a question about the logic of utilizing transfigured gems "feature". Please keep in mind this is from the perspective of someone who is a casual player not steeped in all the nuanced details of the game.

When I have played in the past the enchanting was straight forward. However, I'm finding this new transfigured gem thing to be rather perplexing. As a PoE noob/casual (or whatever) that is following a build guide why would I want to randomly change how a gem works? Wouldn't that likely change or even break the build I'm currently working toward? Seems like you would have to know ahead of time what the "random" new gem would be to not just immediately break your own build or am I missing something?

Are people just randomly transfiguring gems as they level? I don't get the logic of how this process is expected to work.

I'm not 100% sure about the lower levels of Labyrinth and what options they provide, but in the higher two levels you get to put your gem in the machine, press the button and it will present you with three options. At this point you can reject the three options and keep your gem as is. You then run the Lab again and hope for a better outcome.

Yes, it's a terrible design, utterly pointless and not fun at all. Just wait till they add even more transfigured gems to the game and your chances decrease further!

I am still trying to roll a particular gem and simply gave up after several days. How's that for an engaging game loop GG, the design was so obnoxiously tedious I just stopped playing the game. Top job!

Before the usual suspects jump in and proclaim "hur-dur, you can just buy the gem you want for next to nothing" well, what's the point in gating them behind the Lab at all if they are so worthless? Just give them to our hideout gem vendor and let's all get on with actually playing the game.

Thanks for the reply. It does seem like a very dubious game loop. I don't get why they removed the enchanting. I liked that much better. I just ended up opting for the quality upgrade instead which is pretty lame.

Gating them behind lab is terrible.

The new gems aren't supposed to be upgrades or progression; they're supposed to be "different alternatives" as to how you play or build around the gem (sure, some of them are much better than the original, but some of them are also worse). Hiding them behind both RNG and progression is a terrible choice.

People will probably come into this thread and tell you that you "can just buy the gem". While that's true, it clearly doesn't make the choice of gating the gems behind the lab any better.

That said; getting rid of the enchants was a good thing.

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Off topic

I think the whole transfigured idea gem was a bad idea overall. They now have twice as many skills to balance, and we all know how that will go: Never touch the underwhelming ones, quickly touch the overwhelming ones.

I think if I didn’t want them in vendors (I’m okay with that, it would be a little dull), I would have done something like the old Templar Lab epilogue quest with Kirac. Piece together some bit of arcane machinery (eg. maybe you find a piece in the Sceptre, a piece in the mines, and a piece in the Templar offices) and build it in your hideout. Then activate it with some new (or even existing) currency item. That way you can earn access to transfigurations through normal play and not have to derail your play with tiresome extra Labyrinth runs.

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Phrazz wrote:

Gating them behind lab is terrible.

The new gems aren't supposed to be upgrades or progression; they're supposed to be "different alternatives" as to how you play or build around the gem (sure, some of them are much better than the original, but some of them are also worse). Hiding them behind both RNG and progression is a terrible choice.

People will probably come into this thread and tell you that you "can just buy the gem". While that's true, it clearly doesn't make the choice of gating the gems behind the lab any better.

That said; getting rid of the enchants was a good thing.

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Off topic

I think the whole transfigured idea gem was a bad idea overall. They now have twice as many skills to balance, and we all know how that will go: Never touch the underwhelming ones, quickly touch the overwhelming ones.

Yeah, completely agree with all of this.


Still really like the effort to add in new options, but I wish they had simply taken the bottom half of skills and transfigured them into being interesting choices, rather than adding all new? Why not have 40 good options instead of 200 with 190 of those being bad (i.e. bad in this context only means significantly below the top 10, and good only means competitive with the top options)

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Phrazz wrote:

People will probably come into this thread and tell you that you "can just buy the gem". While that's true, it clearly doesn't make the choice of gating the gems behind the lab any better.

So for my build, I wanted a speific Soulrend. This is no different than a Flameblaster I did that needed a very speific Flameblast (speifically the one that starts big, and narrows its AoE down) several leagues past. The experence of getting them has been night and day.

The flameblaster had to do maps for about 120 hours (This is just a blind guess, I have no idea how long it took, but it was a process of about a dedicated month and a half) to gather the blueprints and rogues markers (keeping in mind that only 30% of blueprints where even useful to this end), then I had to run those blueprints and just crossed my fingers that the right gem would show up. It was an utter crapshot that could in theroy have taken forever.

This soulrend I spent a day doing labs, I just stocked up on some soulrends from Lilly and ran Merc Labs, and dipped it in "Pick 3 gem of a matching color", and the "Random Alt of that skill" when it appeared (which currently is just a coin flip for the right version when it came up). Even losing that coinflip once, it still only took a day, maybe twelve runs (that yielded a few other gems, and netted me a 15% quality bump to a gem I could have passed on, but 15 gemcutters seems like a deal for a lvl 68 lab run that only takes like 15 minutes). This was simple enough of a task I didn't even feel the need to PoELabs, it only took 2ish runs to figure out a good enough route with a few shrines along the way.

So what was basically an all league chase to even get a build working right, it was just one day of work. Of course both versions can just opt to buy the item, but this version is MUCH more accessable, and MUCH more clearly marked (as you are flagged by the game to do the lab, an uninformed player will clearly see the route to self discover the alternate gems, which they might not have even done so with the heist gating).

Also they already had to balance a ton of extra gems with the previous method, so they didn't really change their workload in that regard. A lot of these can just be personal taste, like the Soulrend that just turns it into a frontloaded chaos missile rather than a dot, if you like chaos but don't want a DoT, well there's a simple tool. I just wanted a spell that felt thematic with a cyclone, and Spiral Soulrend fits that bill enough.

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Are people just randomly transfiguring gems as they level? I don't get the logic of how this process is expected to work.

I'd hope not, much like you shouldn't just slam chaos into the gear your currently using. Generally you've got a second gem you're dipping into the divine faunt for the non-deterministic results. Obviously a simple +10M EXP to a gem is fine to push a gem into max level, or push an awakened gem up a bit, or to slam some extra quality on a gem. If you're looking for Alt gems, you'll just shove some lower value gems, either ones retired out of a build (like transitional skills you used until you could get high enough level to use the actual skills you want), or just random trash gems you scraped off the floor or bought from a vender or got as a reward from a quest. And this is assuming you're just blind testing what's out there, and don't already know the alternate you're gunning for.

3.23 is the end of Poe. Absolutely brutal design change to wipe out all of the heist gems. RIP POE1 2023.

Just buy gem you need by trade.

Imo, the biggest problem with trans gems isn't their acquisition but the fact that 90% of them are complete crap.

A handful of gems aside, there been no "meta" shakeup at all.

There are some very cool gems with unique ideas, but most ppl won't ever touch them for one simple reason... Nobody will sacrifice tens of millions of pinnacle dps just to see zombies fall from the sky...

Gating these gems behind some mechanic would make sense if they were indeed more powerful variants of original / alt gems.