Transfigured gem logic

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

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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.