Ask the Devs Round 1/GEMS

Wyatt: Let's see if I can address both of these questions with one answer.

The Amethyst serves a different role than the other gems in providing defense rather than offense. For players who are looking to increase their Life On Hit or survivability in general, the Amethyst fills that role. We're not looking to see some minimum percentage of the audience using Amethysts; it's okay if less than 25% of players use an Amethyst. It's even okay if less than 5% of players use the Amethyst. What's important is that if you want to increase your survivability, you can look at the Amethyst and say it's providing a worthwhile boost.

With the lowering of damage at Inferno since the game's release, and the introduction of Monster Power, we've seen a natural shift towards offensive builds and maximizing damage in general. This is totally expected. As a result, there has also been a corresponding decline in the use of the Amethyst in weapons, which is also expected and normal. Those who have been playing since release will recall that the Amethyst was an extremely popular gem choice, particularly for Barbarians and Monks. In situations where Life on Hit or survivability is desired -- such as new characters, Hardcore characters, or people who really want to build super tanky -- then the Amethyst is still a solid choice.

The Topaz, on the other hand, is a different story. No -- the damage from the Topaz is not competitive in comparison to other gems. Thorns damage in general is underpowered in the game and we're looking to correct that n the future. While we're discussing a number of ways to do this, the favored idea internally is to allow Thorns to benefit from your primary stat (Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence). So if you have, say, 2000 Intelligence as a Wizard or Witch Doctor, then your Thorns items will do +2000% damage, much like your weapon damage. This is, of course, a huge buff to the Thorns property and there is no specific timeline on when we're going to make such a change.

What we don't want to do, however, is buff the Topaz considerably today only to have it be grossly overpowered in the future. This would then put us in the situation where we'd either have to go back and nerf the Topaz, or not move forward with allowing it to buff your primary stat.

Now, some of you may be thinking "Buff it now so we can use it and nerf it later! We don't mind!" but it's not that easy. Buffing it now would lead to one set of builds and gearing options, which would be adversely affected if it got nerfed later. What if (hypothetically) a Topaz weapon buff lead to a class of builds that skipped any stacking of your primary stat? If we later made Thorns benefit from your primary stat and nerfed the Topaz accordingly, this entire class of builds would become invalidated.

So, while we do want improve Topaz gems and with it the Thorns affix, we don’t have any immediate plans to do so. This kind of change is likely something we’d incorporate into Diablo III alongside similar improvements.

Andrew: We agree that crafting gems can be slow and tedious, and we've seen a number of great suggestions from the community on how to address this issue. We are definitely looking into allowing you to perform a "craft all gems of this type" style action. Worth noting: we will only allow this for gems, as the crafted outcome is a very known quantity with fixed affixes. We still believe the process of crafting one random item at a time has value.

Andrew: Trading is certainly super important, but I wouldn’t say the game is based on trading. Diablo III is about killing monsters and finding evermore powerful enemies and items to kill them with. Trading is just one method by which players can obtain items, and the Auction House is currently the most popular way to do that. We feel that gearing up is perhaps too skewed towards trading right now, and account-bound items are a way of balancing that out with farming.

We don’t really like that, for most players, all of your current gear is very likely to be something you’ve found on the Auction House. This can create a situation where it doesn’t feel like you "own" the gear you’ve obtained; instead, it feels like you are renting it. This is one of the big draws of making items account-bound. We also need more end game item and gold sinks, and making something account bound permanently "removes" those items from the game. Having gear (or gems) that feels like you own it forever is good for you, and removing a lot of things from the economy is good for the game.

Andrew: We wanted to add a new tier for a few reasons:

We wanted to make them attractive, and an increase in power is very attractive.
We wanted a way to remove some of the current top tier gems from circulation.

We don’t feel that adding a whole new type of gem to the game was the right answer at the moment. We do have ideas for what we would want from new gems, but now isn’t the time to add that to the game. The Marquise gems are gold and item sinks (which is something we feel the economy can really benefit from right now), and very attractive ones at that.

(As for "why didn’t we fix Topax in weapons", I believe Wyatt provided a pretty comprehensive answer to that question already.)

Andrew: We love that players are able to remove gems from sockets in Diablo III, as it helps provide more flexibility as you gear up rather than locking you to single choice. However, since un-socketing is so painless and costs so little, what we’ve found is that players will simply recycle the same gem across all their characters rather than creating new ones. An important goal with the new Marquise gems is to act as a gold and Radiant Star gem sink. Currently, there’s nothing in the game that actually pulls those gems out of the economy, but to keep their value up, that’s important.

In all honesty, I wish the cost to remove the lower tier gems was much higher, more in line with the cost of the Marquise gem. We would prefer players to be crafting new gems of all types rather than just shuffling them around as that makes the gem economy more dynamic (more things coming in, lots of things coming out). Right now it’s almost entirely stagnant, with demand going down every day. If you only had to craft one Marquise Ruby for all 10 characters, that would remove some Radiant Stars from the economy, but realistically it won’t remove much. With the unsocket cost set to 5 million, you now have a clear choice: "should I move my gem 4 times or just craft a new one?" For the sake of the economy, we actually hope you’d prefer to craft a new one.