Deeper skill gem leveling.

I've noticed skill gem leveling seems to mostly be rather shallow and linear. This isn't a bad thing really, I know you have support gems and stuff to mix it up.
However, I can't recall ever not just clicking that plus sign. All the upgrades are also so minor that I hardly even notice, all it does is just seem to gradually scale the damage and mana cost for the enemies I am fighting as I level.
I'd love to eventually see some deeper skill gem leveling, like perhaps having a choice of what to improve on a skill, to give each leveled gem its own characteristics and also let you come up with more interesting builds perhaps.
I also saw someone mention skill gems found as random drops sometimes having random mods on them, like items, and I think that'd be cool too.

Skill gems have a quality modifier, just like gear. That's what they were referring to.

Dont know if this is a repeat but i'd like to see the lvl of the gem spell on the quickmenu of your GUI... not just in the inventory and when it lvl's etc. thx

I don't think every part of a game needs to be complex to end up with something that is, in the end, complex and interesting.

Currently:
- The passive skill tree is pretty straightforward after the initial shellshock.
- Item mods are easy to understand.
- And unique items have some, well, unique mods to think about.
- Getting the right flasks isn't too hard as the mods on flasks are few in number.
- Skills just get "better" as they level.
- Supports also just get "better" as they level, but now that we have things like Totem, you can start to be pretty complex here.
- Quality on stuff makes them better.


Each piece of your character customization is a variable, and your game complexity is a product (multiplication) of these variables.

So, two scenarios:
- GGG can introduce some new variable (say, a pants slot) and get a lot of complexity and emergent behaviour out of it since the end result of total complexity is a product.
- GGG could instead make one variable very large (by doing something crazy like adding synergy into the skill tree, or allow for different movement modes across the tree, or by allowing skill gems to level in different ways at each level) and get the same larger product.

The benefits of the first approach is that no single variable gets too large to comprehend.



tl;dr I don't like this suggestion, leave skills alone and focus on content elsewhere.

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Gunfingers wrote:

Skill gems have a quality modifier, just like gear. That's what they were referring to.

Nah, it was in the suggestions forums. It wasn't in-game right now, just something suggested.
Anyway, I totally get that some people don't want stuff that complicated. I was just hoping for something more than always leveling my skill in a linear fashion.

I don't mind the linear progression of gems so much. What I do mind is that each level hardly changes the strength or effect of the skill any noticeable degree. Especially when you upgrade a gem and it makes it cost more mana for something like 3% physical damage. With the way support gems work, a change of 1 more mana to the base skill gem can skyrocket skill costs.

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sharkh20 wrote:

I don't mind the linear progression of gems so much. What I do mind is that each level hardly changes the strength or effect of the skill any noticeable degree. Especially when you upgrade a gem and it makes it cost more mana for something like 3% physical damage. With the way support gems work, a change of 1 more mana to the base skill gem can skyrocket skill costs.

I think that's intentional, the devs didn't want players to stick to their starting skills only because they are higher lvl, or to ignore quality on lvl1 gems because their gem of this skill is already lvl 10. This leads imho to some serious pondering wether you should upgrade skills or not, as the mana cost could skyrocket, as you mentioned - for next to no gain.

I'd like to some personalisation for skill gems, too.
Ways to do it in my opinion:

-give them the chance for an implicit mod. Only something small, with a very small increase per lvl, eg frost nova with 5% higher aoe and .1% higher aoe per lvl, or dual strike with 3% higher dam and .2% higher dam per lvl, something along these lines. Maybe even fixed values, like a burning arrow with fixed +5% fire resis or +10 fire dam. Give them some different mods, so dropped gems get interesting.

-give them different quality boni, make quality more common. Maybe i'm just unlucky, but in 40 lvls in 0.9.9 I haven't found a single skill gem with %quality, it used to be a lot more than that. Then, randomize the effects of quality. Eg. on burning arrow, there's quality for +burning duration, +ignite chance, or +fire dam. It would be a lot harder to get the "perfect" gem for your build, and increase customisation

-or go all out and give options upon lvling. This would severly affect the balance of the game, but then again, we're still in beta ;) eg, they could give three choices for every skill upon lvl up what you want to raise, in our burning arrow example: more dam, more ignite chance, or longer burning duration. This would lead to A LOT of customisation, and some players would even use the same gem twice, e.g. one arrow for damage, on for igniting. Hell, they could even implement a small passive skill tree for every gem with 40-50 nodes, but I think it's to late for that now and that's just crazy talk :)

I think option 2 would be very easy to implement, whereas #3 is kind of utopic, yet it would be awesome. I prefer the first choice - it makes the gems unique and gives the perfectionists something to grind for. Thoughts?

Progress in this game is a treadmill.

I like the idea of having a choice on how to upgrade a gem with each level. Extra gems on hand would become useful and leveled gems may actually become desirable for trading.

I don't blame the dev's. I blame the genre.

This type of game has become synonymous with grind, and every system in the game reflects it.