Threshold Jewels and Attributes in Radius

Haven't seen this asked or answered anywhere -- text seems plain, but perhaps I'm misreading.

Do these have to be 'active' nodes?

...or does the jewel just require the node to be IN its radius to produce its effect?

Used to be that Threshold jewels required active allocation of their attribute, yes.

This was changed when GGG realized nobody liked Threshold jewels. Now, the attributes just have to be there; you don't need to spend points on them anymore. It essentially acts as a way to limit certain thresh jewels to specific slots on the tree, which...does something GGG finds valuable. I don't know. Nobody ever uses a thresh jewel without meeting its requirement, and the requirements are loose enough that most builds have no issue meeting them.

I get the distinct feeling thresh jewels are something of a kludge job internal to the company - they're as ad-hoc for GGG as they look like for us, a Cool Idea somebody had that ended up warped into something mechanically useful for balance but a lot less significant and flavorful.

They all feel like bandaids designed to try and create some parity for underused and weak skills.

I'm running a ele. crit bow/ranger/raider this league. Thought I would give Shrapnel Shot a go, simply because I really like the animation AND I like skills that do multiple things, like have an AOE and a projectile. Melee bow seemed intriguing.

I quickly realized it wouldn't be viable endgame without some oomph. Checked out the dual threhold setup -- it makes it *generally* competitive. As in, yeah, it can kill some things, but I always find myself wondering, with this and Ice Shot, why they didn't just retool the SKILL itself to either bake in the effects or add something more akin to D2s charms (shudder) and just create more scaling. Of course, that always results in cries of power creep -- which is true -- but that's the nature of ANY game where you're constantly introducing new content. It's just incredibly hard to add bigger, better end game and stuff, stuff, stuff and keep the balance completely intact.

I think people forget that when getting all misty-eyed for games like D2 (my literal GoAT game). It was just totally *meh* before the expansion, and then it went through its PoE phase, before finally settling on runewords as a way to balance without having to constantly adjust the entire game every time a new unique or something else popped up.

"Oh, you want to play a hammerdin but you need 6 uniques, all of which do explicit things? How about we give you a runeword that does 3 of those things INCREDIBLY WELL, and shores up your defenses or has an interesting feature - like teleport - and then you can just hunt down 3 other uniques and some rares and give it a whirl."

...of course, duped runes kept the economy in a constant state of flux, but overall, it solved a whole lot of itemization and scaling issues.

I wonder if PoE is headed down a similar path, eventually?

Thresh jewels are much quicker and easier on dev resources than reduxing skills is. Your Shield Charges or Lightning Tendrils take a lot more time than just introducing a thresh jewel. Plus, thresh jewels being specific to certain skills means GGG can admit that some skills, for example, need GMP to be functional - thus why half the thresh jewels in the game are "Gives Skill GMP" - without saying "Look, we know the design of GMP bothers you all, but we've got to draw a line somewhere - if you want five times the coverage on your skill you're GOING to sacrifice DPS". They can say "Okay. This skill is crappy crap that craps the bed. We'll give you semi-free GMP for it, so you can spend all your gem slots on damage and mostly compete with actual skills, but you have to get to certain areas of the tree and also sacrifice two jewel slots to do it."

Balance-wise it works but it feels very clunky and bolt-on, and people are often disgruntled over needing thresh jewels to make Skill <X> useful. It's a field-expedient design tool GGG can use to quick-buff a garbo skill (Blight, anybody?) into having a role in builds, but it's not as good as just making the skill better.

There's ways to make the system more interesting and engaging, but let's be realistic here - nobody cares. Thresh jewels fulfill a purpose, they do so in an acceptably easy and manageable way, and so they're here to stay and likely won't undergo any major revisions anymore. C'est la vie. Better than not being able to seriously use these skills at all, really.

Agreed. I don't dislike the design necessarily; it just feels inelegant...like forcing the door with a crowbar for certain skills rather than integrating them into the lock and making the door easier to open.

Ugh...what a terrible metaphor.

I think it makes sense, though. Ironically, it was really runewords that made me stick with D2 for so many years because, although the drop rates for high runes were INSANE, and Blizzard's stated position was always that they should be VERY DIFFICULT™ to obtain, the sheer scale of rune duping and their rather half-hearted enforcement of it, made them seem complicit in realizing that the game was ultimately better for it because it increased build diversity by a factor of a cool bajillion and made a whole new build planning (not unlike what PoE does with ascendancies and the different starting nodes for the passive tree) a real thing.

Sorry, don't mean to prattle on about D2. I love PoE! And, for the most part, I like its general design philosophy.

Threshold jewels just irk me a bit, because when I realize I need to use them, I think to myself -- what OTHER passive node could I take if I had those points available rather than having to path out to jewel node X?

...skill diversity always trumps *itemization* in that sense, for me. Everyone always yearns for interesting uniques, but they want those uniques to have COOL SKILLS™ or make old skills work in very new and engaging ways.

I'd rather have those points to spend traipsing about to see what I could come up with, though I guess it's just as likely I might end up on a given build picking "X to Y stat" nodes as anything.

Oh well...

Thanks for the quick reply.

To be fair, jewel sockets are always valuable picks anyways. Even cheapo chump jewels can be more than worth the ~2.5 average point cost of nabbing a jewel socket, and people pay stacks of exalts for really high-end jewels for a reason. The thresh jewel issue is more one of "but what if I want to use my jewel slots for JEWELS? q_q" than a "Jewel slots suck tho!" one, at least to me.

What I honestly wish is that there were multiple thresh jewels for skills, a'la things like Glacial Hammer or Burning Arrow. Pick your poison, or go hambananas on super-specializing in your given skill with multiple stacked thresh jewels of different types for different skills. If you have only one thresh jewel for a skill, then that's just a tax on using the skill. Taxing skill use sucks. But if you have 2+ thresh jewels for a skill, all competing for limited jewel slots...well, now you have a choice.

And if you don't like making choices, oh boy howdy dee are you playing the wrong game...