Gemcutter prism recipie advice for first timer

Looking for some advice from experienced players on how they go about using the vendor recipie for 20% gems.

I am on my first character on standard and my gems are all hitting level 20 at once. I hear it is recommended to use the gemcutter prisms to trade these for a 20% quality gem, and I can see why. If I do this for most of my gems at the same time, I feel like I wont be able to run my yellow maps safely until they get back up to at least level 16.

Question is, how have you guys approached this problem? Do you just run act 10 content for a while? Should I only do a few conversions at a time to avoid this? Or, am I worrying about nothing?

Don't worry, they level fast enough.
Level gem copies in off hand weapons as well so you can corrupt them once they are 20/20

Level up a swap gem first. Gems level up on your secondary weapon set. Have some gems there for the 20% trade.

I had no clue gems level on the offhand set when inactive. That changes things a lot. Thanks!

For new players just run some of the lower level maps for awhile to get your 20% gem leveled back up into the mid teens before pushing into the higher tier maps. You could use this time to farm Act 9 Blood Aqueduct for Humility cards to get a Tabula Rasa (9 cards needed, great for running your next build through the 10 acts) while leveling your gems again.

Since you are playing Standard League always be thinking ahead to your next build your want to play and be leveling that skill gem in the 2nd weapon/shield slots so you will be ready to start it with a 20% level 1 gem.

There really isn't a quick shortcut to this unless you can grind out enough currency and brave the awful trade-chat to connect with a seller and buy your 20% gems. The Chaos recipe used to be a good way to grind the white/yellow maps for level 60+ unIDed gear (2 chaos gems for an unIDed full set vendored) but with the damn bots farming this 24/7 their value has been deflated this year.

When you just start out, only make your support gems lvl 1/20q with gemcutters, by using the merchants. These will be up to their old power in 10-12 levels or so(2-3 maps tops). And just use gemcutters you find, to slowly to make your main skill gem 20q. A good source to get them is the 40q gem merchant recipe. Should be plenty.

And as others have suggested, use your secondary weapons to level copies of your main skill gems(do this as early as you can). Make these lvl 1/20q with the merchants when you can. When they are lvl20-20q you switch one for your main skills if they are not 20/20q yet. If they are, corrupt them and try for 21/20q or 20/23q.

Goodluck!

I usually try to buy gems that are ~15% quality and use gem cutters to bump them up to 20%.

By the time you level a gem up to L20, you've generally picked up enough low Quality gems to vendor that you should have enough GC's to manage it. These are just dead weight if you dont use them (since you rarely sell them) so might as well make use of them.

So when starting fresh i'll use quest rewards/vendor gems, and have mid-high Q gems in offhand (or mains for support gems since 1-2 lvls doesnt mean much).

Once i've raised the gems to 20/20 with GC's and corrupted, i'll take the original gems and use the 20/0 -> 1/20 recipe provided i didnt corrupt a main skill gem to 19/20 (which does hurt performance).

nb: i usually lose interest in a league before i can level a set of gems to 20/0 -> 1/20 -> 20/20. I find my gems are normally reaching L20 (from scratch) when I'm around level 93.

You can get the gems back to level 10ish by running just a few Blood Aqueducts. Then try a white map or two, see how it feels, and get them back to level 11 or 12. If it feels bad, keep leveling them in easy content, if it feels OK go back to what you usually do.

I pickup most quality gems constantly for GCPs. I always have 6sockets available for this purpose via weapon swap. If you're playing higher content the quality'd gems level very quickly. Once they're level 14 or so they're approximate in DPS to the lvl20 with no quality.

Another important point is to check what the quality does for the skill. Sometimes you will realize that it is not that important to have quality on the gem. In those cases if you still want to increase the quality, you can do so 1% at a time as you get a new gcp.