Timeless Rework Concept

Timeless jewels have been out for good while since the launch of Legion a couple of leagues ago. It has seen some minor changes with keystones and not much more past that. An update to timeless jewels could be a more than welcomed change to be seen if not for poe1 than for poe2.

My idea is for 5-ways to award a type of Timeless Core. This core would become the foundation of your future Timeless Jewel. The core will be able to drop with varying tiers of 1 to 5 which would be determined based on what tier of encounter you found it at either 5-way, 4-way, etc. These tiers would act as augment slots, modifying the passives and or the Keystones that the jewel will provide to the player. These augments would come from endgame content like high-tier bosses like a shaper, sirus, and maven or very difficult encounters such as high-tier lakes of Calandra, high tier blueprints/contracts, very deep depths and so on. These augments would act as fossils placed into resonators or deli orbs used on maps, they modify the outcome of the original item.

The augments would be a way that the player can sort of influence what passives they want/need from a timeless jewel. Although it won't be guaranteed there will be a high likely hood that the passives you need will show up there especially if you invest 5 augments.

These augments coming from different bosses and various high-end content augment the timeless jewel into focusing on what passive modifiers would appear. For example, let's say you have a 5-slot timeless core and need passives for your minion build. Let's assume minion passives are tied to the augment you can get from an elder. Slotting 5 of those elder augments into a timeless core would give the player a high likely hood that the passives that get rolled are primarily something having to do with minions. Either minion damage, movespeed, resist, and so much more.

My main idea for this concept is to make timeless jewelry more deterministic with what you can expect to receive as well as reducing the divination needed for rerolling into passives that you need. At the moment people either use timeless jewels for very specific passives or their keystones. The current method makes very few jewels very very expensive while all the rest are pretty much garbage tiers with useless passives. While the new method, you can safely assume what you'll get from a jewel based on what core it has and what augments were used for it.

Please excuse my writing as it's done on short notice and probably not fully thought through but the idea is somewhat there for the nitpicking.

Am curious to know what others think about this and how they would go about it. I just dislike how 99% of jewels are trash and only 1% or less are worth selling.