Farming labs for transfigured gems just sucks. Please rethink this.

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LennyGhoul wrote:

The answer to every single discussion cannot possibly be, well MUH SSF bad. That doesn't solve any issues, nor make my concerns any less valid.

Well GGG isn't going to make getting transfigured gems easier to appeal to SSF players. They've never done anything to help SSF players. The issue you have is that it's difficult to acquire transfigured gems, GGG's solution for literally everything has always been "just buy it 5head".

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LennyGhoul wrote:

This is the feedback area I came to leave my feedback. I think it's insane how much you guys are just more concerned with trolling than simply having a real discussion.

Disagreeing with your concerns isn't trolling. The core issue of your problem stems from playing SSF, and GGG just isn't going to change something to make it better for SSF players. That's just the reality of the situation. They haven't done it in the past, they're not going to do it now. It's a challenge mode.

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LennyGhoul wrote:

Yes I know how to farm Goddesses but I don't want to spend hours farming goddesses so that I can then spend hours farming uber lab just to land one stupid skill gem.

You don't need to farm Offerings on a purpose(doing map labs trials - only reason for doing them is - with atlas Notable that have a chance to award with upgraded Offering).

You can get some Atlas passives into Rituals - and got a lot of them from there on SSF.
This is how im get mines, like ~200 at least from league start.
You just doing regular maps + rituals on them, getting a lot of offerings from Rituals - profit.

Then you've waiting for a good day for good fast Lab layout - straight rooms with few Darkshrines/Troves/Argus on a main path - running them fast - and getting gems you want from Divine font.

You can argue with this if u want but as others mentioned - this is 100% fact - that its 5x times easier now to get desired Skill gem in Ulab than getting old 6x ULab Trials in SSF back in the day.

And like 20x times easier than getting desired Helmet Enchant when it was only 1x random choice for Helmets on Divine font(Not 3x Choices like in last leagues).

SSF is not the main game mode, and if you choose to play it, you know you're dealing with restrictions that will make some items impossible to get. That's normal and fine. Don't make builds that rely on those items or play the regular version of the game, the choice is yours.

Honestly ignoring the ssf aspect still makes the gem generation in lab really boring. There are too many "bad" results.

It is just like looking for the helmet enchant you wanted. They should have just let you pick the gem you need instead of this gacha system.

Lab doesn't give enough xp and the only really good items are the unique jewels that are comedically rare. And let's be honest, transfigured gems are never going to be more than a handful of chaos after league start.

If you are running a build that uses a less popular transfigured gem it may not even be on the trade site in the future ( let alone a 21/20 or a 20/23). Just browsing some at random shows that only like 100-200 of them were even listed. In future leagues when there are more gem options or lab becomes even less popular that will dwindle further.

It feels like the need to put in multiple layers of randomness got in the way of an otherwise good idea.

Yes, outside of SSF, like I've been trying to say the whole time, but some people can't seem to get over that part, it still sucks... period.

It's just not fun to do that part of the game regardless if I end up having to trade or whatever for the gem. This is just feedback of a bad delivery system for the new gems, which has been posted in the feedback area of the forums.

That's all I was trying to say, before the same old giga chad gatekeepers of how to play the game showed up and did the same old tired and extremely played out boring flex on SSF.

Many people in game chat comment on this regularly saying it takes about 20+ uber labs to hit the gem they want as well, and it just sucks. This is just a bad idea that should be fix in all game modes.

After spending my 14+ hours to finally land the gem I wanted. it ended up not even working the way I thought it would, so you can imagine my major disappointment in having to labor that hard to simply find out the gem sucked anyway.

Most of these gems simply are not worth the effort.

A possible solution could be making it a bench crafting option with the OG version of the gem you want, and just gate keep it behind a couple of chaos or something per roll, if it absolutely need to be gatekept at all, which honestly I don't think should be the case either.

I actually love the changes to the lab. it's actually worth doing now, instead of getting some random enchant doing who knows what that you need really specific gear for, all I need to carry is a gem or 2 to transfigure. Sure it's playing the lotto, but in the worst case there are still multiple options that provide decent results, including raising quality (seems to be pretty common). I can literally save money and time from resetting skill gems.

Grand heists would take far longer and it's still totally random what exactly you end up with. Here, even the worst choice can usually give decent results.

There seems to be a few logical extrapolations that some players apply to the new transfigured gems that should be confronted.

1. Transfigured Gems are not on par with Alt Quality gems. Conflating the two and implying they should be similarly hard to get is without reason. Applying this logic, we should also put all the Nova gems in Lab, because they are basically just alternate ways of doing a similar thing, which is what most of the new gems are anyway.

2. Transfigured Gems are not on par with the old Lab enchantments. Particularly helm enchants that were often significant power boosts to a main skill. While both systems involved the end of the Lab, that's where the similarities end.


As for the usual suspects proclaiming "It's your fault for choosing SSF in the first place. Just buy them, they are super cheap and easy to get.", let's delve into that logic for a moment.

So, if in trade league there is no real value to them because they are readily available (like for instance all other gems you can obtain from what's-her-face in your hideout) then why is it justified to persist with the current system? Surely moving all gems to your vendor is actually the logical thing to do?

"No, no, it's a great system for the gods of GG have designed it, how dare you suggest otherwise. Blasphemer!" (OK, I might have gotten a little melodramatic on that last bit). So, if it's such a great system, why not move all gems aside from your starting ones into it? Either it's the best thing since sliced bread or it isn't, so why not fully embrace it? Why fear change, particularly when it doesn't seem to impact you either way?

Let's take a step back and have a look at the entirety of the situation.

GG determined that Alt Quality gems and Lab enchantments were not meeting their expectations and sought a solution through a new group of T gems.

Lab is oft maligned and avoided as much as possible (and with good reason) by a large proportion of players and because enchantments were located there, GG felt it was a good fit to place T gems there instead. On the surface that seems logical, but really there's no actual reason to put them there over any other particular location aside from "No, the children are wrong. Lab is amazing content and they will love running it, or else".

GG promoted the T gems not as a straight out power boost like enchantments often were (and certainly as many of the Alt Quality Heist gems were), but as interesting versions of the main stream gems. The reality however is much like what we see with uniques. Most are utter garbage, some do some quirky interesting things and are fun to play around with, and a few are actually pretty strong.

The randomness of obtaining these gems is just GG's affinity for friction and considering the value of the gems, seems misplaced and unnecessary. It's a solution in search of a problem that doesn't actually exist.

Considering this new system has only just been implemented and wasn't in existence before, holding it up to critique seems quite justified. More so when we consider that GG didn't get all the T gems sorted in time for this league and more are coming to dilute the pool in the future and further randomise the chance of obtaining them.

Personally I think there is one simple change that could be made to make this an entire non issue. Simply make the Eternal Lab give the user a guaranteed option of transforming a skill gem into its alternate version. Leave all the other crafting options as random events because there's enough value there to keep some people returning regularly.

Personally I'd rather see them obtainable from your hideout gem vendor once a player has completed the Eternal Lab for player convenience. Not everything in the game has to be detrimental to the player.

I have to agree that making the main font option be random over 75+ (and counting) possible transfigured gems is a very poor solution. It usually is in this game, but another layer of RNG shouldn't be the solution to every design problem. This will fall apart as they add further gems to the list.


It currently takes much less effort to 20% quality a skill gem in normal lab than it does to obtain a particular transfigured gem. This seems to suggest that the grind to obtain that gem needs balancing. Someone not obtaining their skill gem by level 92 is a problem.

I'm not going to wade into the usual SSF argument we see in this game in opposition to any feedback, but the grind behind obtaining a desired transfigured gem seems rather pointless and extreme. It is friction that forces re-running labs [*] and giving players a reason to want to buy them from someone else in trade.
* The new means of adding quality to gems already does this and actually provides value for your run.

Having friction isn't necessarily the problem, but having that friction be excessive is. This grind is equivalent to or worse than farming Oni-Goroshi, yet has a far larger impact on builds in the game.




There are potential options to make it a bit less painful without throwing away grind. There are likely better (or more transformative) suggestions than these, but the point is there are options to make this grind feel less pointless and time-consuming. I hope that they work on this.

- As suggested, the straight conversion option could be made more common.
- More options could be presented to the player to narrow the odds.
- The pool of random gems could be more specific (e.g. the skill's damage types).
- The random selection could have more weighting placed on the chance of obtaining the same or a similarly-tagged gem.
- Lab seems to drop a lot of skill gems, now, including Gemcutter strongboxes. Perhaps these drops and monster drops in the lab could have some chance of dropping a transfigured gem as well.
- Maybe we could trade treasure keys for additional font options (this would be a band-aid to the problem, overly complex, and may result in making other options even rarer to compensate).
- There could be a cooldown on not receiving the same options many times, or at least not during the same lab.
- The gems could become purchaseable from Lilly after completing the Eternal lab (thwarts the economy assigning much value to certain gems; early birds make bank).
- The game is already bloated in currency types, but lab could have a chance at dropping a new regrading lens that will convert a skill gem to another transfigured gem of the same type.

[edited to clarify Eternal not newer uber versions of lab]