Vendor Recipe to Upgrade Skill Gem to 20% Removed?

I haven't played PoE in a few releases. I just tried to upgrade a level 20 skill gem with 0% quality to a level 1 skill gem with 20% quality. This vendor recipe still works for support gems but not for skill gems. I'll guess that GGG removed this vendor recipe when they removed the alternate quality options on gems.

My question is why did GGG remove this nice vendor recipe?

Is there some new way to get gemcutter prisms? I know about the vendor recipe to sell 40% total quality gems to get a gemcutter prism. Is there another way besides drops? It takes too long to get 20 gemcutter prisms using just drops and 40% total quality gem vendor recipe.

They did it because they added new lab crafts. You can easily add quality to gems there. Also you can get gcp in sanctum I believe but I don't remember which ilevel

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NasusPodInta wrote:

They did it because they added new lab crafts. You can easily add quality to gems there. Also you can get gcp in sanctum I believe but I don't remember which ilevel

Thanks! I'll check that out.

edit: I thought that you meant that they added some new crafting options to the hideout crafting bench that can be discovered in lab. That's apparently not the case.

I'm now guessing that when one finishes an endgame lab that there's a crafting option for quality on skill gems added in the last room of the lab?

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Turtledove wrote:

I'm now guessing that when one finishes an endgame lab that there's a crafting option for quality on skill gems added in the last room of the lab?

Correct. Fairly common to get a gem crafting option post-lab for quality.
The labyrinth enchants are now exclusive gem-related enchants, and no longer associated with gear.

Nasue is wrong on the reason behind the change: The stated reason they removed the 20%q recipe is because they completely overhauled the quality bonuses on gems to be baseline more powerful and impactful, and therefore more valuable. They removed the 20%q recipe to make getting 20% more cumbersome and therefore more "valuable". It didn't exactly have anything to do with them adding the lab quality enchants, although that was a byproduct of their decision process.

as long as you can still 'flip' support gems, it wont really be a problem to use 20 gcp on your couple of active skills. you dont even normally flip your gems until character level 80, you should have some gpc by then.

i think they wanted quality to matter.


before quality on skills gave say 10% increased damage, now it gives a mod that will usually act like a source of more damage. example split arrow fires 9 arrows at max level and then quality now gives it an extra 4 arrows which is way more impactful than 10% increased damage getting added to your existing 600% increased damage from other sources.


plus i feel like everyone who kept doing gcp recipe had 100s of gcps just sitting there.

i think they just wanted gcps to matter, quality on your skill to matter, it had all slipped into a fairly meaningless bleh state over the years.