Additional thoughts for skill & support gem philosophy

I have been thinking a while about gems after my last thread (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3610333).

In that thread I talked about how you can kind of go 3 ways, support gems being pure customization with no power increase (essentially just creating variations of a skill), support gems providing a power increase (like 30% more damage), or a mix of both.

(Skip to the last section for the good/interesting part)

Philosophy stuff:
When I first played PoE 1 and hearing about multiple greater projectiles, I thought that meant the system was embracing the first philosophy (pure customization with no power increase). But of course that wasn't the case due to the copious amount of "30% more damage" supports, as well as the limited 6 links available (2 6 links at most in almost every build).

I realize that it is hard to design the support gems in such a way that putting multiple projectiles on any skill does not increase its power, so I think the only realistic option is that every gem increases damage or utility by some number (like 30%).

Another slightly more difficult to implement option would be having 2 types of support gems, "power" support gems, which specialize by multiplying stats (e.g. damage, AoE), and "divergent" support gems, which de-specialize by either changing how an aspect of a skill works (e.g. element conversion, more examples at the end) or by adding a flat stat to it (+ area, + damage, etc) but with a tradeoff in the cases where it would otherwise be a pure buff.
In short, power support gems would increase your power while divergent support gems would shape the skill into a different player-crafted skill.
And of course, skill gems would have "power" sockets and "divergent" sockets, with the intent being that there would be plenty of divergent sockets that may go unused if the player does not wish to use them, without a DPS penalty.
(though of course some support gems could also fall in-between, it would be your job to balance them to avoid this scenario)

I think the decision to only allow one instance of a support gem is a bandaid fix, and does not solve the underlying issue.
I don't mind the idea of SOME support gems only being able to be used once, such a support gem that says "generates a power charge on hit with this skill once every 10 seconds, 50% less damage" or "+ flat freeze buildup if this skill is cold". But I see no reason for multiple projectiles or fork, or a support gem that converts a skill to another element, to only be able to be used once.

Even better than having a generic "1 support gem" limit would be to have a "limited" support gem tag (or multiple tags), where you can only use 1 support with that specific "limited" tag.
I also don't even mind if a support gem has different modifiers for different skill gems to help balance things on dev's end (e.g. multiple projectiles having its default % less damage on all skill gems, but having even less damage on grenade) as I believe a support gem should be more about the spirit of what it does rather than the specific values (though communicating the values is still very important).

My expectations:
In short, the alluring idea of path of exile's skill system, for me, has always been that you get to create your own gem, in a way. And I feel like PoE 2 has failed to live up to that expectation, and does not currently feel worthy of being called a successor to path of exile in that sense.

Weapon restriction:
I also think the weapon restrictions on skills are not great, and I hope they are lifted in the future, especially if we get some custom animations for all of them as time goes on, and especially if we get different changes in behaviors with different weapons for the same skill (e.g. more aoe&damage with a mace but more cast time, more speed & base crit chance with a dagger for spells, etc)

Here are some examples of what I expected:

>>> Turning a DPS skill into an utility skill
- (e.g. Comet being supported to deal very little damage but apply an immense amount of freeze)
- (e.g. adding petrify to mercenary's Gas Grenade, perhaps affecting the player as well if he stands in them but making it deal extremely low damage)

>>> Turning a utility skill into a DPS skill
- (e.g. Frozen Locust gaining a ton of damage/aoe, but applying no freeze buildup)

>>> Turning a very small area skill into a huge nearly screen-wide thing
- (e.g. Ice Strike's area getting a flat area increase, even if losing a lot of damage)

>>> Turning a very wide area skill into a tiny, more potent skill

>>> Adding/replacing a debuff
- (e.g. Gas Grenade's poison cloud changing color when supported by "freeze support" or maybe "cold conversion support", making enemies that stand in the cloud freeze instead of taking poison damage)

>>> Adding/replacing a "consume debuff" mechanic
- (e.g. Falling Thunder normally consumes a power charge to do its special effect, but maybe having support gems that allow you to change the debuff you consume could work, for example consuming freeze or shock or petrify, but to balance it out it could reduce your global freeze buildup rate or shock chance)

>>> Adding more interesting meta gems that aren't spirit-based
- (e.g. "Meta Grenade", which would shoot out a grenade which then shoots out a spell, such as Comet, with a damage/effect penalty balanced on a spell-by-spell basis ideally, this would create a completely new archetype - crossbow mage :P)

>>> Putting it all together to make crazy stuff
- (e.g. imagine playing mercenary but changing the armor break machine gun skill to cause freeze buildup with fork for AoE, then modify gas grenades to slowly consume the freeze - replacing it with another debuff like shock, only to use the frost shotgun with its freeze removed to deal more cold damage instead (just to be quirky or for some other interaction)... it just sounds like what PoE should've always been)
- (e.g. putting comet on meta-grenade which would cause its fuse time to be dramatically higher and the aoe smaller, basically acting as a sort of orbital strike marker while you use your other skills to keep the enemies in place)



Of course, in an ideal world using these weird quirky and highly customized examples shouldn't be necessary, you should be able to use your skill gems without customizing them at all (with "divergent" support gems as mentioned above) and still do very good. So this shouldn't impact new player experience drastically.



I hope this illustrates what I want out of the system more than my attempts at game design.
Please make it happen, it sounds way too fucking cool not to!