Gemcutter's Prism's value is flawed

As stated many times before, the inherrent design behind the orb currency system is that they are their own goldsink: if you have an excess of orbs, you simply use them to craft (hopefully valuable) items, and the shortage fixes itself.

It works for pretty much all orbs, except one: the Gemcutter's Prism. The reasons are completely obvious:
1. GCPs are decently rare.
2. Quality gems are decently common, in comparison.
3. The only reason to ever USE GCPs is if you can boost one of your vital gems to 20% quality

Point 1 and 2 combined mandate that, say, a 10% quality gem is worth only between 2 and 5 GCPs, depending on the gem in question. Therefore, the result of using a GCP on a gem is ALWAYS a net loss. Always. This opposed to all other orbs where there is a decent chance of a net gain in item value; with a bit of luck using one Chaos improves your item from a 1 Chaos value to 3 Chaos or higher value.

Point 3 is pretty much the ONLY use GCPs have. Quality gems aren't too rare, but 20% quality is REALLY rare. Yet, even if you have, say, a 13% gem already and 7 GCPs to boost it to 20%, those 7 GCPs could also buy you 2 or 3 quality support gems. How likely is it that that is a better deal than getting one 20%? Pretty damn likely.

The answer? In my opinion, there's two easy ways. The first is to simply make GCPs a lot more common, to ramp up the price of a quality gem to the exact quality it has. But that's also boring. The second way is to make GCPs improve quality AT RANDOM, between 1 and 5%. If you're unlucky, it still takes you 20 to get a perfect gem. If you're lucky, it only takes you 4. That's a very decent chance at a high increase in value.

Quality gems are common? I have nearly two tabs of gems and none of them has any quality added.

What we need is a gem sink, but that's a diffrent subject.

1,5 of those tabs are quest gems, aren't they?

sounds like a good idea and on a personal level I would like to see GCP's rarity lowered. however it is the usefulness of GCP's that means they are so rare it leaves a gap for large amounts of improvement end game.

However I do agree that something should be done with the relatively low rarity of quality gems compared to the relatively high rarity of GCP's found.

my suggestion would be instead to decrease how common quality gems are to a similar rarity of unique items. This leaves quality gems almost exclusively to the end game. and makes using GCP's a worthwhile choice.

Nope.

GCPs are end-game, BIS, best everything items that start dropping from level 1.

Every character needs only a finite number of GCPs.

Thus, they need to stay rare.

Once you get into your high 60s and 70s you literally have nothing left to do but 6 link your chest (and bow if applicable), level your gems, and get your gems to 20% quality.

Those are the 3 end-end-end-game itemization steps. You can't be having GCPs falling like candy or you remove 1/3 of the end game.

I think the system is fine as is.

Quality gems are somewhat rare, perfect quality gems are extremely rare and expensive. Just like it should be. The cost of going for perfect quality should not scale linearly, you should always pay extra for that last 1%.