Is anyone actually using Vaal Gems?

I insist on using my Vaal Spark at every opportunity, solely because it looks cool. I hope they get patched at some point to be worthwhile; now that I'm in merc, I'll probably need to ditch it to make room for a CoDT setup or something.

I suspect the vaal gems have been balanced for a full party. If everybody pops theirs at the Boss, it should substantially shorten how long it takes to kill it. Solo... probably not so much. In my view those gems are more of a novelty, cause by the looks of it, the gems get about 2 uses per area if you really pay attention.

I like my Vaal Spectral Throw , 6 uses I can usually charge it enough to make it useful each map and the weapons it tosses out fly in a pattern similar to D2s Paladin Blessed Hammer so its good for hitting everything around you very hard very fast ;)

I use Vaal Molten Shell sometimes. Good for situations were I swarmed by small melee monsters. But I agree the gems are most of the time unusable, either they aren't charged, or there is no need to use it.

They need to either change to use cooldown instead of souls, or make it possible to store more than one charge at a time, and most important of all, MAKE US KEEP THE CHARGES FOR THE NEXT ZONE!

vaal gems seem lame to me. I got vaal RoA and it doesnt even work until it's charged? Do I have that right? Why not work normally until it is charged then you press shift + attack to use it's charge in a link setup?

I cant ever see using one as it does not function 95% of the time.

100% working gem @ say 3000 dps beats 5% working gem at 6000 dps all day.

I started a fresh invasion league and the first vaal gem was Vaal Burning Arrow. I like it very much (still in normal difficulty) and haven't yet linked it to anything. On the other hand, other vaal gems I have encountered need to many souls to charge up and, at my current level, they are not doing anything really. For instance, vaal immortal call: I can see it's potential, but for now I don't get any value from it and I'm afraid that in merciless you could be using it just once in an end game map. It could be invaluable against a chaos/elemental damaging uber boss, but there is one problem: can you get 5 endurance charges just about when you need to pull the trigger?

As I read through this thread, I feel the community has given quite some good ideas:
- recharge like the flask
- NEW! create a property for items to recharge the souls faster like it exists for flask (maybe to appear on that new ring that has a socket)
- keep the souls from area to area, but reset if you visit the town

I haven't thought of it till now, but you could use 2 vaal gems of the same type because the souls add up to all the vaal gems you have equiped.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

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Aim_Deep wrote:

vaal gems seem lame to me. I got vaal RoA and it doesnt even work until it's charged? Do I have that right? Why not work normally until it is charged then you press shift + attack to use it's charge in a link setup?

I cant ever see using one as it does not function 95% of the time.

100% working gem @ say 3000 dps beats 5% working gem at 6000 dps all day.

Ever play a fighting game? Super moves. Good for tactical bursts.

Same deal. Nothing more, nothing less.

but it is less, much less. last hc toon i had i had a 5L RoA with added fire, and ias. beating vaal RoA all to hell not to mention it always works.

I got one Vaal Cyclone from a a guild mate, and tried it quite a lot.

The biggest problem I got with the gem was that the damage was below what I expected, maybe if I manage to get it to a higher lvl (it's only 5 now) the damage will be nice. I can't spare a 5 or 6 link for it, but I can manage to let it use a 4 links.

I've put vaal cyclone + increase duration + added fire damage + melee physical damage and the result was a little bit over 2k DPS, while my normal cyclone hits at 11k DPS

After trying, the damage does seem to be above 2k, but I'm not sure that this gem will be the boss nuke I wished vaal gems would be, even at a higher lvl like 17 or even 20.

Other gems that I want to try are ground slam and double strike, if I do not like any of them, I'll settle for using molten shell, since that's a cast and forget skill for me ( I'll just pop it and continue to cyclone chip damage to death the boss )

Only Vaal Cold Snap for utility purpose cause mine is dual totems character.
Besides, why I can't teleport with my Vaal Lightning Warp on my dual totems character?

Huh? You teleport? With the gem that teleports monsters?