So I was thinking, perhaps you could Vaal Orb a Gem and have it change its color.



Some counterpoints:



"Why change the gem color, you can just change the slot?"



1) Changing a slot color isn't always cheap. I for example need 4 off-colors for my build. That's a lot of Chromas!



2) You can't always change your slot colors! What about that nice looking 6L Carcass Jack with a nice corrupted implicit? But man, those colors are terrible! That's a lot of Vaal Orbs (not to mention a high level Vorici) needed to fix that up!



"No ones going to buy that."



1) There would be plenty of buyers for gems that were meta. The colors would be around 1C, the price of the Vaal Orb. 120 Chromas is 1C right now. In certain situations it will be cheaper to buy a corrupted gem instead.



2) White Gems?! Maybe. Maybe not. But if it's white, that'd make for a nice leveling gem. Not having to worry about getting the right slot color is an ease of convenience.



"The Technology isn't there!"



Maybe not. Maybe it is? Maybe if it's desired enough they'll consider adding it.



-Bonus : Prismatic Eclipse?! Any gem could be a white gem! Or a Red, or Green, or Blue! The possibilities. Last bumped on Jun 19, 2016, 2:42:35 PM Posted by

Madolinn

on on Quote this Post

Eh, i dont know how i feel about that. Its already pretty hard to get a 21 gem in most cases and they made the leveling process harder which directly affects how they made 19-20 harder to level gems.



If it were weighted right against -1 level, -1-8% quality, and Vaal versions i could be okay with it. Currently 3 bad things can happen in comparison to two, +1 or +quality (+quality is worse than +1 generally).



The other problem with it though would potentially be how it affects chromes. If everyone has white gems chromes become useless in alot of cases, which also has a big impact on the market of hard to obtain colors as well.



I think it would have a more negative impact than a positive one overall. Last edited by Tin_Foil_Hat on Jun 18, 2016, 12:05:42 AM Posted by

Tin_Foil_Hat

on on Quote this Post

Actually iirc the way they made the leveling process harder was by increasing the exp penalty via formula



Which means it is not harder to level gems, since gems are not affected by exp penalties. In fact it is even (relatively) easier to level gems, since you are more likely to spend time to content with higher exp penalty to you, so your gems get more exp by the time you reach the same level as you would have before.



I think gems should not be able to turn white though. If anything they turn into a random (different) colour so as not to saturate the chance of vaals doing nothing (we'll never know how many white sockets you got on that tabula :P)



Aside from that I think the OP's idea is nice though i think chromes are not really a big problem imo since i think players should be partially planning around that from the start. It hurts more when you want like 4 off colours and then by miracle get 5 off colours that you can't use... lol Posted by

biyte

on on Quote this Post

If you could change the color or skill gems then the most logical option would be to remove Vaal Orbs from the game. No point in having White Sockets if skill gems can change colors. Just because corrupting an item is permanent doesn't mean they should allow you to bypass the results. Posted by

XerxezBreak

on on Quote this Post

White gem is too OP, unless the chance is like really, really low. Unlike the +1 level and quality corruption, if you want to get a particular gem to change color, you don't have to wait till it's level 20 or/and has 20% quality. You can just get a bunch of gems from vendor and vaal them.

To balance this, the color corruption will have to be a really, I mean REALLY small chance. It creates another vaal orb sink, that I don't think w really need and I don't think it will feel right.



I do agree that there should be a way to change gem color, it's something that could be really useful for non conventional builds, like melee CI for example, where it's night impossible to get the proper gem colors unless you go for hybrid gear. Perhaps if such option was behind some challange similar to uber atziri/labyrinth and the gem would be forced to be stuck at level 1. Also probably not white color, but just another color of the spectrum. Last edited by lolPLSiGOTthis on Jun 18, 2016, 7:06:53 AM Posted by

lolPLSiGOTthis

on on Quote this Post

I'd love to see corruptions for changing a skill gem to be one of the other two colours for socketing.



It'd be potentially helpful for leveling if you don't want to use a Tabula Rasa and one was on the market for moderately cheap. The case where it would be very helpful is for certain builds where you need to be able to swap gems around: e.g. Curse support builds that need to change their curses to match their party's composition.



I don't think this would deter using Chromatics on actual items.



For one it will cost vaal orbs and many gems to get the colour you want, which may very well be more expensive than just using some chromatics on your item. The case this would beat out using Chromatics on a normal chest is where you need a half-dozen thousand orbs to get your off-colours. However, since this would be a corruption it means you cannot get a 21/20 or 20/23 on those gems... so you'd still need to use Chromatics to min-max your build anyway. And if you just spam vaal orbs on random gems to get your off-colour gem you'd be unable to add any quality once you get the corruption you needed.



The only problem I see is with gems themselves. Every gem has its own unique graphic. Meaning every skill gem's graphic in the game would need to be duplicated and made in two additional colours plus white. That could be easy or difficult depending on if they have the source files sitting around still for older gems. Posted by

Nuro

on on Quote this Post