Gems archive

Archive of information radically changed or removed entirely from the Gems page.

Archived Article [e] Gems archive is an archived article about material previously included in Diablo 3. However, it has currently been removed or the article contains outdated facts. The information is stored in Diablo Wiki for posterity. Please note: Links in this article lead to both updated and archived material. This article was last up to date: June 2012 Currently updated version of this article is: Gems

Gem Types

A graphic was shown at the Crafting Sanctuary panel at Blizzcon 2010 that displayed six types of gems: Rubies, Sapphires, Emeralds, Topazes, Amethysts and Diamonds. Skull gems were not shown. Diamonds and Sapphires were removed before the beta, and the planned item bonuses reapportioned to the four remaining gems.

Diamonds are being reintroduced in Reaper of Souls, the first expansion for Diablo 3.

Creating and Spending Gems

According to the official Caravan FAQ it sounds as if the Jeweler will have a way to create gems.

The Jeweler crafts gems, amulets, and rings. The jeweler can also remove gems from socketed items and can combine gems to improve their quality.

But in the official Blizzard Jeweler page his three services do not include crafting anything.

• Combine Gems
• Add Sockets
• Remove Gems

That does not rule the use of gems in other things. Bashiok alluded to other gem purposes, in a forum post in August 2010.

They have a good chance of being used in other ways aside from simply being socketed, something that would siphon them out of the economy. Maybe crafting. We like them remaining as something you have to visit the Jeweler artisan to combine. We don’t want it to be annoying or take a lot of time though. We also don’t anticipate someone visiting one with 19,000 gems looking to upgrade all the way to level 14.

Unsocketing Gem

One key fact to consider is that in Diablo III, gems (and other socketables) can be removed from sockets, by the Jeweler, without losing the gem or the item. (Though this may grow quite expensive with higher level gems.) This was not the case in Diablo II, where runes, gems, and jewels were in an item forever, or were destroyed by the unsocket recipe. This change fundamentally alters the upgrading project, since instead of gems sitting useless in your stash until they are all the way to the top level (as they did in Diablo 2), characters in Diablo III will be using their highest level gems all the time, and gaining considerable benefits from the gem before unsocketing it and combining it to create the next higher level gem, which then goes back into the item.

Gem Bonuses

L3 Emerald bonuses.

Little is yet known of the bonuses gems will provide. It's widely-assumed that the higher level gems will grant very high bonuses, and that the bonuses won't simply increase at say, +3 per level. That doesn't seem like enough of an improvement to make the months and months of collecting and upgrading required to create a L14 gem worth it.

As for what the gems will provide bonuses to, that's also unknown. Jay Wilson commented on this from Gamescom 2010:

in.Diablo.d3: Can you tell us about gem stats?

Jay Wilson: They work much as they did in D2. They have fixed stats depending on which type of item you put them into. We largely copied what D2 did, but not exactly since our itemization is different and stating is different. For example, most of our classes don’t have mana, so that wouldn’t work. But things like casting speed and strength and such are there.

Gem Levels

The full display of gems in Diablo III. Diamonds & Sapphires have since been removed

The naming convention for gems in Diablo III is similar to how it worked in Diablo II. The first four levels are the same, with "radiant" replacing "perfect" for the fifth level. After the first five there are square, round, and star gems that repeat the top three quality levels.

• Level 1 - Chipped
• Level 2 - Flawed
• Level 3 - Regular
• Level 4 - Flawless
• Level 5 - Perfect
• Level 6 - Radiant
• Level 7 - Square
• Level 8 - Flawless Square
• Level 9 - Perfect Square
• Level 10 - Radiant Square
• Level 11 - Star
• Level 12 - Flawless Star
• Level 13 - Perfect Star
• Level 14 - Radiant Star

With the GamesCom 2011 announcements came a new visual for Gem level progression, which shows different graphics for each individual gem.

Gem progression, GamesCom 2011.

Upgrading Gems

Gems were set to upgrade all along, but initially the developers planned on a 3 > 1 ratio for all levels. (This was eventually lowered to 2 > 1 for the first seven tiers, which also had their gold costs cut dramatically in Patch 1.03.)

Gems are upgraded by the Jeweler, rather than players doing it themselves with a Horadric Cube, as in Diablo 2.

Gems stack up in Diablo III, making them take up less stash space. Initially they were set to stack to 10 high in a single inventory space. This was later raised to 30 for launch, and increased again to 100 in a later patch.

Initially, gems were only going to be found at level 1-5, which would have made upgrading them all the way to level 14 quite a task. At the 3 > 1 ratio, that would have required 1,594,323 level 1 gems to make a single level 14 gem (3^(14 - 1)). The length of that becomes absurd when you consider it would have taken 664 hours of nonstop clicking simply to upgrade that many times, at one upgrade per second.

Earl version of Sapphires.

The maths isn't quite as daunting going from level 5 gems. In that case it only requires 19,683 level 5 gems to make one level 14 gem. Happily, Jay Wilson said that they're were open to tweaking the formulae, and in fact the developers did, though in reverse of the Diablo II system of rune upgrading. In that game high level runes became cheaper, and only required 2 to combine to the next level. Diablo III took the opposite approach with gems and lowered the upgrade costs in gold and just 2 > 1 for the lower 6 levels, while the top 7 still require 3 > 1.

In August 2010 Bashiok spoke on the design theory behind high level gems taking so long to create.

The gem-to-gem upgrade intent is not to have these huge gaps where you feel like you’re lame unless you have level 14 gems in every slot, but as a long term goal for the hardcore min/maxers and PvPers who are going to be playing for a long time and be able to work toward those goals. It’s something you can put a little time into just by upgrading the gems you pick up during normal play, so you’re constantly able to keep working toward the goal of crating a level 14 gem.

Also the trading game and millions of people playing for months is going to make them a lot more attainable than they may seem when throwing out numbers like 19,000.

It’s possible it may feel crappy or we need to add something to help jump gaps, or, who knows. It’s all very unproven at the moment, but we think provides a nice long term goal anyone can work toward just by killing monsters and picking up gems.

Twinking Gems

Gems do not have a Clvl requirement to use, and they are intended to be very useful as twinked items.

They don’t have a level requirement so we do intend to see them used as a way to twink new characters, or allow people to buy into gemming up a bit earlier on if they have the gold.

There may be some interesting complications with this though.

You can pay an artisan to remove the gems from an item. The last design I had heard of was that it was based on gem value, so as you socket higher level gems it becomes more expensive, but you’ll almost certainly want to unsocket gems to level them up, or swap to new gear. This may cause some unique problems for low level (non-twink) characters attempting to buy high level gems and then being unable to remove them from the socket when they get a better piece of armor (because they can’t afford it), but that may turn out to be an acceptable roadblock.

Changing Gem Bonuses

L3 Emerald bonuses.

Until the beta, little was known of the bonuses gems will provide. It was assumed that the higher level gems would grant very high bonuses, to make the huge costs of upgrading worthwhile. This turned out not to be the case, with higher level gems generally just adding another few points to various stats, but players value them anyway as every stat point helps.

What particular bonuses gems would provide varied during development, as Jay Wilson detailed during an interview at Gamescom 2010:

Can you tell us about gem stats? Jay Wilson: They work much as they did in D2. They have fixed stats depending on which type of item you put them into. We largely copied what D2 did, but not exactly since our itemization is different and stating is different. For example, most of our classes don’t have mana, so that wouldn’t work. But things like casting speed and strength and such are there.

Early Known Gem Bonuses

The first sighting of gem stats came from the Artisan Video from Gamescom 2010 . That gem was socketed into a shield (shields do not have sockets in the final game) and the hover text showed its potential bonuses:

• Weapon: +4% Casting Speed. (This bonus was changed to Critical Hit damage before release.)
• Helms: Attackers take 7 damage.
• Other: +7 dexterity

In the Diablo 2 expansion, a level 3 emerald grants:

• Weapons: 17 poison damage over 1 second
• Armor & Helms: +6 dexterity.
• Shields: +22% Poison Resistance
  • Clvl 12 required for all

The numerical bonuses (but not the type of bonus) from gems changed from D2C to D2X, but clearly there are major differences in more than the numbers. Diablo 3 grants entirely different types of bonuses, and categorizes the socketable items differently as well; helms/armor no longer share the same bonuses.

These changes are largely due to the game's different combat mechanics and character requirements, but were also somewhat required by the different itemization issues. For instance, Sapphires in helms/armor grant +mana in Diablo 2, but +mana isn't a viable bonus in Diablo 3, since only the Witch Doctor has mana for a resource. Even considering that, the changes to the Emerald are quite large. In Diablo 2, most gems provided resistance in shields and elemental damage in weapons. Emeralds in D3 do neither of those things.

More Gem Stats

More gem stats were seen in ninja photos from the Blizzcon 2010 demo. At that point the current version of the game had a whole new (and short-lived) system of attributes, so the stats were out of date, and then later came back in-date.

Gem stats from Blizzcon 2010.

Chipped (level 1) Ruby granted:

• Weapon: Spells deal 10% more damage
• Helm: +2% Chance to Block
• Other: +2 Strength

Flawed (level 2) Amethyst granted:

• Weapon: +0,03 Attacks Per Second
• Helms: +3% Movement Speed
• Other: +2 to all Attributes

As you can see, a Chipped (level 1) Ruby grants +2 Strength, while a level 3 Emerald (as seen in the Youtube video ) grants +7 Dexterity.

It is possible that it is always the bonus granted from the gem a level below it + the level of the current gem that decides how much bonus a given gem gives to an attribute. So a Emerald would give 4 (the bonus to an attribute granted from a Flawed Emerald) + 3 (the level, 3 out of 14, of the Emerald) = 7.

Another example would be a Flawed Ruby would give 2 (the attribute bonus from the Chipped Ruby) + 2 (the level of the Flawed Ruby) = 4.

A more complete formula to discover any attribute bonus simply from the level of the gem is (n * (n + 1) / 2) + 1, where n is the level of the gem (from 1 to 14).

If this theory holds true, then a maxed out Radiant Star (level 14) Ruby (or any gem that increases an attribute would give +106 Strength if it was socketed into something other than a weapon or a helm, which is a upgrade from the Flawless Star (level 13) Ruby that would give 92 Strength. (This estimation proved incorrect, with highest level gems only granting 58 attribute bonus.)