Amber Gem Scaling is the Same/constant for 20%, 30% and 40% gems

Hi,I kow youve been testing the amber gem on PTR. Could you lmk what the results are for scaling? In live server currently the higher the gem the lower the damage im doing. Thanks

all i know is that i do a lot more damage with 20% amber gem than with the highest tier one. and that shouldn’t be the thing. hence it’s bugged.

if it’s not bugged, then it’s false advertising. and they should just delete the higher tier gems because they aren’t an upgrade at all. they aren’t any more useful than a pet rock at this point.

Is this on PTR?

Haven’t tested anything other than 50% gem on PTR. AGS gives you stacks of all the 50% gems to test with but not any other types and I’m not that interested in playing so much on PTR to go find all the other types.

thanks

base 1090 crit 1379 with amber 2
base 878 crit 1112 with amber 4

pristine gem does ~24% less damage

Thanks

PSA: Stop using mobs for testing!
Near every fort in every zone, there is a camp. In that camp there are dummies. Please do your testing with that as is much more comparable between tests and also they have fixed damage reduction / armor / whatever.

I believe the dummies scale with your Level and amour type as well

I redo some testing on the PTR server.
I only tested 20% and 50% gems. Mainly INT Gems.

Tested on dummies, I plotted the damage done based on how many attributes you allocate on INT, using 20% and 50% INT conversion gems.

From top to bottom:

  • Purple is the normal damage of the weapon when scaling with STR.
  • Blue is the Total Damage (Normal damage + Gem Damage) for 50% INT Gem.
  • Yellow(-ish?) is the Total Damage (Normal damage + Gem Damage) for 20% INT Gem.
  • Green is the Gem Damage only, for 50% INT Gem.
  • Red is the Gem Damage only, for 20% INT Gem.

Base damage remained constant as weapon scales off STR not INT.
The dashed line is at 150 INT, when the perk +15% More Elemental Damage procs, so we see an increase in damage.

This was tested using the exact same weapon. No perks altered the results and the damage recorded was consistent after every hit. The last INT perk (more damage against full HP target) was ignored by doing damage first.

Couldn’t test 30% and 40% gems due to workstation problems on PTR (all of them are lv2)


In my opinion, there are one single bug: being how a 20% gem does more total damage than a 50% one and how the 50% gem outdamages the 20% one after the 150 INT landmark. This behavior is the same for FOC Gems but it doesn't get "corrected" at any attribute bracket.

Other comments in this thread bring other points as bugs but I rather read them as misconceptions from what the gems actually do. As the tooltip wording is poor one can only assume things.

Some says that the better the gem, the more the scaling but they expect to be reflected on total damage. Others says that the weapon itself should scale with INT, like a fire staff would do.

As far as I can desglose from the tooltip itself, the intended behavior is that a percent of weapon damage is taken out and turned into elemental damage, which scales based on int. That is happening as showed by the green and red lines in the graph.
As a percentage is taken out from the damage, the total (the 100%) will always be the same no mater the % of the gem.

So the only advantage would be do more damage to a mob whos weak against that element type. I tested this briefly against the same Ancients mob using a Hatchet, an Ice Gauntlet and a Warhammer with 20% an 50% Light conversion and the result was a 12% more total damage with the 50% gem at most. Some giving 8% more or even 5% less.

Given how little this % was, I might say that there’s another bug but it isn’t clear from the tooltip description. 12% more damage for a T5 gem is useless in every scenario (even when the gem is scaling off STR). So I see no reason at all for using any other than a 20% gem, no matter what you are doing.


I personally believe that the problem lies in the actual scaling of each gem and that it must mirror the weapon scaling mechanics in a way. Currently, the more base damage a weapon has, the bigger the return of each attribute on weapon damage. Gems does not do that, instead, the elemental damage alone between different gems tier gives a "flat" amount of damage (because is taken as percentage from the base weapon damage). One would expect that more INT in a better gem translates into a damage curve being more positive sloped than a lower tier gem.

Some here have stated precisely that as the bug, but it ain’t clear from the tooltip if that is the intended effect of the gems or if just giving us at most 12% more damage is what the devs had in mind.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

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YellowMembrillo

I love the analysis, but I disagree with a few of the conclusions.

  1. The “Total” dmg lines should be within +/- 2 dmg. This is due to rounding. Most likely the before/after 150 int isn’t actual difference in scaling as it is just rounding issues.

  2. Your tests only had pure INT builds. If you add some STR to the tests (ex. 50-100 str) you will see that the total damage decreases as the gem quality goes up.

  3. Previous tests with STR suggest that:

  • At 80/20 split the Phys portion of the weapon damage gets scaling from 80% of STR, while the Nature portion gets scaling from ~28% of FOC.
  • At 50/50 split the Phys portion of the weapon gets scaling from 50% of STR, while the Nature portion Remains at ~28% of FOC.
    Based on this STR scaling observation - The calculation for Physical damage does in fact look at what % of base is attributed to that Stat, and then this % is applied to the scaling calculation.
    This however does not happen for FOC, as it’s stuck at some arbitrary %, which is not tied to how much of the weapon base has been converted.

The worst case scenario is if you have 145 STR and 155 FOC (similar to the paladin builds). This is where you will see a very large drop in total damage as you go from 20% gem to 50% gem.

  1. Last time I used those dummies, I got some very strange armor scaling when using low GS weapons. I don’t trust the dummies, which is why I stick to repeating tests on either the same mob (letting it go into “retreating” to regen hp) or on lvl 1 bunnies that have no armor.
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bump. can i get a refund on the pristine ambers i bought for my weapons due to misleading info? thanks devs.

The wolves outside WW are just perfect for amber gem testing. If you get them to attack you once and hit them once in the face they will give white numbers for both your base attack number and your FOC nature attack number.

Sounds spot on to the few tests I have run.

I think YellowMembrillo got some things wrong in his conclusions.

Its confirmed by own developers that its not working as intended.
Idk why yall doing ramdom numbers claiming to be right.

I was claiming the exact opposite.

And I’m gonna need for the source of the devs confirming it bugged. As stated it my post, there’s doubt on what is exactly bugged and what was the intention of devs behind gem functionality.

As far as I remember devs confirmed “not working as intended”, so if we are referring to the same source, then is pretty useless as it leaves us in the same place.

As you can see, they are not saying the gems are not working as intended but clearly state that this Amber gem is not working “correctly”.

It’s not rocket science and unlike the lemoni video there is no need for convoluted maths to try and recreate code or whatnot

Concept is simple…

each weapon uses a base stat, just open you attributes page to see which weapon uses which stat.

Gems allow for a portion of your total damage to be converted to a different damage type that uses a different stat than what the weapon you have normally uses.

lower lvl gems convert less of the damage to this new type, higher lvl gems convert more damage to the new type.

This is suppose to mean as you use higher level gems you do less “base damage” or the damage based on the tradition stat the weapon uses and more damage based on the new stats the gems provides.

As you use higher level gems you are suppose to do more overall damage because even though you do less damage based on the tradition base stats you do more with the new stat which you are suppose to have lots more of thus more damage overall.

As a healer (using lifestaff GA) with lots more points into FOC than say str my amber gems are suppose to make my first white damage number become lower (this one is based of str) and the converted damage, my 2nd white numbers, is then suppose to scale off of FOC. Since my foc is much higher it is suppose to cause more damage overall.

The simplest way to check this is on mob, not dummies, that have no resistance or weakness to either the first or second damage numbers.

As soon as your gems stats (FOC for Amber) is greater than the original stats of a weapon is high then it shoud be doing more damage.

Example if you have 200 focus and 52 str sticking in an amber gems is suppose to make your GA damage go up overall and up high for each tier you step up that gem not go down.

And yes on this can vary depending on mobs which is why you test this on the same mob that is giving white damage numbers for both types of damage to eliminate that variance.

yep, we are on the same boat. Devs confirmed it as “bugged” yet we don’t know which part is bugged.

For the amber gems it is taking away the damage from the base or traditional stat, str for GA, that part is working however the higher tier gems are not giving you the increased damage in the second stats.

Therefore a 20% gems works fine, it takes the portion of your str damage (first damage number) and shoves it over to foc and then that second number scales off foc…

however

when using higher lvl gems the first part works it takes more str damage away from your first number like it is suppose to but doesn’t add the full amount taken away to the second number…this part seems to stay stuck at 20% instead of increasing to 30 or 40 or 50.

That’s what our test show.

The only way to test this properly is on mob with no weakness or resistance to either the first damage numbers or the second ones.

Again the dummies are not good to test on.

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So a workaround Ive noticed for us healers is that when I respec’d attr to 230 str & 150 foc, it seems to create a good dps/heal balance. I am hitting 700 base +700 nature and critting for 950 base + 950 nature which is way more than before. I am using the 50% gem as well. When I used the 20% gem I was hitting 1000 base and 300 nature. I’m still able to heal just as good as before as well. Lifestaff dmg did go down but I really only use it for heals. But if I run full 320 focus with 50% gem I’m only hitting 300 base +400 nature and critting for 500 base + 600 nature on my GA with 50% gem… Its quite strange.