The Gem Leveling Process in Diablo III
However, Bashiok has recently told us that there are plans to have gems drop past level five, which could drastically decrease the number of dropped gems required. Even though this bit of information makes it clear that it will be considerably less of a process, as simply allowing level six gems to drop would decrease the number to around 6,500 level six gems required for a Radiant Star, and you would only need 2,000 level seven gems to create a gem of the highest level. Unfortunately, as with so many things, we must wait for more information until we know exactly what Blizzard's plans are for collecting gems, but fortunately we get to discuss how long-term getting a Radiant Star should be. So all that being said, are you glad they are making it easier to get higher level gems? If so, how much less of a process do you think it should be? Feel free to discuss your opinion in the topic above after voting in this week's poll.
Last week's poll was a resounding victory for the grinders as the vast majority of you voted that you would level all of your artisans to the maximum level. Hopefully leveling up artisans will be as interesting a goal as the last poll makes it seem. If you still want to engage in that discussion, or just want to vote in the previous poll, click the link above.
What worries me is just how much better can a gem get between radiant and 1 level down
One gem is not that much. In the end, you can have 10+ slots to fill up. You can't have getting a single radiant star take so much time.
I'd expect us to be able to find up to lvl 9 gems, probably as a frequency of 9-10 lvl 9's per hour (hopefully with some kind of gem storage bag, that holds infinite gems, as to not waste our inventory). So that's ~25 hours of play to obtain one. That way casual gamers can obtain one by themselves realistically in a few weeks, and hardcore in a few days.
You are dead wrong.
Let's say you can get 50 lvl 6 gems per hour of play. (which is ridiculous to be honest, the game would be more about picking items up and combining them then anything else) To go from a lvl 6 into 14, you would need 6561 gems. At 50/hour, it would take 131.22 hours of play to get a single gem.
Now let's go with what you want (you masochist you), "as rare as perfect gems did in D2". What was that then, about 5 perfect per hour of play, depending on what you were doing? You'd need 1312.2 hours just to get one gem. 54.675 days of playing straight (with no sleep, or anything BUT playing D3) for one gem. A full year of playing (again with no sleep, or anything else) would only yield 6.675 gems. Let's add some sleep and other-things time into that, shorten our play time down to 6 hours per day. 218.7 days for 1 gem. Basically, you'd be lucky if you got a gem after playing the game for a year, 6 hours a day.
That's just not realistic. People would probably kill themselves trying to get the damn thing... Seriously.