Last season, Diablo 4 completely redesigned all the gems in the game. Before Season 13, most gems were not that useful, especially for weapons, where emeralds were the only real option.
The Lord of Hatred expansion heavily expanded on this system, as now every gem color comes with powerful multipliers for a specific type of elemental damage.
Not only that, but two additional tiers of gems were introduced to the game – Horadric and Flawless Horadric. These new tiers require the Horadric Cube to create: five Grand gems combine into Horadric, and five Horadric gems become a Flawless Horadric gem.
For most players, getting even a Grand gem is very time consuming, since it requires one million gem fragments. Horadric gems are even more challenging to make, with a base Horadric needing 5 million fragments, while the flawless variant demands a staggering 25 million.
The hunt for these high end gems was especially difficult last season, when gem fragments were scarce and hard to come by. Season 14 introduced a lot of buffs to make the gem crafting a lot more accessible, so now players can get millions of fragments with a single Escalating Nightmare Dungeon run.
Despite the buffs, one major problem still remains. Whenever you salvage a gem, you get back exactly as many fragments as it took to craft it. This 1:1 formula ensures that players don’t lose resources and are free to switch the gems around as they please.
In Season 13 players learned the hard way that this no longer applies. Low-tier gems still followed that formula, but starting from Grand and above, adventurers would only receive a small fraction of resources back, resulting in severe losses of gem fragments.
Season 14 resolved this issue with Grand gems, but it still persists for Horadric gems. As it stands now, if you salvage a Horadric gem of any kind, you will only get one million fragments back.
For Horadric gems, this represents a 5:1 loss, since it took five million fragments to make. But the real problem is Flawless Horadric gems. Anyone who happens to salvage them will be very disappointed to receive only a small fraction of the fragments back, as this highest tier of gems costs 25 million fragments. In other words, players get 25 times fewer fragments than they invested.
To make matters even worse, there is currently nothing in the game that can warn players about this very unfavorable conversion. There are no tooltips or warnings to indicate what will happen, so players who aren’t informed about this are often in disbelief.
This has happened to many people already, and some of them went to social media to voice their frustration. One Reddit user, u/CobaltKiller27, made a post about their experience.
Season 14 has received several hotfixes over the past few weeks, but this issue still hasn’t been addressed.
