Those gems are really sad, they don’t work because of bugs, but anyway they didn’t seem to work well as gems probably rings with similar effects would have made more sense.
In my opinion, at the effect strength levels in the beta, gems were strong, often even stronger than enchantments.
The white items fall behind not because of their effectiveness but because of their lack of flexibility/possibility, The problem is that there are too few effects and therefore you can’t make interesting builds.
In my opinion, ideally the gems should work as I explain here: The RNG Problem, Enchantment System & Gem System “TOGETHER” (BETA)
But given the changes that have been announced for the embers ( New Embers Concept! Feedback - #14 by Lombix_4 ) it is very unlikely that they will choose the solution I propose in that Topic.
In any case I think they would increase the interesting effects you can get through the gems, by fixing gems that are not interesting and adding new gems.
The fact is that the old bow is not adequate as a “bow”, but as a secondary weapon it only needed to balanced.
I think it makes sense that when they add crossbows the one-handed ones are secondary weapons similar to the old bows while the two-handed ones are two-handed weapons like the new bows.
@thomasmahler Talked about Orbs and Pipes as secondary weapons, Pipes were supposed to be used for Buffs (presumably that’s not their role anymore since “Body” runes exist) while the orbs are probably used to cast attack Runes in ways similar to the old bow.
The idea of having a short weapon like: knives, parrying dagger, throwing knives, Wakizashi, etc. as a secondary off-hand weapon has been proposed several times.
I don’t know, I tried it and found it less satisfying than fire.
I know there are specific runes that make it strong because they make it proc multiple times on the same hit, but I’ve never used it this way so I don’t know exactly what needs to be fixed, but it seems to me that in normal use it is already weaker than fire so the specific cases in which it is too strong should be nerfed but in other cases it should also be buffed a bit.
Then the fact that fire doesn’t work in shallow water is a bit strange, it’s a giant middle finger and I found it quite problematic you lose like 25% of the damage just because you decided to use fire, I understand the logical connection but it doesn’t seem fun to me especially against bosses.