Design philosophy issues with support gem (and skill gem) design

Jonathan mentions "specializing" and "despecializing" stats during an interview from early 2024. The relevant portion lasts about 2-3 minutes.
https://youtu.be/UvyR3vn741c?t=1362

Specifically, he mentions "support gems should be de-specializing", or in other words, have more additive stats in general rather than multiplicative.

I have gone through all support gems currently in PoE 2 and have categorized them:
- 123 specializing gems
- 37 specializing gems with no condition or tradeoff
Out of a total of 197 support gems.




To be clear:
- A very large amount of specializing gems are extremely boring stat multipliers with no tradeoffs or conditions.
- A few of the conditions/tradeoffs in specializing gems prevent you from making interesting choices (for example: extra damage of 1 type and less damage of other types).
- A few specializing gems may still allow for fine-tuned customization (even "boring" stat ones, for example: more damage and less attack speed).

In other words:
Specializing gem-specific stat buffs still have a place in the game.



However, this brings to light a design philosophy issue:
What is the purpose of the support gem system?
- On one hand, you have specializing supports, which are usually a pure power increase.
- On the other, you have despecializing and customization supports, which offer ways to turn an existing skill into something different - a way to craft your own skill gem, in a manner of speaking.

And yet, both of these categories are competing for the same slots.
It is hard to create despecializing or customization gems that can compete with a multiplicative 30% damage boost.
In practice, this means that players will almost always optimize for stat gains at the expense of more original skill gameplay modification.



Another issue is that skill gems often come pre-supported:
A lot of skill gems feel like they come "pre-supported", for example:
- Explosive / Flash / Gas / Voltaic / Oil / Cluster grenade
- Fragmentation rounds / Armour piercing rounds / High velocity rounds
- Permafrost bolts / Galvanic shards
- Falling thunder / Storm Wave
- Ice Strike / Tempest Flurry
(... among many others)

Let's take grenades as an example:
- Cluster grenade feels like "Grenade -> Wildshard on expire support - Fire conversion support"
- Flash grenade feels like "Grenade -> Blind support - Overpower support"
- Explosive grenade feels like "Grenade -> Fire conversion support"
- Voltaic grenade feels like "Grenade -> Lightning conversion support - Electrocute support"
- Oil grenade feels like "Grenade -> Fire exposure support"
- Gas grenade feels like "Grenade -> Expire to gas support"

I understand the benefits of this approach: it is simply impossible to balance a support gem with a static number and have it work well with many skill gems. It is also much easier to give these "skill bundles" to a new player.
However, I feel like this severely limits possibilities, and defeats the point of having such a system in the first place.
I genuinely hope you do not continue going into this direction by just adding 50 divergent versions of skill gems, rather than going with a more modular system by slowly allowing more support gems to be used with more basic skill gems.



The last issue I want to address with skill gems is that a lot of them are designed to be used in very specific ways:
- "Frozen Locus" and "Wave of Frost" are designed to be used while enemies are chasing you or stationary
- "High Velocity rounds" is designed to be used after armor break

There are no (or very few) support gems that could:
- Modify "Frozen Locus" / "Wave of Frost" player's movement by making it push you forward, or to a side, or to a player-specified direction (not to mention those skills, like all melee skills, should not full-movement lock you and instead allow slight WASD movement with a speed penalty mid-air)
- Modify "Frozen Locus" to be cast from a distance (with the appropriate balance), converted to fire, or any other crazy ideas you might think for a skill.



My suggestion:
First, I believe support gems should have 2 categories:
- "Power" support gems, which specialize existing stats
- "Divergent" support gems, which add new stats/effects or modify/convert existing stats
Skill gems should have 2 support gem slot types according to those support gem types:
- Power sockets
- Divergent sockets
Other systems could interact with those values in the future.
To make it easy on new players and to smoothly transition the current state of the game, skill gems should "contain" divergent support gems in a way that is inaccessible to new players.
For example, "Explosive Grenade" would inherently contain the "Fire conversion support" divergent support gem but have it be invisible unless viewed in a specific way, instead only showing power sockets to players.

Second, support gems should have different values for different skill categories:
Certain support gem values would make no sense with different skill gems.
For example, Flash Grenade has a 400% stun buildup modifier, yet the Overpower support gem provides 50%.
Therefore, certain 'purposes' of skills should have different support gem values.
In general, if a skill is modified to be pure utility, it should receive more bonus from non-damage sources, and the same would be true for other categories.

I do not claim to know every category that should receive exceptions from the default support gem values.
And yes, it does sound like a balancing nightmare for the devs - but that has always been PoE 1's strength: it first sets up a modular system which creates an insane amount of possibilities, and then tries to balance them all at the cost of making some possibilities not be viable.

In the extreme case, every support gem would have a different value for every possible skill and support gem combination. This is obviously impossible to achieve given the sheer number of possibilities, however the fact that it is theoretically possible is very similar to PoE 1's skill tree philosophy.



Some cool examples to finish:
With only the examples given in the post this far, this means you could create skills such as:
- "Toxic cluster spark": Spark -> Wildshard on expire support - Expire to gas support
- "Flash meteor": Comet -> Fire conversion support - Blind support
Note that I am giving the skills a new name: this is not necessarily a needed feature, but could be achieved through an automated system (e.g. Comet with a conversion support changes the base name, other divergent support gems add affix words, support gem combinations combine their words into one, etc).

With additional examples:
- "Electrifying-mist grenade": Grenade -> Gas on expire support - Electric effect conversion support
- "Reversed thunder": Falling thunder -> Rewind support (projectiles spawns at end point and travel backwards)
- "Petrification wall": Fire wall -> Petrify conversion support (could affect players with petrify if they touch the wall and remove all damage from the wall)

The list goes on. The point would be to convert all of your skill gems and divergent skill gem ideas into support gems, which would necessarily create an insane amount of combinations with much less work per possibility (besides the balancing and interactions, of course).
This of course means each possibility would be much harder to balance, but you can ease into this philosophy by slowly increasing the number of divergent support gem sockets per skill gem (starting at 1-2 and going up from there, with some skills having less or more divergent sockets).

This is of course a daunting change (and I have spared you the details on skill visuals changing procedurally, too), but I believe if there is any time to make that change it is either now, or PoE 3.
Personally, I don't feel like PoE 2 has innovated enough in terms of player-facing system changes, so I believe the right decision is to do it now.