I don't get the Skill Gem Window

Skill Gems in PoE2 are in a very weird place - unintuitive for any newcomer, and cumbersome for veterans.

In PoE1 it made sense: you socketed Skill Gems into your gear - Green into green, blue into blue, etc... But in PoE2? You drop an uncut gem, then you can choose what skill of that level you permanently want it to change into and when you try to equip the skill, an ominous detached entity opens up called the "Skill Gem Window". That Window has zero relationship to our character, yet it introduces weird and unexplained global limitations.

- You only get to use a specific support gem once per character, even if you have multiple copies. Why? Because Skill Gem Window says so.

- You want to equip some off-color Gems? You better be aware that every equipped gem is counted towards an attribute limit (+5 to Attribute Requirement per Gem), even across different skills. Why? Because Skill Gem Windows says so.

- Changed your mind about what Skill you wanted to take this level? Well, too bad, no way to change your Skill Gem. You gotta manually grind out a new one (and hope it's of the appropriate level too...!). Why? Well, okay, this one isn't one the Window itself, but rather the underlying system.

I can't think of a single other similar ARPG that is so apprehensive about letting the player experiment with new skills. Early in Campaign you are gem-starved and can easily build yourself in a corner, later in game you have way too many and there's barely any middle ground.


That's about it. Not here to offer a good or well thought out solution, I just think the current implementation is unintuitive and needs more work.
Maybe you can even keep the system if you relate it more to our character somehow? Like the Gemlings in PoE Lore, at least they do something sensible with their gems. They don't have a floating window following them around where they socket their stuff.

So you want the game telling you that duplicate supports would be totally op?

I don't mind the new gem system, but to be honest it's probably more confusing than the original version was, which is exactly the opposite of what they were trying to accomplish

disagree
I like POE2 way, I think it stupid and weird at first sight to see POE1 skills system.

The system from POE 1 has significant advantages over this one :

It didn't break game immersion
More flexible system by allowing supports mutiple times which does make sense. If you use two spells, you might want more cast speed on both
By tying socket count to the gear piece, you did not need to worry about the fact that changing a skill changes your number of sockets. Yes, it means finding gear with the right amount of sockets becomes important, but that's why we have the jeweller's orbs
Support gems could be levelled and qualitied while they are now just reduced to applying a static modifier to your skill gem, which makes them feel very underwhelming compared to POE 1, especially when viewed in combination to their usage limit
No intensification of attribute requirements because of chromatic orbs being a thing

It also had some problems when compared to POE 2

Changing a skill or support gem required you to level it up all over again, which is not required with the new 'uncut' system
You had to actually FIND the right skill or support, again, solved by the uncut system

So i see where the change to the uncut system comes from.
However, some of the many advantages the POE 1 system had were removed while i feel they did not have to be.
Keeping it so the skills and supports still drop in their 'uncut' form would guarantuee the advantages of this, but they should not have changed the rest.
Let us slot the skills and supports into gear as before so we are not forced into a GUI to manage our skills, keep chromatic orbs in and lose the additionally introduced stat requirements on gems and separate link number from gems and tie it back to gear, where it should be.
I'd love to see them do something like that