Gems in Season 14: the ten times ladder and the Horadric tier : schillman.se

The ladder

Six tiers, each ten times the last

There are seven gem types and six quality tiers: Crude, Chipped, then a tier with no prefix at all, then Flawless, Royal and Grand. The cost to craft each one is identical across all seven types, and it is a straight power of ten:

Crafting cost per tier. Identical for all seven gem types.
Tier	Fragments	Gold	Also needs
Crude	10	1,000
Chipped	100	10,000
No prefix	1,000	100,000
Flawless	10,000	1,000,000
Royal	100,000	10,000,000	30 Forgotten Souls
Grand	1,000,000	10,000,000	300 Forgotten Souls

The consequence people miss A Grand gem is a million fragments of one colour. Fragments do not pool across types, so a stash holding two hundred thousand of each of five colours is a stash with no Grand gem in it and no realistic path to one. Pick the colour your build actually wants and funnel everything into it, and treat the other six as salvage.

Effects

What each type does, by socket

The same gem does three different things depending on where you put it, which is the part that trips people up when they socket by colour rather than by slot:

The seven gem types and their effect in each socket location.
Gem	Weapon	Armour	Jewellery
Ruby	Fire damage	Strength	Fire Resistance
Sapphire	Cold damage	Willpower	Cold Resistance
Emerald	Poison damage	Dexterity	Poison Resistance
Topaz	Lightning damage	Intelligence	Lightning Resistance
Amethyst	Shadow damage	Barrier Generation	Shadow Resistance
Diamond	All Damage Multiplier	All Stats	All Resistances
Skull	Physical damage	Healing Received	Physical Resistance

Diamond is the one to think about twice. In a weapon it is an all damage multiplier rather than a damage type, so it does not care what your build's element is, which makes it the default weapon gem for anything that does not have a single dominant damage type to feed.

Above Grand

Horadric gems, and what they actually cost

Grand is not the top. Above it sit Horadric gems and then Flawless Horadric gems, crafted in the Horadric Cube rather than at the Jeweler, and this is where the season's gem chase actually ends.

The widely reported recipe is five Grand gems of one type into one Horadric gem, and five Horadric gems into one Flawless Horadric. Working that back down the ladder, a single Flawless Horadric gem is on the order of 25 million fragments of one colour, alongside roughly 750 Forgotten Souls and 250 million gold. In return, a Flawless Horadric gem in your main weapon is reported to give around a 32% multiplicative bonus to that weapon's primary damage type, which is the largest single gem effect in the season.

Treat these numbers as unconfirmed The six tier ladder, the effects table and the fragment costs above all come from Maxroll's gem resource. The Horadric and Flawless Horadric numbers do not: that page documents the tiers only up to Grand. The figures in this section are consistent across several secondary community sites, which is worth something but is not the same as a primary source, and they are exactly the kind of number that gets tuned in a patch. Read the recipe off your own Horadric Cube before committing 25 million of anything, and tell me if it reads differently.

Fragments

Where the fragments come from

Gem fragments drop from slaying elite enemies, from the Tree of Whispers cache, from ore veins in the open world, and from ordinary chests. That is the ambient trickle, and at a million fragments per Grand gem, ambient is not a plan.

The deliberate version is the Gem Reserve affix on Nightmare Dungeons. Maxroll's current ranking puts an Escalating Nightmare Dungeon with Gem Reserve at the top, a plain Nightmare Dungeon with Gem Reserve next, and Seer's Reach runs after that. This is the same machinery covered on the Escalations page: the Reserve affixes turn a dungeon into a vending machine for one material, and gems are the material where that matters most, because no other source moves numbers of this size.

Practical order

If you only do one thing

Choose your colour first, before you farm anything. Then run Escalations with the Gem Reserve affix and put every fragment of that colour into the ladder, salvaging the rest without sentiment.

Do not start a Royal or a Grand on a build you are not sure you are keeping for the season. The ten times ladder means that decision costs ten times more at every tier you climb, and a Grand gem in a build you abandoned in week two is the single most expensive object you can own.

The Season 14 Farming Ledger has the gem decisions as tickable items, including the budgeting one, which is the one that actually bites.

Jeweler, Gems and Socketing, Maxroll, for the six tiers, the seven types and their per socket effects, the full crafting cost ladder including Forgotten Soul requirements, and the fragment sources.
Optimal Farming Guide, Maxroll, for the current ranking of gem fragment farming methods.
The Horadric and Flawless Horadric gem recipe, cost and damage figures are community reported across several secondary guide sites and are not confirmed on a primary source. They are labelled as such in the text above.