[blue]Lots of good discussion. A few thoughts.
1. We’d like to address stacks falling beyond just the loading screen. It should be okay for Taeguk to fall off in general. Maybe I want to pick up a lot of items from a Gelatinous Sire. Maybe a friend whispered me and I want to take 5 seconds to type a reply with more than one syllable. If Taeguk stacked way faster then it wouldn’t be as big a deal if those stacks fell off. I’ve seen suggestions that Taeguk only stack to 20 and the damage per stack scale instead. I also saw a suggestion that it only take 3 seconds to reach max stacks but it falls off as soon as you stop channeling. These are great suggestions keep ’em coming!
2. There’s been some suggestions (to address point #1) that the stacks simply fall off slower. This solution is workable but less exciting because it cements Taeguk as the best gem for even more builds. Legendary Gems are supposed to have niches. I know many other gems (looking at you Bane of the Trapped) are also ubiquitous – pointing at other ubiquitous gems are not a justification to make Taeguk more ubiquitous. Let’s move towards the gems having niches even if we don’t get there overnight.
3. There seems to be a lot of support to make Taeguk work with only channeled skills. This is also a workable solution. If we went this route we would have to make sure non-channeled builds that currently use Taeguk such as HotA and Cluster Arrow) have competitive alternative gems.
4. Many people have pointed out that Taeguk is used for the survivability as much as for the damage. If we adjust Taeguk or make Taeguk channeled only, we would have to make sure survivability was still readily available. This could come in the form of defensive bonuses on other gems, a reduction of monster damage at higher greater rifts, or a combination of both.[source]http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/20742464060?page=6#110[/source][/blue]
We kicked this issue around on the new podcast (coming tonight) and basically agreed with Wyatt (and most fans) that Taeguk’s has become unwieldy largely thanks to power creep. Taeguk’s is arguably too powerful for offense/defense (even though most builds don’t use it) now, but that aside, the gem worked okay back when most of us were topping out at 40 or 50 stacks. Now that players are getting LGems to rank 70 and 80 and 100+, Taeguk needs to change in function so you don’t lose the entire stack just due to a slow level load, which can take you most of an entire Greater Rift just to build back up gain.
I’m not sure which of Wyatt’s suggested changes is best (all of them?) but it’s nice Blizzard is responding to the issue and considering buffing or at least rebalancing LGems on the whole, since too many of them are either 1) everyone’s favorite, and 2) completely unused.