What are your impressions?

[Elric of Grans]

First time through the game, gold is at more of a premium than crafting materials, so selling excess blue or even gold items may be more useful than melting them down for crafting materials that will be obsolete by the 2nd difficulty level.

I heard that, when you start higher difficulty levels, you can upgrade your older crafting materials to the new ones. Can you please confirm? I had been hoarding them for this reason, but will change my approach if that is the case.