05-29-2003, 10:01 PM
Quote:Which brings me, finally, for god's sake, to my point: If what Isolde hinted at is correct, that the 3-socket cube sword trick will work for all items, then my hope may yet be warranted.
snip
Quote:The proof is that chipped gems are nearly a viable trade item now. Some people do accept them.
I don't mind the chipped gem economy, but I'd rather see it as a perfect gem economy. If the 3 chipped gem + [weapon] recipe was altered to require perfect gems, I think it would make for more balanced trading.
The reason for this is that it makes no sense to make the common-as-dirt chipped gems have more value than their upgraded counterparts. Any low level character can have a full stash of them by the end of Normal Difficulty, and trade them for some gear they would never find until much later in the game through normal playing.
Perfect gems are comparitively much harder to come by, allowing for saner trading. The only real way to gather a lot of perfect gems is to gather up those flawless gems and cube them up (or search for gem shrines). This takes much more time than slumming Act 1 Normal for chips. It's also quite reasonable for anyone to do, given enough play-time. Just collect them as you naturally play, and you'll build up a nice stash of them.
Chipped gems should really have little value. They should be useful for starting characters, but that's about it. I mean, how ridiculous is it for people to center entire character BUILDS around finding chipped gems? Gogo Holy Fire Paladin.
In conclusion, I hope the recipe is altered to use perfect gems with ANY weapon and grant 3 sockets. Heck, maybe even have it grant anywhere from 1-3 sockets. If the chance to get 3 sockets was pretty low, people would be cubing things all the time, making the perfect gem even more valuable.
-DeeBye