A player's guide to home-made cruels

[Crystalion]

Excellent post. Here's two bits of trivia that might be of interest...

If one uses the 3 perfect gem recipe to reroll, which depends on ilvl, one should currently be slightly paranoid because mlvls are slightly messed up in nightmare and hell (the area scaling code to make "guest monsters" work right turns out to also be *lowering* the levels of monsters that it should never have touched, which in turn means their ilvl drops are lower than d2data might lead one to believe). The thread at AB is: Monster levels adjusted both up and DOWN.

Also of special interest are the wands and orbs which can be cubed for

In another AB post Ruvanal corrected my assumption that olvl of 25 on the chippy reroll would prevent wands/scepters/staves/orbs from having clvl req 30 skills. He says that olvl 25 allows the fifth (final) tier for skills. If I understand this correctly, then using chipped gems to recube orbs, regardless of the qlvl, is potentially very worthwhile (what sorc wouldn't prefer a great set of +skills 1h instead of 2h, eh?--and you can't buy or gamble orbs so this looks like the only reasonable option).