A player's guide to home-made cruels

[Brista]

A few things have changed in 1.10 and it's useful to know of a number of ways you can use the cube to turn that spiffy elite blue weapon your character just found into a Cruel

This is not an exclusive list, there are other recipes that can produce Cruel, for instance crafts, but it's a good place to start

First you need a blue or a socketed weapon to turn into a Cruel. If you really wanted a white weapon you found to be Cruel you could use this recipe or a Larzuk quest to socket it

RAL + AMN + 1 perfect amethyst + normal weapon => socketed weapon


All of the following recipes remove ethereality

For swords there is a special recipe:
one ruby (any grade) + 4 health potions+ sword => blue sword of the leech
This recipe won't work with Colossus Swords and Colossus Blades

If you have a blue weapon (including a sword if you like) use the following recipe on your first attempt:

3 flawless (any colour) + blue weapon => socketed blue weapon

If you have a socketed weapon, even a rare or magic one, use these:

3 chipped (any colour) + socketed weapon => socketed blue weapon
3 standard (any colour) + socketed weapon => socketed blue weapon

After the first craft you have a socketed blue weapon that will work in any of the "three of a kind" recipes

All of these recipes can produce a Cruel provided you use one of a short list of particular types of weapon. Where you found it doesn't matter, using your gem mule who is level 1 is fine. If it is one of these you can get Cruel and if it isn't you can't

I've lifted this from Zath over at the AB, many thanks for the excellent analysis Zath :)

Zath: The weapons that can get the Cruel prefix for the flawless, normal, and chipped gem recipes are...

Bows & Crossbows
- Grand Matron Bow
- Hydra Bow
- Ward Bow
- Crusader Bow
- Demon Crossbow
- Colossus Crossbow

Swords:
- Mythical Sword
- Colossus Blade
- Cryptic Sword
- Colossal Sword
- Conquest Sword
- Champion Sword

Axes:
- Berserker Axe
- Glorious Axe
- Champion Axe
- War Spike

Blunt:
- Thunder Maul
- Legendary Mallet
- Scourge
- Caduceus
- Seraph Rod

Polearm & Spears:
- Giant Thresher
- Great Poleaxe
- Cryptic Axe
- Matriarchal Pike
- War Pike
- Ghost Spear

Claws:
- Scissors Suwayyah
- Runic Talons
- Feral Claws

Daggers:
- Legend Spike
- Fanged Knife

Javlines & Throwing:
- Winged Harpoon
- Ghost Glaive
- Winged Axe
- Winged Knife

Also of special interest are the wands and orbs which can be cubed for +2 skills...

Wands:
- Grave Wand
- Lich Wand
- Unearthed Wand

Orbs:
- Dimensional Shard
- Vortex Orb
- Demon Heart
- Eldritch Orb
- Heavenly Stone
- Swirling Crystal

(original thread here: http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums/in...showtopic=32661 )

After you make your Cruel it will have one to two sockets and a 50% chance of a suffix if you used one of the 3 of a kind recipes or it will have no sockets and the Of the Leech suffix if you used the ruby and health potions recipe. In the latter case you can put sockets in at Larzuk

So to summarise from a gem management perspective:
a ruby (any grade) = one go at making a Cruel
3 of a kind (chipped, standard or flawless) = a go at making a Cruel

It takes a lot of goes but it does get results. I have an unsocketed 284% Cruel Conquest Sword of 4% Leech on the Hardcore Europe Ladder to prove it :)

[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).