Horadric Cube?

[valiea987]

Hello all!

Just wanted to present an idea to see what you all thought. I'm not sure how possible this would be, but it could be neat.

Those of you who played Diablo 2 will remember the Horadric Cube, where you could exchange a few gems for one of a higher gem. I was thinking that could be neat here on the server for crafting gems. So lets say you have a lot of +3 AC gems, you could burn like 5 of them into a single +4 armor gem.

I think the real worry then would be that you can easily farm those lower end gems, and it would lead to a further stat surge in gear itemization. What I thought of for this was maybe adding one more drop to the gem lists, some type of Forging Essence type of thing. To crush a bunch of gems together into one of a higher gem, you need a Forging Essence of the higher quality. So if you want a purple gem, you have to have found one of those Essences from a higher dungeon anyway. Maybe make it so you can't do this for Eldritch gems, or it costs a -lot- of Ensorcelled gems to do it with Eldritch gems?

The real benefit of this, I think, is it would help if you have a bunch of Blue rarity skill gems, and would like to get a higher up version of that skill gem but it just wont drop.

Any thoughts on that? Not sure if it would be doable, but it seems like a neat idea.

[suddenperihelion]

I did precisely this for my crafting system on SoT, so I can confirm that it is in principle possible.

[Kymus]

+1 I'm fond of the idea.

[Deleted]

First, crafting +5 is supposed to be extremely rare, as rare as finding an eldritch item as well.  "Farming" +3 gems to craft an eldritch item isn't something that aligns with our system of how the tiered loot and crafting process is supposed to run.  So if we did something like this, I would limit it to ensorcelled.

I would be more willing to allow trading up of the bonus items, rather than the base armor/weapon enchantment gem.

[valiea987]

Understandable. That's why I thought maybe it would be worth doing but having something like "Maybe make it so you can't do this for Eldritch gems" but still let it be possible for Ensorcelled ones. Would probably mostly be used for curbing off always getting the wrong type of skill gem over and over, especially with how rare secondary gems seem to be.

Or an alternate idea: Something like the Forged Essence, but it can side-grade a gem. So if you have a purple Divinity gem (Know Religion/Spellcraft), you can combine it with an equal level (purple) Forged Essence type of item, and instead it becomes a purple Hide/Move Silently gem?

As it is, the secondary gem types are fairly rare, and then getting the right one is a real PITA, especially given crafting items and stuff are balanced to be weaker than similar tiered dropped named items. I'm not sure how much crafting has happened since this new system has been put in, but I just can't find the gems. I have probably a 2:1 ratio of enhancement gems to skill gems, and no attribute gems or secondary gems (out of about 20). Crafted items are weaker, but it seems rarer to get the right type of gem.

I totally get not wanting Eldritch ones to be common, that's for sure.

[Fire Wraith]

We definitely don't really have a good system on distribution of the gems, at the moment. Part of this is because I felt it better to err on the side of caution and giving out too few rather than too many, to start. It's something we're going to keep looking at tweaking.

Some of it is just how the loot system is setup, or rather, is a function of it. We're definitely going to keep working at it, however.

[valiea987]

Yup! Just offering what could be a neat way of curbing the effects without totally overhauling the system entirely. But then again, it might be easier just to start messing with the gem drops rather than creating an entirely different means of altering them.

[Atomic Twinkie]

Free gems for everyone. Boom.