The beauty of D2 is exactly because - well - some things are rare. If you make everything available, everything also becomes boring. Plus, you only have to farm in normal, you can already do it.
What is preventing you farming normal, if I may ask?
If you really wanted to do something about it, just remove the gem requirement for cubing altogether instead of diluting drops. Not that I would be in favour of that, but upping drop chances for gems is a workaround for a workaround.
Darkrangeres is right, should just make it so that any gem quality will work. However you assuming that players are not cubing up runes because of the chipped gem requirement is nonsense.
I’d imagine most players like myself pick up certain low runes for specific recipes and crafting. Other than that who wants to be teleporting back to town constantly filling your stash and spending a load of time cubing low runes…
Or another option would be simply to add cube recipes to shatter gems to allow you to turn a higher gem into multiple lower gems. That would actually have zero impact on anyone. No drop rates would change, and if you don’t want to do it then don’t do it. But its just stupid that chipped gems are more rare in practice than flawless gems.
Something like 1 gem of X level + 1 normal mace weapon of any quality or level = 3 gems of the lower level.
id be more for taking lower tier runes off the drop table in hell before adding chipped to it…
Well yeah, that too. The point is, don’t provide only part of the ingredients for a recipe. Either stop dropping or significantly reduce the dropping of El-Thul, or provide the other part of the recipe to cube them. Making people spend hours in Normal wasting time, OR just throwing low level runes away because the other (supposedly more common) ingredient is too rare, is just stupid.
In the thread below to improve crafting, we have discussed adding a new recipe to break down higher quality gems into lower quality gems using a hammer of any kind. This recipe would have loss built into it acquiring only 1-2 gems of lower quality. This recipe would be useful in a pinch, but inefficient enough that players would consider other options.
Because if a chipped gem drops… a flawless gem doesn’t. Flawless are worth cubing to perfect and get used for crafting things that are actually worthwhile. Unlike having a collection of 47 Dol runes.
Im not in favour of it, but if this needs to be done, remove gems as a cubing requirement for runes altogether - instead of messing up gem drop chances.
If you make chipped gems drop more, you also make charms drop less… which changes the entire endgame. It has to drop SOMETHING from that table when it doesn’t roll no-drop. More chance for chipped means less chance for other things. They aren’t going to rework how drop mechanics work to add in some more useless chipped gems lol.
As for the crafting recipe… sure why not. It’s useless, but if it makes people happy go for it.
I’m gonna say you’re wasting time even bothering cubing up the smaller runes.
Will agree that a recipe should exist to break gems.
Don’t think chipped gems should be entertained in hell games taking up space with a higher drop chance.
Will remind you the devs most likely will never implement anything like a gem breaking recipe.
Will remind you that you can farm normal cows all day and nobody is stopping you.
Edit: Will also remind you the flawless gems you’d probably seek to break down would have much more value in crafting and rerolling baal GCs.
Think about this: Would you trade 3 chipped amethysts for a single Amn rune? No one would. But would you trade 5 flawed emeralds for a Pul? Would you trade 10 rubies for a Vex, 20 flawless emeralds for a Zod?
In the equation, the relative value of the gems is far higher for Amn - Io. No one would trade 3 chipped amethysts for a Amn, because everyone will have far more Thul’s than chipped amethysts, so if they had 3 chipped amethysts they would just convert them to Amns if they wanted to. But as soon as you get to Lum, anyone would trade a dozen flawed gems for a Lum.
Clearly, the ratio of the components if out of whack. There aren’t enough chipped gems in teh economy of the game. It doesn’t mater if you don’t think that converting mid-level runes is worth it or not, the fact is that there aren’t nearly enough chipped gems in circulation for the recipes to make sense. Beyond the fact of how many it takes to get from A to Z, there is a reason no one bothers to cube up mid-level runes, because no one has the gems to do it.
Actually there are enough chipped gems in circulation. Nobody collects them because nobody cares to waste their time doing so, even if you’d pay a Lum for them. Most people are out here not even picking up lem/ko/lum runes this far into ladder and certainly not at all on non ladder. Your perception is circumstance. You want to upgrade all your runes, but that wasn’t the intended mechanic behind the upgrade recipe. Not everyone is trying to cube all their low runs up to a ZOD.
The point of the mechanic is that if you are unlucky for whatever reason you could upgrade runes to get the ONE rune you need if you find the proper components. Thats the thing about “circulation” too. The only things that circulate are items of actual value after a certain point. People keep some chipped gems early on because they might need to do an upgrade, but very shortly into ladder those chipped gems don’t even get muled. They get dumped on the ground and never picked up again. Just like how right now you struggle to find worthless chipped gems I would struggle to find someone with all the disciple set to trade me. It has nothing to do with their drop rate and everything to do with their value or lack there of.
Edit: Will also remind you the flawless gems you’d probably seek to break down would have much more value in crafting and rerolling baal GCs.
Yeah. Regardless, you shouldn’t have to farm Normal to get what is supposed to be one of the most common and easy to obtain components. Saying “farm normal” is absurd.
Farming Normal to get chipped gems is a colossal waste of time. When you farm Hell, (which is also arguably a waste of time) at least you have opportunity to get many beneficial things (including XP), of which gems are just a small part of that equation.
When farming Normal, there is nothing of value to get, other than just chipped gems, which are not worth the time and effort. That’s the whole point.
The point is that the resources it takes to be able to do the cubbing recipe for runes Amn-Lum are actually more laborious, or requires a biggest investment in opportunity cost, than the farming for the components of Ko+.
Which again, is why everyone says “Just throw those runes away”. Everyone says to just vendor those runes because getting the gems needed to cube them isn’t worth the time/effort. It shouldn’t be the case that the opportunity cost of crafting low-mid-level items is GREATER than the opportunity cost of crafting higher level items. It is only this way because chipped gems don’t drop (or super rarely drop) in Hell.
And talk about the drop rates is stupid. They can be anything. Saying that chipped gems in Hell would take away from other gems is total nonsense. They can change the drop rates however they want. They can make the average yields of other gems the same, while also introducing the drop of more chipped gems. This isn’t rocket science.