Not that I think it’ll be implemented, but I’m curious if anyone has thoughts on what the impact would be of a recipe to break runes.
I’m thinking something as simple as throwing a scroll of TP and a Pul into the cube and getting back 3 Lem, perhaps without the flawed emerald to maintain a minimal cost to the player.
On the one hand, Zod would have incredible value. On the other hand, runewords like Enigma might become commonplace.
Thoughts?
I thought about this before aswell. Being stuck with a Cham kinda sucks when you don’t need it and few rune words of value require it, that being said Cham isn’t worth much in the market of runes unless it’s needed. But I also thought about the technical side of it over time aswell because of that previous statement.
So for one thing, unless a serious loss from a hr rune breakdown transaction (for instance only getting one hr back), it would destroy the market and overall value of runes.
Like if it didn’t have a 1hr cost and if you think about it, one zod becomes 2 Cham, then those 2 Cham become 4 jah which is the highest in value next to… breaking your 4 jah into 8 ber. 8 ber into 16 sur, 16 sur into 32 Lo… it would get insane. They would have no value anymore if it was that simple.
I think that it should be implemented on mid and low runes however because really mal, um, pul, and lem don’t exactly kill in the market. I of course don’t consider vex, or ist as mids, although they might be concidered mid runes overall. So I do agree that we should be able to break them down, but hr’s would have to come at a cost or it could really muck things up something fierce
I am a little choked about not being able to socket uniques in the cube with an soj though. That only makes me salty cause by the time I finally had an soj I wasn’t using that I could spare for socketing, the ability to do it away. 21 damn years and I didn’t get to take advantage of it once 
haha
That’s a good point about distorting the market. I would be happy with just getting back the directly lower rune. I’ve been farming the Countess for a bit hoping for a Lem to make another Treachery and all I’ve dropped are a Pul and an Um. Good luck, but bad luck at the same time!
No lower runes to up? I’ll assume not or you would up to a Lem. I do completely understand though, I needed lem’s like crazy for a bit there
I’d be more than happy giving up a rune just to break a rune. I mean at first I didn’t even think of currency when I first thought of breaking down runes a few months back. It literally took time just to think of what would happen in such a scenario and what would make sense.
That’s the only thing I can possibly think of that would make sense, add incentive to use the recipe, and not completely cripple the market
Just throwing this out there - sorry the thread is a bit TL;DR.
I remember there was a d2 mod called “Median XL” that had this feature. Granted all you had to do was put the rune and hit xmute, it was pretty nice.
Wish actiblizz could add something to D2R, maybe put those Perfect Skulls to more use?
Median XL was the best mod 
It would completely break the game. If you ever looked at the insane math you would know that it takes over 14 trillion El runes to cube up to a Zod. If you allow players to break down runes, you are giving them all those runes in reverse. Runes would have then zero value, you have to drop them on the ground.