These are harder to get than inventories full of pgems. Low runes suffocate mules everywhere because the recipes requiring chipped gems to smush them together are obnoxious to farm. Flawless and perfect, easy, everything lower isn’t worth the effort over dumping low runes on the ground to clear up inventory space.
thats why i removed them completely from the upgrade process (which also works in downgrade)
https://youtu.be/dZWtHK_s7gg?si=4V_RPThnC6SZswsz
and to keep them relevant made chipped reagents to salvage uniques into gold vouchers
https://youtu.be/hpauwNUoZZ0?si=zDyqaOkefhNCLHEv
While I am among the players that upgrade low runes, I can only discourage you to do so. The issue isn’t so much the amount of gems required for the upgrades (if you play a little in normal, you’ll solve the issue very quickly), as it is the amount of low runes required to make that single high rune.
To put it another way, determine what rune it is you are expecting to grind towards, then open a spreadsheet program, and see in it how many runes you need to get there.
For example, let’s say you are trying to upgrade towards Mal. Are you really going to upgrade Shael runes into Dol runes, when a Dol rune is a 8748th of a Mal rune? Is it really worth the hassle?
If you are trying to upgrade towards Ber, are you really going to upgrade Lum runes into Ko runes, when a Ko rune is a 13824th of a Ber rune? It’s not even likely to impact how fast you’ll manage to make the upgrade through other runes.
No, dude. Low runes build up and destroy inventory space, so you smash them in the cube to clear up that space while reserving certain recipe runes, like rals for caster amulets or something. You get up to Thul or something, then you need to have a bunch of chipped gems on hand to keep cleaning up space. Nobody has this. Normal mode isn’t farmed, and farming normal mode for chipped gems is a colossal waste of time over just trashing low runes. What’s more, farming chipped/flawed/normal, 3 ranks of gems x6 gems is another colossal hit to inventory space.
They can add trash like Mosaic to the game, but not remove these otherwise useless materials from smashing low runes? It’s idiotic.