Marquis will be worth it. Getting a Flawless Royal in the right color might take longer than the whole leveling process though.
Shards will still be useful right from the start to farm a bunch of easy ones (Mag/Zul) for salvaging purposes due to the gems they provide. Get lucky with a flawless royal ruby salvage (or 2) and your set for leveling to 70 REALLY quick. Even ammy or your main stat gems early on give a pretty substantial damage/toughness boost for T6 leveling.
I just want to mention that soul shards are legendary gems that qualify for Caldesann’s despair.
Depending on one’s play style most shards will be useless. Yet, salvaging them for gems is a waste. If I remember correctly from PTR, even a basic level soul shard is equal to a rank 50 gem in Caldesann’s despair and +25 to the rank for every level more up to a max of rank 125 for a fully upgraded soul shard.
Better to keep the junk and use it later for stats.
rank 0 shards are quite literally unlimited in supply, you can kill any act boss over and over for a 100 percent drop of the rank 0 shards. early in the levelling it will be very beneficial to farm up a bunch of shards for salvage to get high level gems
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And with so many flawless gems you can augment low level ancient legendaries.
Not at the start of the season. You can do runs to Zoltan Kulle at level 1 which can drop a shard, and salvage those for gems. If you get rubies, you can put them into a helm and weapon, for a major increase in levelling up speed.
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Granted Sockets dont show up to what level 12 but having a flawless ruby in the weapon is MASSIVE (kinda like using the level 70 items with the lower level requirement at 40.
You guys are getting Hellforge Embers? I’m already level 70, I’m on torment 7 and ready to go to torment 8 maybe even 9. I’ve clears all the bounties multiple times and been trying to get a single hellforge ember for days now and not a single one. NONE! I have all the shards but no embers to upgrade them. I’ve always been crewed over by RNG in video games but thisd is bull.
You need to run at higher difficulties to improve the drop rate of embers… Well, the drop rate of everything is higher at T10, T13 and T16. Season is always about getting to a level where you can farm at T16 and GR 75+
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Yes, it’s that bad. At 400+ para, a full evening of solo running T16 bounties and GR75 got me 2 embers. And before that I got another 2 somehow, so it’s 4 now.
Remembering full well how difficult it was to get the right shard upgrade on PTR, I seriously doubt their overall value. I don’t compete on skill with this, I compete on luck.
Drop rate is buffed. I get them pretty frequently, even multiple drops in the same GR (running 108 speeds). They also drop occasionally in T16 rifts.
Drop rate is already known, its 6 (or was it 8) times the drop weight value of Rami’s Gift. Seems common enough for me. Para 600ish and gotten 11 so far.
I seem to get just enough embers to have what I need but always need more. It’s pretty perfect if you ask me.
Speaking of RNG though, my first GR1 rift that I ran for season dropped 2 embers off the boss. I was like Paragon 6 or something.
OUCH 
This is a terrible drop.
Some guys @ paragon 700 told that they had like 4 drop…
I know that paragon 600 - 700 or something along these lines is like an entry level but if you are a solo player it still takes time. Getting 11 in this time frame is pretty brutal.
Well, I guess not worth wasting time on this season. If you need to reach T16+ as someone mentioned to start somewhat experiencing the seasonal feature properly this is pure sadness of a balance, at least in my opinion. Screw this 
This always reminds me of Mark Twain saying:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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Mileage will definitely vary.
If you don’t have interest in one of the speed/power classes, embers might be hard to some by. For many classes/builds, blasting T16 in the first 5-6 hours of the season is pretty easy.
Casual player here with paragon in mid 600’s so far.
You do not need to be T16 to experience the new shards…even in T6-T10 I had 'em and they were great. So far, I have been able to upgrade 3 Slivers and 1 Dregs fully to 3.
Just give it a shot and don’t count yourself out before you try.
-D
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‘My man’ - Denzel voice
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“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet!” - Abe Lincoln
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T16 isn’t required and soul shards are useful straight at level 1. Getting a ruby (let alone a flawless royal ruby) by level 12 making the leveling process SO QUICK. The base power is still strong for leveling and as stated, finding embers aint that rare.
Sure trying to get the “perfect” rolls will take time but so does basically everything else in an ARPG.
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