Economy and Crafting

[Razakai]

There's been a lot of discussion in irc lately about the state of ToME's economy. Currently, gold has but 3 uses:

1) Fill in some gear gaps early on by running to LH/Zigur/Angolwen to grab T3 gear and inscriptions
2) Buy talent training for Staff/Mindstar etc
3) Merchant randarts

Once out of the early game, except for Dwarves gold becomes fairly useless when not in breakpoints of 4k+. So there's lot's of ways this can be improved, I thought it might be an idea for people to post ideas on how to fix this:

- Low-end, custom gear. I'm sure everyone has had that unfortunate feeling when you reach 15 and thanks to poor store selection, are still rocking that Insulating Rough Leather belt. Instead, you could go to a crafting merchant, pick from an item, tier and theme, and get a decent ego item from it. So in this example you could request belt, T3, 'melee', and get a Monstrous Hardened Leather Belt. Or perhaps it would be a rare-equivalent rather than ego, and in this case it might give str/crit. The cost could be just gold, or include 'materials' such as gems and a leather belt.
- More imbues. Gems are currently a little pointless outside of Limnir and Alchemists, so it might be better if you could pay to have them imbued into more items.
- Rerolling egos. Found a lovely Warbringer's Greatsword for your zerker, but the 2nd ego is of the Mystic? Pay gold to change it to a random ego, in the hope that it'll become of Rage or Crippling. Perhaps vary the gold cost to pick from lesser/greater egos, and allow adding them to single ego items.

[HousePet]

A thought for imbuing items with gems:
Inserting a gem into lower tier item could be an interesting way of improving the item if you can't find anything better, or in the case of fixed arts, better doesn't exist.
This would only be available to t1-4 items, since no t6 gem exists, so it shouldn't make endgame equipment more powerful.

[Isotope-X]

- Rerolling egos. Found a lovely Warbringer's Greatsword for your zerker, but the 2nd ego is of the Mystic? Pay gold to change it to a random ego, in the hope that it'll become of Rage or Crippling. Perhaps vary the gold cost to pick from lesser/greater egos, and allow adding them to single ego items.

I like this idea, and I think the cost should increase if used repeatedly on the same item.