Shards effectively have quality levels. Instead of adding more ingredients like Alchemy and Blacksmithing, increasing one's Sagecrafting skill allows for the use of more advanced shards.
Sagecraft by the Numbers
Three quality levels:
Seven shard types:
- Fire
- Ice
- Lightning
- Magic
- Physical
- Poison
- Protection
Four gem categories:
- Weapon
- Armor
- Utility
- Epic
Skill Progression
All characters can combine Cloudy Shards into gems innately. At level 2, you can combine Lambent Shards into gems. At level 6, you can use Pristine Shards.
Reaching level 3 in Sagecrafting lets you fuse identical shards into a higher tier, much like Diablo II's Horadric Cube, or Torchlight's Transmuter.
Reaching level 8 unlocks the epic gems recipe category.
Reaching Level 10 allows a master Sagecrafter to extract gems from equipment, with no harm to either gem or armament.
Every time you increase your Sagecrafting skill you also increase the chance of finding shards in the first place.
Gem Recipes
Like Alchemy, there are set combinations to create certain effects. Unlike Alchemy, you get a preview of the results of the transmutation before performing it, so you're never sagecrafting blindly.
There are 196 different combinations (7 shard types, 2 shards per gem, 4 categories), but there is some overlap; For instance, Fire + Protection and Ice + Protection both give + Physical Damage when used as a weapon gem.
The item rarities in Kingdoms of Amalur are very similar to the item rarities in World of Warcraft, or most other MMORPGs.
According to the in-game manual, the rarities are:
It's implied that the Gold (set items) are considered the most powerful items in the game (depending on how many pieces of the set you have), mostly because the more items you have equipped from that particular set, the more powerful each individual piece becomes the more powerful the set becomes.
In addition, the higher tier of armor, the more bonuses you receive.
As opposed to an Infrequent piece of armor.
The item sockets, in some cases (depending on your Sagecraft), can make an Infrequent item last a surprisingly long time in comparison to some Rare or even Unique items.
Best Answer
From, what I've managed to find out, that means that they are vulnerable to a specific type of damage (i.e. spiders and boggarts using fire) which increases the damage done. The opposite is "resisted" where they are strong against a specific element, such as spiders when using poison or fire sprites using fire.