Bring back the Mystic

During development, there were supposed to be three artisans, the third was the mystic which was supposed to be able to enchant items items to add properties to them. She was removed late in development because Blizzard felt there was too much overlap, with the blacksmith since his items already come with magical properties (a fair enough statement), and the jeweler since gems let you choose what effect to add (the state of gems is pathetic since we only have access to 12 potential effects, and only 4 of those for a given item, so I don't see that one).

I have been thinking they should reconsider that stance and put the mystic in for an expansion or something similar.

Going through the list of sets and legendaries there are a fair number of interesting pieces. While MOST of the magical properties legendaries have aren't unique the properties they do have are nice on most of them, and a couple legendaries do have special properties, and their appearances are generally unique as well. More importantly, though, sets make for extra bonuses above the limit on the number of properties per item. It's disappointing then, that a fair number of sets and legendary items are below level cap, though this can be nice for leveling, you will end up getting rid of them before the end since they won't be much use when you hit 60.

I've also had problems many times where crafted items fail to surpass the stats of something I found or made several acts earlier. An example being I have a shield 29 levels lower than my wizard but after crafting a ton of shields around my level, most of them fail to exceed the amount of defense of that shield, and I ran out of crafting ingredients before getting one that could improve on my defenses and not also radically nerf my damage and health (my old shield has Int and Vit, among other things). Being able to improve the armor value of that shield or get what I need from a new one would be great

With all that in mind, the first thing that would be a nice thing to that have they could give to the mystic is to let her upgrade somethings item level. Increasing the ilvl would naturally raise the item's basic stats to the appropriate range, but should also cause any properties to have their magnitude to be brought into the appropriate range for that ilvl (in other words, upgrade the item, and while keeping the same properties, re-roll the values of everything as if the item were just dropped/crafted). This should be able to be done with any sort of item from Normals and magics, to rares to legendaries including set items (why you'd upgrade crappy stuff, though I don't know), with higher rarities taking more reagents per level raised. This means you could take that nice weapon you found, or some set gear you crafted and boost it up to still be usable as you level up all the way to level cap (though to balance it with the item grind, it should be very expensive to keep the same item from level 0 to 60, so you are more inventivized to use new gear, only keeping stuff with the exact perfect selection of attributes you want, or certain sets and legendaries that give you something you can't get on anything else). note: Since item level goes above 60 (63 max I believe) while level requirement does not, this also means you can upgrade some max level equipment to be better. (Also, this could potentially cover some of the ground of transmogrification since you could take gear with a look you like and boost it to the usefulness you need). For min-maxing goodness, they could possibly also allow you to try to re-roll basic stats (armor on armor, damage on weapons) multiple times rather than raising the item's level to try for better stats, to re-roll properties a second time see part 2.

Continues. . .