Not sure if anybody else has posted this before, but i'd like to make a suggestion.
There's already an option to downgrade fire crystals to lower star variants, for heating up lower-star weapons, correct? Why not something similar for the orbs of alchemies? Not necessarily providing more orbs to craft with, but, for instance, downgrading an Eternal orb into an Elite orb and so on? It'd probably save some time on scrounging through runs and ending up with orbs that you DON'T want to use for crafting, and lord knows I already have more 5* orbs than I know what to do with them at this point, with all other lower-tier orbs seeming harder to find in comparison.
Just a suggestion for the sake of convenience and giving Eternals a bit more practicality. Any thoughts or objections?
As someone who has about 30x more Eternals than Elite, I completely agree with you on this point. It makes perfect sense to allow this since fire crystals are already able to.
However, I assume this hasn't been done because orbs can almost be equated directly to energy costs, and converting one orb into another would result in unequal conversions of energy. I.E you would end up with less energy equivalent than you started with, since it wouldn't be fair to go up. That might disrupt the flow of the market.
Also, it allows vanguards/T3-players to craft down with their Eternals into any orb they want, meaning that they don't need to buy orbs anymore at all since Eternals are relatively easy to find for top tier players. This means no one would buy off the depot anymore, and you know OOO wants their money. This doesn't apply to fire crystals since there is an extraordinary drought in Radiants that pretty much stops us from crafting down, and the fact that low tiered crystals are easy to find, in contrast to orbs where the lower tiers are harder to find.