MORE Kingdoms of Amalur

We left off with weapon creation in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
on our last post about it. I would like to dive deeper into weapons, armor, and sagecrafting in this post. When I first started playing, I automatically started with blacksmithing, as I did in Skyrim. The first thing I noticed was the ability to level up by completing a few weapons was not there. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrimallowed you to level up whatever skill you were using, and upgrade through levelling up to get better armor classes you could build. Kingdoms of Amalur worked in a few more opportunities to create the weapon you wanted, without enchanting it, but did not allow you to hone your skills on blacksmithing unless you levelled up. I liked the fact that you could change handles, fulcrums, shafts, and such to create unique weapons and armor, sadly though all of the weapons looked the same unless they were already pre-made items the creators thought up. I would have loved to have seen a menu where you could choose a variety of looks for your weapons, especially if you had your blacksmithing all the way up.
Combining different pieces could help your character out in many ways, for example Robust Rivets give a plus to both health and managers. Also, I am a huge fan of using both poison and fire for most of the enemies in the game.
(Quick hint, use shock on the prismere trolls, this saved me a ton of time instead of dodging, slashing, dodging, arrow, dodge....)
After working through part of the game, I kept finding shards of crystals, and finally realized that in order to maximize weapons and armor, I needed to work on my sagecrafting. I started first by just creating small jewels, using the cloudy shards which gave me small boosts to whatever I was creating.
I then started collecting more shards, and combining them, increasing the way effects of previous trials for gems. I will post a few of the shard effects on my next post, to make it easier for you to find which way you want to go, and what you need to get there.
Gem combinations along with weapon creation can give you an explosive combination. For example, say you put an increase of 10% more damage with Ice on your armor, 10% increase on your weapon, and put a gem into your weapon that causes 20 damage from ice. Now your weapon automatically does 24 damage!
Increases like this can make the game easier, and you can get a few more quests done earlier to level up faster. I will post some of my attempts at weapons,  and also a few screenshots of my character to show what I have been doing.