Runes should be unsocketable but cost 50k gold

Yeah being able to experiment with different runes and replace it if it's not working out is fantastic and I can't see any problem with it. Maybe I need life leech until I spec into leech on tree at which point I'm going to want more damage.

I shouldn't have to craft or buy a whole new weapon just to do that. It's needlessly punitive.

The problem with sockets is purely one of perception.

When you use an Exalted Orb and add a new property to a rare item, no one thinks that property should be removable, right?

If sockets, instead of introducing runes into items, were other items that added new parameters (like a purple text with the parameter the rune provides), absolutely no one would be asking for these things.

However, sockets in PoE and PoE2 are slots for inserting and removing gems, so perception pushes us to think they should also be removable.

At the same time, rune drops (at least runes, not soul cores) are clearly balanced to be used as a continuous currency and not as a valuable item you extract from one object to use in another.

Being able to add new runes, even while destroying the previous one, would be similar to allowing multiple Exalted to overwrite the previous parameter.

When you think about it that way, it sounds a bit exaggerated.

However, I completely agree that it is a design disaster to have designed runes as items to be inserted into sockets while not allowing them to be removed.

There are several solutions depending on the final vision for sockets and runes. For now, it’s clear that after moving skills from gear to the skill panel, the sockets in gear and the runes are not a properly designed system but a poorly thought-out patch.

Personally, any solution in any direction would seem better to me than what we currently have. While the issue remains one of perception, I think it’s a disaster to leave it as it is.

(It’s inconsistent with the systems, not serious, etc.).
Because if you have multiple ways to achieve the same thing, but you choose the one that causes confusion and frustration for the player (when the identical system wouldn’t produce that if implemented differently), you are clearly doing it wrong.

Runes replace bench crafting to be able to "fix" build problems, like Jonathan himself mentioned. However, when you replace some gear in the endgame, let's say a fire res ring for a cold res one. Suddenly, you're overcapped and don't need all those cold res runes and would love to replace them with fire res. How do you fix that, Jon?

There should be a significant cost for removal, perhaps the runes should be rarer and most certainly unsocketing should DESTROY the rune in the process.

Bench crafts can be removed...