Instead of a forge system that allows you craft UTs with other, less useful, UTs and everyone and their grandmother complain it feels cheaty, what if we made UTs tradable?
Think about it, this way players would be able to decide what UTs are worth so nobody will be able to get, say, a prism of dire instability with 18 crings (unless the other guy REALLY wants those crings). Plus you would be able to sell UTs you don’t use for pots or something, which is also pretty good.
We may need to come up with another meaning for UT, since it means “UnTradable” and I am proposing to make then tradable, but we can redefine it as “Unique Technique” (as they usually have a unique playstyle, and the name has a nice rhyme to it) to keep it as is.
I think this idea would be a more organic way to reduce the grindiness involved in acquiring UTs, since it uses a mechanic that already exists in the game and we could do away with the blacksmith that nobody really likes anyway.
(I know this would have been better posted long ago, but I wasn’t playing the game when the forge was introduced)