Scapegoat and I were talking about how to keep the R1 items as common as their rarity is supposed to be indicative of. Here are two ideas I thought of, regarding the Enchanter:
1. If the enchanter transforms your item into another item, he should take 5% gold maybe, so you're not getting something for nothing and getting rid of low-level items without a bit of thought.
OR;
2. Instead of a 100% chance that, if your item is transmogrified it becomes a higher rank, maybe that could be tweaked a bit. So, for example, an R1 item might break down like this:
50% chance it changes to a different R1 item
50% chance it becomes an R2
An R2 item might have these odds:
50% chance it becomes a different R2
40% chance it becomes an R3
10% chance it becomes an R1. ("Oh crap I made it WORSE!")
Within this, there could be something like a 1% chance of an R1-3 items becoming an R5. On the other hand, I think it's important to not make the "negative" consequences TOO likely, because item transformation is already nested inside the other list of options (enchant, destroy, item, destroy+gold) that already carries quite negative consequences.
What do you think?