Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

I think people underestimate how complex and pomegranatety the runeword system was. There were literally billions of possibilities, and at one point, some where unknown. The rarity of anything above Gul makes Legendaries in RoS look like blues.

I think maybe adding a few more sockets to different slots and having Legendary and Set gems would suffice. They'd perform identically to what a runeword implementation would, without the added complexity of combining complex or large sets and adding large number of sockets.

Half the problem, in my opinion, is just how generic the buffs from Gems are.

If it's a weapon, there's ABSOLUTELY NO reason not to go with Crit Damage at max level. Everyone has to stack Crit to able to compete against the harder difficulties. If you're leveling a lowbie, Damage all the way because of the high numbers on low level gear.
If it's a non-helm, there's ABSOLUTELY NO reason not to go with your main stat. Vit is overrated and everyone knows it (unless you have really pomegranatety Vit to begin with).
If it's a helm, it's pretty much useless but the MF is okay, or maybe Life%. It's really the best one with options. Too bad the options all pretty much suck.

Gems are way too generic. There's really no options. When you get a slot you know exactly what to use it for. There's no experimentation.

Runewords on the other hand had so many different combinations that there were lots of different things to try out. It's too basic now.

Edit: Ran into this on Reddit, not sure if this has been posted here or not yet: http://diablo.somepage.com/info/patches-future#pc-minor