we call know you can recreate the orange stats on a piece of gear with recreation rune (duh), but there's another way to do it which is to gather three pieces of gear with exactly the same base stats and put them through a process called "combination" that can be done in the bootleggery. A new piece of gear will emerge with new orange stats. However, this process is comparatively exceptionally inefficient compare to recreation(imagine getting three pieces of goddess adamas top just to alter the orange stats on one of them...). As a result it is a feature in game that is rarely, and will almost never be, used unless sensible changes are made to it. I was thinking perhaps this combination system can be used to change base stats instead of orange stats. That will most likely make it worthwhile enough for players to use and at the same time not easy enough that players will abuse the system and we end up flooding the market with huge number of uber base stat gears.

the exact details can be discussed. but please post your feedbacks here on this general idea.