Why not make a use for gems of great value?
 

As it stands now, gems of great value aren't worth much more than the 40 or so platinum you'd get for selling them to a vendor. Though this used to be a lot back in the day, it's nothing in the current situation.

Why not make them usable to craft amulets, like the following:

Amulet of the Red Lion (Str + 1, Resist fire +5)
http://www2.canisius.edu/~mckernas/redlion.png
Requires:
1 Ruby of Great Value
1 Amulet
1 large gold nugget

Amulet of the Blue Falcon (Int +1, Resist Cold +5)
http://www2.canisius.edu/~mckernas/bluefalcon.png
Requires:
1 Sapphire of Great Value
1 Amulet
1 wand

Amulet of the Green Dragon (Con +1, Resist Poison +5)
http://www2.canisius.edu/~mckernas/greendragon.png
Requires:
1 Emerald of Great Value
1 Amulet
5 Mint Sprigs

Amulet of the White Tiger (Dex + 1, Resist Electricity +5)
http://www2.canisius.edu/~mckernas/whitetiger.png
Requires:
1 Diamond of Great Value
1 Amulet
4 pearls


It'd give a use for the items, plus, it would give mid-range amulets for those that can't afford something like the Blue/Red Dragon Amulet Fragments and things like that.

But... those aren't even close to being on par with other items.

Well, if you make them too powerful, that upsets the people with the special items. They are, however, better than anything that can be bought from the shops.

I like this idea.

I do too. As it stands, the other amulets you can get only slightly raise AC, WC, Armor, Reflect Spells, or give Resist to some attribute that GK has in it, but is never used. (Such as ghosthit.) If those amulets got paired up with more AC, WC, Magic, or Magic resist, they'd be great as a small armor addition since bracers don't really offer anything.

Nice idea, really!

The gems of great value are even the same shape as the RDA / BDA gems.

They are, but the amulets should look different.
I posted what I came up with in the post above.
I don't care what they end up looking like in the end though. =P

Also, since gems of Great Value are rare as it is, maybe have an event once a month, or once every couple weeks where the "Gem Collector" comes to town and trades gems of great value for a certain amount of their normal counterpart?
Exchange rates could vary each time.

Before you die, you see the ri-- erm, red x.
In other words, your icons are broken. :P

Must be you. I can see them fine, and I can still see them after clearing my cache and reloading. Anyone else having trouble?

Aha. You must be using IE.
IE and PNGs have some sort of blood-feud, and they won't display in IE.
They show up perfectly fine in Firefox though.

PNG's work in IE, just some won't work for some odd reason.

If you can't see them, right click each of these and click "save target as". You will have to save it as "all files" and add the .png extension yourself or else they will download as .htm files no matter what.
Red Lion
White Tiger
Green Dragon
Blue Falcon

Edit: Whoops, used HTML by accident, haha