Changing the primary stats to three different colors would eliminate a lot of potential Primary/Secondary combo gems. The better solution, and one they might implement, is to increase the amount of secondary stats in relation to primary stats. So if a red gem gives 40 Int, a yellow would give 60-80 Haste, for example.

The other possibility is to decrease the value of primary stats in relation to secondary stats. I don't think this is likely in the immediate future due to requiring a lot of new balancing. It would be much easier to just adjust the secondary gems.

Spirit is likely going to be much more valuable to healers in MoP, so that should increase the value of Blue/Purple gems at least.

"Changing the primary stats to three different colors would eliminate a lot of potential Primary/Secondary combo gems."

This statement isn't processing for me - can someone enlighten me?

If there are 5 colors, and 10 cuts of each color, how would re-jiggering which cuts fell into which color cut off potential combos? This confuses me.

I suppose he's saying that if, say, Intellect becomes a blue gem stat then a cut with Intellect and Hit on it will become a blue gem cut, rather than a purple gem cut. Which would be a rather strange thing.

So right now, as stats are, most people want Red (agi,str,int) in most sockets, and to get bonuses you want an Orange (red+yellow) or Purple (Red+Blue) occasionally. If the primary stats were spread out among different colors, the Orange and Purple (and Green) gems would be all screwed up. For many classes, Haste or Mastery is a really good secondary stat. If those stayed Yellow, then you could not have a combo gem with the Yellow primary and those secondaries. (ie. if Int was Yellow, Int+Haste and Int+Mastery would be impossible)

The only way I could see spreading the primary stats working, is by eliminating combo gems and putting the secondary stats (Haste, Mastery, Spirit, Hit, Crit) on the Green/Purple/Orange gems. In that case I foresee most people never gemming secondary stats if they remain much less valuable than primary stats. Unless they make socket bonuses too valuable to ignore.

...I forgot to list a bunch of melee/tank stats (stamina, expertise, etc.) (Sorry, I'm primarily a caster).

Tim is right about the hybrid gems, although theoretically you could do it the opposite, and by that I mean you could split the primary stats between red and blue, and put all of the secondary stats (haste, crit, mastery, spirit) on the yellow gems.

That might actually make green gems worth something more than vendor fodder for the first time ever.

The other way to do it would be to decrease the scaling of the primary stats, or increase the scaling of secondary stats - just something to make the secondary stats a bit more attractive than they are now, where pretty much every secondary stat is worth less than half of the primary stat. I thought I remembered something about them looking into doing just that for Mists, although my memory is notoriously bad for these things.

If they don't want to rebalance the secondary stats, they could just do away with straight Agi/Str/Int gems and only have those stats as part of combination gems. Gemming would not be as mindless for DPS (just gemming your primary stat) and help balance out costs as different classes and specs have such different priorities for secondary stats. I'd rather see the stats be balanced, though.

As far as the enchanting mats, I think it's a good idea but one that could go horribly wrong in the short term. I do think that the market will be horrendously inflated early on as the initial flow of crystals will probably be slow but players race for world/server firsts and spend obscene amounts of gold to get an edge. After the initial blitz, though, prices should settle down and be much smoother across the market as a whole. I'm not sure how the current prices overlay with the new design (I think essences would be a lot lower and shards/crystals a lot higher, basing off of current dust prices being ~1g each), but a lot of it will just come down to what the market decides a crystal is worth as that high-end demand is likely to drive the rest of the market up or down accordingly.

I guess I just figured they could redesign gems from the ground up. I mean - honestly, would that upset anyone?

The design they have now is elegant in that the blending of colors makes sense to help you know sort of what to expect, but... It sucks because it overbalances the value of one particular variety beyond the other.

The only other salvation for the system that I can see is - make +20 primary stat socket bonuses more frequent below the last tier of gear in the expansion.

They actually used to have the primary stats divided into different colors and it was changed specifically for Cata to fix the issues it caused.
(Red was strength, yellow was...Int or spell power I think, and blue was...er...something else. My JC was not max level until the very end of Wrath so I don't remember well.)

Unfortunately Cata ended up with everyone primarily stacking their primary stats which were all red gems and pretty much ignoring the secondary stats.
Hopefully the secondary stats will become more valuable in Mists so that the other color gems are also in demand.

No, personally I'm not too invested in how the system works right now, and I'm completely open to them trying new things. The logic of Red+Yellow=Orange appeals to me, but if they wanted to change how that worked, I'd get over it.

Based on data mined material, as you said, it does seem they are sticking with Red as the primary stat color. So for the time being at least, I hope they go with the solution of giving secondary stats more points to even things out.

Personally, I think the reason why all the base stats are red is to make creating tier gem bonuses easier for blizzard; it's a way to tell new raiders how to gear their characters easily. Still, in today's day and age gem bonuses seem to be ignored if they don't benefit a primary stat, so I would be all for blizzard getting rid of separate colors for separate gems; instead jsut have every stat available in every color. True, that is A LOT of new recipes, but you gotta admit it would provide an extra market for people who have had JC for a long time and a lot of worthless gemstones (kind of like inscription).

The jewel colors do not need fixing. They work just fine as they are now.