Yes, it's now moonstone and it's everywhere.
However, you can also use moonstone in the Grinder. The Grinder allows you to create new weapons by placing 3 of the same type in it and use moonstones to create a higher quality weapon.
You can create a new weapon of standard quality without moonstone, but I don't see the point in that.
Moonstone cost makes certain of an upgrade in rarity of item by one level, but it WILL happen more often than not without using moonstone. Even though it's plentiful (compared to eridium anyway) it's not worth it for most situations. I'd hazard a guess that 60-70% of my grinds without moonstones upgrade from one rarity to the next tier up. It's a large cost(around 30-32 moonstones while combining level 22-24 weapons) for what is only adding a certainty and a seemingly miniscule chance to add a luneshine bonus to the weapon. Which as yet I haven't seen any that are that damn good.
In the time it would take to get 30 moonstones, you could get 50 weapons and grind them all for no cost, or sell 47 of them, grind 3 and have loads of cash with basically nothing to spend it on. Save moonstones up for the expensive chests and for the late game grinding to get legendaries.
I'm a bit confused by the grinder. I got a nice purple out of it, but then the next time I tried to use it no combination of weapons would work. Can you grind purples to get an orange? And is there any logic to what goes in and what comes out?
Enjoying playing as claptrap. The comedy value makes it worthwhile and the special is actually really powerful most of the time (sometimes it totally doesn't do what you were hoping though).
3 whites = high chance of a green
3 greens = high chance of a blue
3 blues = high chance of a purple.
You can't grind 3 purples, there is a way to grind to get legendaries, it's not 3 purples.
3 same type of gun = get same type back. So any 3 pistols will give you a pistol back. But if you do 3 pistols that you want, IE three autos with decent mag size and say caustic, you can get any pistol back, non elemental, low mag size and generally crap. If you do say a assault rifle, a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher you can get anything back, the only certainty is you won't get something of a lower quality level. So three random green weapons means at worst, random new green weapon(at roughly speaking the average level of the three weapons in my experience), at best a random new blue weapon. If you added moonstone to the recipe you would definitely get a blue and it has a small chance of a luneshine bonus on it.
As yet I've seen +1 o2 for every kill on two weapons as a luneshine bonus.... which was disappointing to say the least, also seen +3% shields which is decent but not, you know, mind blowing. I've done 2 or 3 moonstone grinds to see what happened, not one luneshine upgrade(the ones I have are from the 40 moonstone blue chests), the guns weren't great either
You can do shields, not sure I've tried grenades. I think there are other recipes, like two of one type of gun + a shield = specific other type of weapon.
A LOT of the purples I've ended up with have been crap and would often have been better off sticking with a blue. The grinder is what it says literally on the tin, it's a grind. Gather hundreds/thousands of weapons and most of them will combine to be something you don't want to use anyway, it's why it's not worth spending moonstone on grinding, because you could spend 20 moonstone on getting a crap purple. Save them for grinding later in the game.
It's really good, both for general weak mobs and for the bigger, boss-type guys. The speed at which she switches targets is insane! It's fast enough that she can hit (and kill) three different guys in one burst of a Dahl SR, and with the RoF and reload, you really can just go to town. I can only imagine how devestating it will be once I've spec'd into the hipfire bonus skill, Magnificent Six and the dual-wield one. Not one, but two damage boosted aimbot critical damage revolvers? Sign me up!
Her character is designed primarily around the idea of using dual pistols from what I can see(almost anyone showing video's of her at higher levels is running dual pistols).
But the action skill + continuous fire lasers is ridiculously overpowered. I find myself running around trying to get everyone to spawn before just firing it off standing in the middle spinning around firing. It's actually a bit boring and, the zooming in/yellow screen/jumping targets thing it's just a blur of nothingness.
I'm finding myself using the skill less and less because frankly it's so boring. Not only is it an actual aimbot, which is the only way you can describe it, they put so many awful effects on screen that you basically can't see what the hell is going on to a large degree while it's active. The developers were absolutely mental to put both the power in and the visual effects. Epically overpowered and you don't even need to be looking at the screen. Hit button, hold right click, move mouse side to side, open eyes, everything will be dead..........
), then after joining again had all the keys again.