I was really excited with this new system till i read this.
A: Imbuing does not require recipes. It's very similar to crafting. You will need 'X' number of Imbuing Ingredients (one of three types depending on the item property and the intensity to Imbue), 'X' number of regular gems, and 'X' number of rare resources such as perfect emeralds, peerless like ingredients, ingredients from epic encounters, etc
Why does my crafting play style have to rely on FIGHTING!
Cant the ingrediants come from crafting playstyles and not fighting playstyle? Now ill have to pay for ingrediants at high prices, Spend the time to make them and sell for a very small profit. How does this help the crafting profession?
The best way to got high intensity items is to craft them with a runic.
The best way to get many gems is to buy them.
The best thing about imbuing is that it will act as a much needed money sink while enhancing crafting and simultanously enhnacing all systems in UO that reward you with items. It will also be difficult enough to max out imbuing that not everyone will have one! I remember the days when there weren't many blacksmiths around. We actually had a crafter-based game economy. I think this system takes us a step closer to being crafter-based again.
If you don't want to trade with people to get imbuing resources and you don't want to hunt, you could always do BoDs to get high end items. All imbuing gives you that runics don't is the ability to pick what mods to put on your items (at the cost of not being able to POF your items).
You don't have to make an artificer, but I think it's unrealistic to expect the devs to make a system as powerful as imbuing without also making it very interactive. In other words, if the devs made imbuing resources attainable without combat via some stupid grind-based system (see BoD system); people would just script it (see BoD system).