Remember if you are still somewhere around Elegon, or even a bit further...say like Garalon, that not only do you still have to progress up to Empress, you need her to drop your weapon, AND you need to win it. There really should be little hesitation about using gem for LFR weapon, unless your guild is already well progressed in ToES or at least HoF. 10K isn't much. Even if it's 10K more than you have now...it is fairly easy to save that much up in the time it will take your average player to progress up to and obtain a normal Sha Touched weapon.
"Brevity is...wit"
I'm in the same position with being stuck on Elegon. The way I see it, we won't be seeing reg Sha any time soon and even if Starshatter drops, I have to roll against two other potential rollers so it's RNG on top of RNG on top of getting Elegon on farm.
That might be a while.
So, I just went ahead and gemmed LFR Shin'ka and even then I went ahead and threw an upgrade on it along with Relic of Xuen.
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
Does anyone know how the upgraded gem from the 5.1 wrathion stuff works? Do you get a brand new 550 stat gem to socket as you please without being forced to remove the old one during the quest? Where I'm going with this is put the 500 stat one into the LFR weapon and save the 550 one for a regular mode weapon and save yourself 10k.
I felt pretty dirty about doing it but it still provided a fairly decent upgrade over other items on my character and I'll make that 750 vp back several times before we make any decent progress for better gear to upgrade. 487 Shin'ka puts me over Reg Starshatter by a little bit (and a fair amount over 483) so it's really only a waste for me if Starshatter drops next week and I happen to win it which I don't see happening.
That's how I thought of it anyway.
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
it is legendary. calling it "orange" would just be confusing.. since there is already basic orange cuts.
OT: is it worth it to socket LFR weapons.. lemme ask this.. is your group doing ToES? if yes (or maybe even HoF) then no its not worth it.. since you should be seeing your normal version of the weapon drop very soon. if you are not regularly clearing those two raids.. then yes absolutely use the gem in your LFR version.. it will be a while before your group even downs one boss let alone gets the whole raid on farm for Norm weapons. plenty of time to do some dailies and sell some junk on the AH to make that 10k.
Had the Sha touched staff (LFR) socketed with 500 int gem at the moment I got it, and a few days later I acquired the dagger (normal) from amber-shaper, needless to say, I was pretty frustrated to have wasted the gem. I would advise you to consider your options, if you think you are going to get normal version in not too distant future, just save the damn gem. You having 500 more int isn't going to bring boss from 20% to 0% like somebody claimed on this thread.