Quote Originally Posted by Dawnseeker View Post
Chips are meant to be permanent additions to your equipment, not hot-swapped constantly. There's no gem cost at low levels so that you can experiment and get to know how chips work.

We want players to be faced with interesting decisions. Do you use a level 4 chips or wait for a level 5? Or even higher? If you make a mistake, you can pay gems to undo it, if its a big deal to you.

We just made getting chips a lot easier in the last patch, by adding level 3 and 4 chips to Labyrinth rewards. All players now have access to level 4 and even level 5 chips with some patience. The removal cost is there so that you have to plan ahead and decide between immediate upgrades or waiting for more powerful chips.
I was not aware of the cost to remove level 4 chips until I tried to remove one and by then I had a lot of them in my equipment. Now I am stuck with them. 100 Gems is a huge penalty when there was no warning that if I wanted to remove it that is what it would cost.