recursively cubing weapons

[Crystalion]

Really everything comes down to what is easy or acceptable for you to find/consume?: plain elite base weapons; magical elite base weapons; plain or rare normal base weapons upgradable via decent runes. Depending on the base item and your character's level and luck in drops you may favor one path over the others. The way alvls/qlvls and imbues (rushed) work though, far and away the "luckiest" drops are the "plain" ones of exactly the topflight elite(s) you want--either for uber imbue chances or for runeword socketing. This suggests that players will concentrate on farming the latter parts of act5 hell and work on rune acquisition (passively, or by Countess runs, or by nm/hell hellforge rushing).

Hmm, I probably shouldn't have said this without (what seemed to me an obvious) disclaimer...

The luckiest drops are uber uniques and key runes for runewords or for upgrading a good unique into a uber-unique. So a relevant point, for the discussion of weapons, is that Lum and Pul (plus perf emerald) are the lucky drops if you already have a proto-uber exceptional unique weapon you'd like to upgrade (there are quite a few). Naturally the nm Hellforge rush can acquire these runes and you are far more likely, unless you're really high level, to be seeing proto-uber exceptional unique weapons drop than the new uber-elite unique weapons.

As I've been part of other discussions on which runewords are reasonably reachable but very powerful, I won't go into that in detail here. But Crescent Moon, which is still only ShaelUmTir as of v1.10s (they nerfed Call to Arms appropriately in beta-s but didn't adjust CM or Delirium, both of which are too easy in my opinion), is kind of the "baseline" to think about there, as you aren't unlikely to be able to make it (runes) before you even find a suitable base elite for it.

Edit: and even before you can make Crescent Moon, you have an excellent chance of being able to make Passion (my Assassin was barely over 50 when she could make it, but at 69 still hasn't accessed deeply enough into the game to have a good elite base item to put it into--this is normal play, not rushing Hellforge quests, for example).