I’d like to see more customization like this. It could get a little tricky though. What happens if you wear a piece of Hundings with a 2pc weapon damage bonus and another piece with a 2pc weapon crit bonus? If these don’t work together then buying crafted pieces from guild stores would become a lot more difficult (finding matching set bonus pieces). Maybe the best way to handle this would be to split the bonus, so in this example it would give 1/2 a Weapon Damage bonus and 1/2 a Weapon Crit. Extend that to wearing 5 pieces at it would have to look at each set bonus on each piece and find the average of each stat to give. I’m sure it’s possible to code this way, but could get a little confusing for the wearer to figure out what stats they are actually receiving from a set.

Balance wouldn’t be too bad TBH, since standard set bonuses are pretty well balanced already. Their relative strength is not equal across the board, but it’s proportional to the limitations of each. To give a very brief comparison from a damage point of view, from best to worst:
- Minor Slayer (~3.5% damage) - Only works in dungeons and trials, not overland or PVP. Limit of one instance of this bonus. Does not affect self healing.
- 1487 Penetration - Best case is around 3% damage, but diminishes quickly with other sources of Pen. Typical Magicka DPS end game build gets about 1% damage from this. Hard capped at enemy’s resistance value, after which Pen does nothing (limited use against debuffed PVE bosses or lightly armored PVP opponents). Does not affect self healing.
- 833 Crit - Strong option in PVE, adding about 2.5% damage (with Warhorns, Shadow Stone, etc,). Less effective in PVP due to crit resistance. Hard cap of 100%, but diminishing returns before that. Ineffective to build more than 60-70% crit on a Necromancer due to their execute passive.
- 129 Weapon/Spell Damage (~2% damage): Pretty much the standard everything else is weighed against. Generally useful, few limitations (a handful of skills don’t scale from this, only max stats).
- 1096 Stam/Magicka (1.5-2% damage) - This one is more dependent on your max stat multiplier. It can approach the power of a Spell Damage bonus on some Magicka builds, but is a little weaker on most. It also helps sustain a little (some resource return is % based) and allows longer resource burning phases before you are empty.
- 129 Mag/Stam Recovery. Somewhat useful in PVP, less so in PVE (there are more efficient ways to get recovery). It’s roughly balanced with Spell/Weapon damage since you can trade these at a rate of 1:1 in multiple ways in a build.
- 1206 Health - Similar to recovery, this is more desirable in PVP, where you will need to hit some minimums in any build. Less useful in PVE since Health set bonuses don’t allow you the option of going full glass cannon (while damage bonuses can always be traded for health easily in other parts of a build). Still about equal to a max Stam or Mag bonus, as far as shifting resources and total stats (slightly weaker since a preferable option is to get Health from tri-stat sources like Prismatic armor, triune or food).

I don’t see any massive issues with opening these up for all 2-4 piece crafted set bonuses. It’s not like anyone could make 2 sets and have 6 bonuses of Minor Slayer. Even the next best thing, Physical Pen, would be dumb to stack 6 times (why would you need 8922 Penetration?).

The next most powerful would be something like all Spell Crit on a damage set. This could be fun, but I’d hardly call it overpowered to have a set of Julianos with 3 crit bonuses (instead of the normal 2 crit + 1 Magicka).

What it would do is open up dead sets to be utilized in some new builds. Imagine Twice Born Star with decent 2-4 piece bonuses. You could make your own version of Mother’s Sorrow, with 10.7% crit on the 5pc from Thief instead of 8.8% crit (assuming 7 gold divines). So a 9 trait crafted set would be a 1-2% DPS gain over the base game overland set we’ve been stuck with for years. Sounds good to me. And it still has limitations (TBS can’t be front-barred like Sorrow, and requires divines to be effective).

On the topic of TBS you could make something similar to Twice Fanged Serpent using the Lover Stone. It also wouldn’t be usable on a single bar, and would only give 4196 Pen instead of the 4300 on the TFS 5pc, but there’s no ramp up time and you could put Weapon Crit on the 2-4 pc bonuses.

Or maybe make a set of Torugs Pact without the Resistance and Health for a DPS build. Could even give it Stamina stats (Physical Pen, Weapon Crit, Weapon Damage) and possibly see the return of some builds that use weapon enchants over alchemy poisons.

I guess maybe sets like Clever Alchemist might need adjustment if the 2-4 piece bonuses all became damage based, but things like this would be easy to watch out for and simple to adjust. There are so many other fun options it would be worth it IMO. It’s been too long since we’ve had a new game system to mix up the gear meta and reward creativity.