Zenimax: Idea on how to make trait stones more valuable

Nova Sky

Folks:

By now, most of us probably are sitting on a stack of 200 trait stones — or more — that offer *permanent* improvements to armor and weapons. How about adding value and use to those stored stacks by making trait improvements transitory in nature?

It'd work along the lines of how we must now repower our enchanted weapons with soul gems. The traits, once applied, would wear out after taking so many hits or being used "x" amount of times. The applied traits could be repowered by using identical trait stones to energize them again.

Perhaps a depowered trait effect could be swapped out with another one, too, adding another avenue of creativity for the players?

Just some late-night/early morning ideas, Zenimax. How about you, fellow forumites? What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Other, better, ideas?

I_killed_Vivec

I don't know about your idea (maybe use them for repairing gear?) but I do have stacks of 200 of each of the traits.

What annoys me is that they are given out as "rewards" for writs and are provided by hirelings. I end up destroying half of what I get from writs and hirelings and that just isn't right.

Bhakura

just give them a value so they can be sold ... even if its only 1 g per

think i destroyed thousands of them since i started playing lol

Mettaricana

Make em rarer nolonger offer them from hirelings. Also anything past lvl 50 in gear shouldn't be allowed to have training sturdy or well fitted or well fitted. If anything I wish they would change or remove those pissy traits like make training do increased dmg with skills of the weapon its on skills by a %.

Spearshard

They could add a feature where you can change the trait of gear at crafting stations for a material and trait stone cost, use a around 2-3 mats (i.e. iron ingots) and say 15 trait stones. It would relieve several issues at the same time. It would be a trait stone sink, allow trait swapping, (relieve rng woes and player frustration) as well as add value to the stones, turning them into a gold sink as well. It would add a level of complexity to crafting that would be nice.

Nova Sky

Some good ideas, folks. Does anyone else have anything to contribute to this discussion? After all, I'm fairly certain that there are more than five people who visit the forums.

Another idea that I had is this: Once you have 25, 50, 75 or 100 of a trait stone, you can "convert" that stack into a "super trait stone" whose power depends on the number of "normal" trait stone expended in its creation. If this were to come to pass, Zenimax, be sure to *not* bind the resulting "super trait stone" to the player's account. That way, you not only find another use for normal trait stones, but the "super" ones could be sold on the marketplace if the creator didn't want them.

Qyrk

I'm open to the idea but before we get to making trait stones valuable, I would suggest making other traits in par with divines/infused/precise/shardpened/nirn/reinforced first. Best to deal with improving other less popular (or barely used) traits before we get to this.

Soulshine

Never really understood why it always takes more and more mats to create a piece of armor as you level it up, but yet it only takes ONE teeny little stone for a v16 legendary item to be completely "infused" or "precise" ?? Weirdness if you ask me. If you had to plow throw them the way you do other mats to create something, they wouldn't be gathering cobwebs in the bank.

Sausage

The thing isnt to make them more useful, its to reduce the drop rate a lot. Theres too much of everything, thats why no-one isnt buying/selling anything, when they have a bank full of stuff. They could easily put like 50% reduced drop rate on ALL items, well I think gold-tannings start to be there, maybe even 70%. First step is to make everything more rare, imho.