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Crafting dropped items through research
I would like to see the ability for players to research dropped item bonuses and craft new items with those bonuses added to ESO. It could be done by expanding the trait research mechanism to include dropped item bonuses in the following manner:
- Add a 5th skill to Metallurgy, Carpentry, and Stitching available at skill level 50.
- This skill would allow crafters to research dropped item bonuses and craft new items with those bonuses.
- The crafter would have had to have researched all 9 traits of the type of item (cuirass, inferno staff, jerkin, etc.) they wished to research.
- The dropped item would be destroyed during research.
- Researching a dropped item would take up a research slot while the research is conducted.
- Researching a dropped item would take the maximum research time (since the crafter will have researched all 9 traits for that type of item already.)
- Once the research is completed the crafter would be able to create new items with the dropped item’s bonuses.
- The new items would have to be the same type of item as the dropped item that was researched.
- The new items could be of any material, style, and trait the crafter knows how to use.
- Dropped items that are bind-on-pickup could be researched but newly crafted items with the dropped item’s bonuses would be bind-on-pickup as well.
There would be several advantages gained by adding this feature to ESO:
- It would mitigate a great deal of the dropped item vs crafted item power level argument since dropped items could be crafted…eventually.
- It would supplement rather than replace the item dropping mechanism since players would still have to have the desired item drop to start the crafting process.
- It would allow players to replace dropped items that have undesirable traits with items that have more desirable traits.
- It would allow players to customize the appearance of items with the desired bonuses.
- It would retain the rarity of dropped items that are only available through specific types of content since the bind-on-pickup mechanism would be retained.
- Newly introduced dropped items would retain their exclusivity for a reasonable amount of time since it would take several weeks of research before crafted versions would be available.
- Most importantly it would allow crafters to specialize. As it stands now there is little difference between maximum level crafters since there are limited crafting goals to obtain. Due to the long research times and the large and growing amount of dropped items available it would be impossible for one crafter to know how to create all of the different dropped items. Crafters would have to carefully choose which dropped items to research which would lead to crafter specialization.
Edited by Stormwalker on January 2, 2016 4:30PM