This was originally intended to be a reply to Korozenn's thread discussing crafting, which you can read here. However this became something more as I delved deeper into my thoughts on the matter and decided to make it a separate thread and have altered it slightly so that it doesn't sounds so much like a reply.

Learning Unique Styles

This is something I only recently realised that I wanted; and that's the ability to take a unique looking item such as "The Emperor's Blessing" staff and learn how it was made, the style at least. There are a bunch of unique looking weapons/armour in this game and I found I end up just deconstructing them all. Mainly because I don't have the space to keep them all and that they also become inferior or are already inferior to begin with.

Now, how would this work? It would have to have something to do with obtaining the unique item first of course, but instead of deconstructing it to learn how to make it you'd have to research it like a trait. And this fits in nicely with @Korozenn 's idea about adding a secondary trait to weapons and armour.

While his idea about secondary traits is focused on additional buffs, mine is pretty much just aesthetics and altering the style of the item being created. We could have both of course and I'll explain an alternate method of implementation below.

Learning a unique style could be as simple as deconstructing it and from that deconstruction you would always get a single unique ingredient that acts as the style material that you would use in the creation of any level of weapon/armour.

For example

The twisted wooden staff look of The Emperor's Blessing is what I want my new staff to look like. So I deconstruct it and receive an item called let's say..."Blessed wood". Now I want to use this item to re-create the style of The Emperor's Blessing, so first I gather all the ingredients for the level of staff I'm making and when I'm in the creation menu instead of picking "Racial Styles" I can choose "Unique Styles" and scroll through the unique styles that I have accumulated specific to staves. In our case we select "Blessed wood" as the style material and boom, done!

This unique style material would get used up in the creation process. However, when you deconstruct the previously created item you will always re-obtain it again. Also, perhaps for a more interesting creation process you would have to find certain unique crafting stations to create these unique items.

There are many more different ways to go about this of course. I just want to be able to re-create the look of these unique items and give them a lot more worth.

Thanks for reading!