I was talking with a guildmate about how frustrating it can be to collect BoP sets, either you never get the armor slot you need (and get half a dozen pairs of shoes) or you get it and it isn't the trait you want. It feels overly grindy right now to assemble your preferred gear set with the traits you want. He had an excellent suggestion and since he doesn't have a forum account I thought I would share it.

1. We have no problem with dungeon/trial sets being BoP, in fact we like it because then if a player wants that set they need to do that content.
2. The problem of getting wrong traits and/or multiple copies of one armour piece can make getting gear feel like TOO much of a grind.

Solution:

Say you are attempting to collect 5 pieces of The Fabulous Mage set but despite running the dungeon over and over (and over) you have collected many pieces but not 5 different slots and have an absurd number of Shoes of the Fabulous Mage, in various traits. If we could deconstruct these set items and get a Scrap of the Fabulous Mage (1 per set item) and then use a special crafting station inside the dungeon where the set drops to use multiple Scraps of the Fabulous Mage + trait gem of choice to craft whichever piece of The Fabulous Mage set we desire.

If a player is lucky and gets the Robe of the Fabulous Mage - infused which is exactly what the player wanted, they don't need to worry about anything, but instead if they get 6 pairs of Shoes of the Fabulous Mage and the robe never seems to drop then they can deconstruct the 5 extra pairs of Shoes to give 5 Scraps which could then be turned into the desired Robe of the Fabulous Mage (with player chosen trait).

Scraps would be BoP and the item they craft would be BoP.

Special Crafting Station would be needed because sets only are available in certain slots and weights, the only thing the player really would choose piece, trait and possibly level (or Scraps may need to be given a level to prevent abuse by farming of lower level set items/deconstruct/craft v16 piece). This Crafting Station (of the Fabulous Mage) wouldn't require any crafting skills, you can be rank 1 in everything and still craft. This would make it fair for those players who choose not to master crafting skills as crafting isn't something everyone likes to do.

This idea uses mechanics already in the game for crafting by deconstruction of certain items to yield a material to craft a new item. The "special" crafting stations would really just be a trimmed down version of a normal one to limit the options available so they shouldn't be too hard to implement. It isn't a 1:1 conversion but rather for those players who have been unlucky in drops you can turn multiple drops you don't need into the piece you do need, so there still is work required to a complete set with the traits you want, but you don't have to rely 100% on RNG to complete the set.

I thought this idea was just too neat to not share, you may not think it is good solution to this problem, please comment to share your thoughts!