Guild Wars 2

As the title says, I’d like to be able to craft a skin (like the HoM ones) for a weapon or armor as opposed to a full-fledged item. This would be crafted through whatever tradeskill creates the corresponding item type and would be learned through the discovery system.

The discovery recipies would be fairly simple at the low-end, requiring you to forfeit the item with the skin you want as part of it, and a token amount of other materials (including but not necesarily limited to coin) as well.

I’ve seen this request before from time to time, in various forms, but what got me behind it finally was the idea that crafting is so universal there is no value in the skill itself, and the most fun I ever had with crafting was actually many years ago in EverQuest, farming rare materials to throw away in the forge, hoping for skill points, so that I could make rare and exotic items.

Being a 400 weaponsmith doesn’t mean anything on its own, but having a rare-skinned weapon does. By all means, make the weapon / armor skins expensive to make (you could buy cultural armor skins off the trade post for less than the vendor price—no fashion achievement, but you get the looks), but far cheaper than the original item—and make the originals ascended for the really-expensive mystic forge recipies. Bumping them up would mean there is still a reason to have the original item instead of just the skin.

Tradeskills get rare recipies that will be relatively exclusive due to the small number of people willing to sacrifice these items—grinding for the recipies would be far too painful, and the out-of-the-way nature means the gradual trend towards max that MMOs have shouln’t really apply. People not willing or unable to pursue rare-skinned gear have a lower mark they can now hit.

I don’t think this would have worked with exotics as top-shelf gear because they are too easy to manipulate until they have the stats you want. With fixed-stat ascended gear, you can have exclusive combinations and effects very easily, preserving the value of individual items.

I think it would work.