Game Mechanics Scrapping Items

So, who here remembers scrapping items for repair scraps? Yeah, this isn't that.

I was replaying Kingdoms of Amalur recently (if you haven't played it, worth checking out, especially if you're interested in game design), and one thing that caught my attention was the frankly rather good item crafting system. It allows for a reasonably balanced way to make your own gear with attributes that fit what you need. It's by no means perfect, but there are a few interesting design choices I think are worth mentioning and possibly taking some inspiration from. The only one I really wanna focus on though is scrapping items to get components.

In the context of Wynncraft, this would mean being able to scrap items at a blacksmith in order to get ingredients. I don't think that making new ingredients for every item is worth the time it would take, nor would assigning specific ingredients to every item. Rather, I think that assigning specific, unique ingredients to a select few items would be the best way to implement this. More specifically, I think this would be an interesting way to add major IDs to crafted items, by making a selection of ingredients that offer a major ID that can be only received with a relatively low chance, by scrapping items with that major ID.

This would offer some substantial benefits, albeit with one potentially really big drawback (but I don't think it would actually be that huge). The most obvious is that crafted items would be a lot more powerful, but in a way that isn't just a raw increase to their power. You would still get downsides from these ingredients that would need to be balanced. Another great benefit is that crafted classes would have access to major IDs, which might make the challenge run a little bit less painful (no it wouldn't). It would also add value to finding items with major IDs, especially to ironman-crafted classes for whom these would be otherwise virtually worthless. This would also make some major IDs more usable, specifically ones occurring on items people aren't gonna use (lockdown is kinda neat, but for some reason I'm not ever going to use it except briefly while leveling- probably because it's only currently on a level 74 wand that doesn't deal anywhere near enough damage to be viable in the endgame). I get that some of these are going to get more items with them, and that some of them are only balanced in the context of the items that they're on, but I find it highly unlikely that adding some of the downsides of the items that they're on (negative health regen with greed, for instance) wouldn't be enough to balance nearly all of them (since that's currently how almost all of them are balanced).

As for downsides, the most obvious is of course that crafted items would be able to make use of powerful major IDs to make brokenly overpowered items that completely destroy the balance of the game. This doesn't hold any water in my opinion. Major IDs are fairly accessible, or are so inaccessible they would virtually never show up on a crafted item. No one's gonna scrap a dozen weathereds to make an item with roving assassin, and even if someone did, there would be so few of those on the market that it makes very little difference to the majority of players. If it was locked to a dagger, you'd basically just make a worse weathered. The main major IDs that would appear are ones on relatively common items; magnet, greed, coagulate, etc. Even these would be rare enough that making an item with one of these (besides maybe magnet because there's a gravity in every third chest over level 90) would be fairly expensive. Honestly, this is actually the biggest problem I would expect; these would be rare and niche enough that they probably wouldn't see a great deal more use than they currently do. Greed is great, but old keeper's ring is so easy to work into a build that it's effectively there if you want it. The only reason you wouldn't use it if you wanted it is if you desperately need that ring slot for something else, and having a crafted old keeper's ring isn't likely to change that.