Online:Traits

Traits are a special property that can appear on all weapons and armor. Each item can have a single trait, in addition to all other properties an item can carry, though items without any traits are also common.

Traits may be researched in order to craft custom items with the respective properties. 

Constructing an item with a specific trait requires a special tertiary material. These ingredients can be retrieved by deconstructing items with traits, or refining raw ore, wood, leather or fibers. Crafting hirelings for Blacksmithing, Clothing and Woodworking will also commonly send all types of trait materials.

The magnitude of each trait depends on the quality of the item, improving the item will automatically increase the trait's magnitude.


Non-percentage values in the following tables are for Level 50   items. Lower level items will have smaller values.  See the individual trait pages for more complete info.

Weapon Traits

Weapon traits are available on all weapons - axes, swords, maces, daggers, greatswords, battle axes, mauls, bows, restoration staves and destruction staves.

All traits except Infused and Nirnhoned are twice as powerful on two-handed weapons as they are on one-handed weapons.



Armor Traits
Armor traits are available on all articles of light, medium and heavy armor, as well on shields.



Jewelry Traits
Jewelry traits are available on all Jewelry, including rings and necklaces/amulets.



Common Traits
The following traits are available on both armor, weapons, and as of Update 18, jewelry as well.

They can only be found, but not researched or crafted.


Deprecated Traits
These traits were removed and replaced in the past.
Exploration (armor trait) — Increased experience gained from discovering locations.  Was replaced with Prosperous.
Prosperous (armor trait) — Increased size of Gold drops.  Was replaced with Invigorating.
Weighted (weapon trait) — Increase weapon attack speed.  Was replaced with Decisive.

Research
In order to construct an item with a specific trait, it has to first be researched. This can be done at any crafting station:
Light and medium armor at Clothing stations
Bows, staves and shields at Woodworking stations
Heavy armor and metal weapons at Blacksmithing stations
Necklaces and rings at Jewelry Crafting stations
Researching a trait will unlock it only for that particular type of item - e.g. researching the Reinforced trait on pauldrons will only allow you to construct reinforced heavy armor shoulders, but not any other heavy armor items like cuirass or sabatons, or any other shoulder slot items like epaulets or arm cops. The only exceptions are robes and jerkins, which are simply two different styles of light armor chest items.

Researching is performed on a per-character basis, i.e., researching a trait on one character does not unlock that trait on any other character on that account.

Constructing item sets requires you to have a certain number of traits researched.

To start the research process, you need to have an item with the desired trait in your inventory or bank. Both found items and items crafted by other players work. Researching a trait will destroy the item.

By default you can only research a single trait at a time per crafting skill, though each crafting skill line has an ability to raise this limit and increase the research speed:
  Stitching for Clothing
  Carpentry for Woodworking
  Metallurgy for Blacksmithing
  Lapidary Research for Jewelry Crafting
These abilities can increase the research speed by up to 25%, and raise the limit of concurrent research tasks to 3 (with the exception of Lapidary Research, which does not add additional research slots). Note that even with an increased research limit, you still cannot research multiple traits on a single item type at the same time. The highest ability rank limits the research time to 30 days, which is only relevant to the 9  trait on an item, as the others would be below this limit already. Being an ESO Plus Subscriber further reduces research time by 10%, stacking multiplicatively with the above abilities.

The base research time for a trait is 6 hours real time. Each further trait you research for an item type doubles this time - 12 hours for the second trait, 24 hours for the third trait, and so forth. Research time continues to count down while you are not playing the character that is researching (e.g. playing another character or offline). The following table lists the research times for traits:



Using a research scroll will reduce the timers of all items currently being researched in one or more crafts by an amount dependent on the scroll (e.g. an     scroll will reduce the timers of all current Blacksmithing research items by 1 day). Scrolls obtained from the Crown Store have no cooldown between uses; scrolls purchased from Rolis Hlaalu have a cooldown of 20 hours.

Researching all traits for a single item without scrolls will take between 70 days 45 minutes and 127 days 18 hours, depending on the number of points invested in the appropriate skill and if you have ESO Plus. There are 6 different woodworking item types that can be researched, and 14 different clothing and blacksmithing item types that can be researched. This means that it will take an absolute minimum of 140 days 1 hour and 30 minutes (about four and a half months) to research all woodworking traits, and a minimum of 350 days 3 hours and 45 minutes (due to the last 2 traits having to research in their own with 1 empty slot, just under 1 year) to research all clothing and blacksmithing traits without the use of scrolls.