Crafting Unique Item Art onto Commons/Magics/Rares

I'll start this post with a bit of a story about my noobiness. I started this game again on the tail-end of Harbinger league after being coaxed back by my friends. Tried the game out again, loved it, and here I am!

Around the time I started learning more about endgame crafting (still in Harbinger league) and started playing around with Vaal Orbs, I learned that a bricked unique-turned rare kept the unique's art. I was then told that you could actually use this method (and the 5:1 vendor recipe) to get a unique's art onto an uncorrupted rare item, then scour it and have an uncorrupted common item with unique art you could use for crafting. I trusted my friend and never considered looking it up; it just stayed in my mind as the coolest, ultimate crafting vanity thing that maybe I'd someday do.

It's been many leagues later, and while my brother and I have been corrupting a large number of things we incidentally happened upon the truth:

You actually can't get a unique item's art onto a common item to use for crafting into a super-cool rare.

I'm heartbroken.

I realize this is a long-winded post and I'm sure this has been suggested before, but this would be an incredible thing to change to make work. It would add a lot of fun possibility for players looking for more customization in their build that doesn't add power creep or upset balance in any way.

Please think on it!

-Resto

Item Skin Transfer microtransactions have been around for quite some time ... you can buy them fairly cheaply in the shop and get 10 at a time. This can take the item skin of whichever item you wish (destroys the item you are copying the appearance of) and you can then apply it to whichever base item you wish, as long as the base types match up. (can't make a 1-handed sword appear as a 2-handed sword, for example)


This works with "bricked" uniques, so you could take a corrupted unique item that ended up as a rare and take it's appearance .... and apply it to a common rare with the same base type. A bricked starforge will still appear as a starforge for it's appearance, and you can take it and apply the skin to any other 2-handed sword .... even a level 1 item.