You may have been lucky enough to find yourself a Motif. These books or pages can be found anywhere and everywhere within ESO and are appealing to every player of every playstyle.
They can be used to customize the look of your character or they can be sold in Guild Traders for hefty amounts of gold. I am not joking on that last part, either. I’ve seen motifs go up for sale for up to a million gold.
So, what are Motifs? What is this book or page you may have found and how can you get more?
What Are Motifs?
Let’s start with what a Motif is. Motifs in ESO are Crafting Styles. That’s what they used to be anyway, before the edition of the outfit station. Motifs can be used or read, I guess, as it’s a book or page and it allows you to craft weapons and armor in that specific style.
Now, when you start the game for the first time, you’ll only know how to craft weapons and armor in your character’s racial style and as you read more Motifs, you can then craft in that particular style.
For example, my High Elf can craft armor and weaponry in the High Elf style. But if I’m lucky enough to find a Breton Motif book and I read it, my High Elf can then craft weapons and armor in the Breton Style.
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Different Motif Styles
Now since the game has been out for nine years, there are over a hundred different Motif Styles, not necessarily racial. Motifs then started to break down into individual pages.
So, for example, the nine playable races all have books that allow you to craft any weapon or armor piece in that style. However, if you look at the Imperial City DLC onward, all Motif Styles were broken into individual pages that you have to go out and collect. These pages are the individual pieces of armor and weaponry rather than a whole book that contains them all.
Since the release of the Outfit Station, however, crafting is now pointless. You don’t need to go through the effort of farming for the style materials to then craft your armor in that style. When you can simply just read the Motif page or book, come to the Outfit Station and simply change the appearance of your armor for a small fee of ESO Gold.
How To Get More Motifs?
So, how do you get Motifs?
Truthfully, these suckers can genuinely be found pretty much everywhere within the game. The most popular and well-known places to get Motifs is from trials, especially the newer chapters.
Dailies from any zone. This does include the Guild Dailies in the base game.
Group Dungeons, but only DLC dungeons. The base game dungeons don’t currently have any Motifs to collect from them. Now with dungeons, keep in mind the difficulty you do the dungeon on affects the chances of receiving a Motif with veteran hard mode being the best possible chance. Don’t be discouraged though, I have received plenty of Motifs from doing dungeons on normal.
Now, looking at base game, racial style books can be found in any container, dresser, wardrobe, box and urn, etc. But more specific Motifs, like Dwemer, will need to be found in Dwemer locations.
Now, some Motifs are worth an awful lot of money. If you’re lucky enough to find one, that is indeed rare. Consider selling it if you don’t want it for personal use. Depending on the rarity of the Motif, some can genuinely be sold for hundreds of thousands of gold.