You mean sometimes enemies drop +0 and sometimes +1 and +2 weapons? I wouldn't mind it but i don't think it would make a huge impact in terms of gameplay, maybe slightly more/less damage or defence sometimes but that's it right?
That and being able to find such things from relevant sources (Such as weapon racks, equipment chests and the like)
It might not necessarily need to be as simple as BG3 where it only amounts to +1 attack/damage or AC.
But the general idea is that you can build up some generic equipment to gain stats, rather than feeling the need to rush to unique items.
I think the majority of the people who rerun the game propably plan out builds and want it to come online asap. If there is x amount of locations where you could get one of your core pieces, I would rather find it annoying, since i want to play with my build as much as possible.
The crux of this is more so the fact that you have these build critical items in the first place.
If you need specific items for your build to work, then that is a design issue with items.
Ideally your build should come from how you built your character, where items are supportive rather than "I need this item for my build to work, so I need to rush to grab it 0.01 femtoseconds after starting the game!"
Also, I don't think the majority of people who rerun the game plan out builds. A lot of people play casually and will rerun to see different options, play different classes, romance different characters.
It's only min-maxers that will meticulously research and plan out builds, and they can still min-max and rush to all potential spawn locations to get their desired items as fast as possible.
Crafting could be an option, but it also requires to be balanced correctly with multiple copies of an item, which is a worry i have.
Again, this comes down to how item design ends up working out.
The more power that's put into actual character building, what stats they level, skills they raise, feats they take and abilities they utilise, the less impactful gear needs to be.
The less impactful gear needs to be, the less of a concern being able to duplicate (Or improve by way of making "Perfect" statted versions of) items would be.
Again, this doesn't necessarily need to mean boring and generic, but simply less build defining and more supportive.
Yeah the movement beeing tied to AP is a bid odd but i can see it as a balancing tool.
The issue is the way the balancing works is it generally means "Moving is almost always worse than just using ranged attacks"
Like, ranged is already heavily favoured in combat anyway, due to the ease of being able to hit targets, while being out of range of melee attackers (With of course many ways to abuse this with obstacles in the path of you and melee enemies or persistent AoE's like Wall of Fire or damaging surfaces not to mention CC like knockbacks, slows, teleports etc)
Punishing melee even more by making them have to sacrifice the ability to attack just in order to get into range to attack just massively pushes things towards ranged combat even more.
This is before you even factor in how it limits potential when actually fighting in melee. Such as being able to swap targets, move around to get flanking bonuses, repositioning for skills (Like pushing an enemy into an AoE) etc.
Like, the only way you can "Balance" this is if you make melee so much stronger than ranged that melee characters just do obscene damage (But then this too can backfire and go back to ranged favoured combat as you try and kite enemy melee units so they can't blow up your party... Especially when factoring in Larian's love of having a billion enemies per combat)
It is a bit tricky, on one hand i would like to chain a lot of skills to get out cool effects and on the other hand i don't want to burst down the enemy.
Ehh... It's just a balancing thing.
Damage output vs health.
In addition, there's the scaling to what AP equates to an "Average" attack. Which is actually one of the issues I had with DOS2's AP system. 2 AP was an average attack and since most skills used 2 AP they all did average attack damage so it was like... Why do I care to even obtain these skills when I can do a regular attack for the same damage?
Similarly on Lone Wolf its like... I could spend 2 AP on a skill... Or I can use my special normal attack that uses the 3 AP I get a turn to do more damage.
With increased AP per turn for more flexibility in skill usage, you can still tune how much damage skills do based on AP costs. Like, even with 5 AP a turn, maybe a 5 AP skill does as much damage as a normal attack in DOS2 and using multiple cheaper skills just adds up to equal this. Thus damage output per turn remains the same as with DOS2 balance, but you have more control over how you play your turns, with more room for support skills or AP saving (Whilst still doing something during your turn) and the like.
