In BG3 you need specific items for your build because they come with passives, that allow you to create synergies. If they only come from the classes/schools or talents i think that would vastly limit the variety of builds. So in that sense they should have passives and therefore be crucial to your build.
Maybe I misunderstood you but it sounds like you want the gear to be more like stat blocks and the effects coming only from your classes/talents?
What I mean is something like the difference between Returning Pike and Ring of Flinging.
Returning Pike is a build critical item. As it allows (Non-EK) characters to access infinite throwing items. It is a key part of the functionality of a throwing build. This is poor design as it means you need to go and get it ASAP for your build to work.
Ring of Flinging is a supplemental item for a build. Throwing builds still work without it, but it is nice to have for bonus damage. Functionally, you could have some generic ring item that gives "+1 damage" to use before you obtain this, lessening the need to rush to pick it up since your build still works, you just get marginally more powerful for obtaining this item on a build that can utilise it.
That's the sort of thing I'm on about.
Have the build critical things be stuff you build for on your character via feats, stats, abilities and all sorts of potential avenues for actually giving your character some innate abilities.
While items are more supplemental, even with unique and build specific effects.
This would not only take away some of the pressure to rush and pick up unique items, but also allow new players (Or players who don't look at a wiki to find every item in the game before playing) to make builds on their own without having to luck into a build critical item to make them function.
I think even if you just want to get different endings/dialog options or play different characters, you most likely plan your build for the next run, since you propably don't want to play the exact same as in the previous run.
Not necessarily in much detail.
Like, do I need to plan out every single item and its uses on my characters just to play a different class? No.
I just need to think "I want to play X character. What other classes do I want in my party to work together?"
There is a reason that there is a subreddit with over 200k people solely with the focus of creating builds. You see plenty of people wanting to just roleplay and still asking for a fitting build. And in order to create synergies for builds you need to optimize somewhat (and I would argue that humans do have a tendency to optimize that you just can not get rid of and should not try to). Of course not everyone is min maxing trying to squeeze out that extra 3 damage per hit but i also don't think there is anything wrong with that.
From what I've seen on these forums of people asking about builds, they're mostly just asking about party compositions, class combos and combat styles (Great Weapon Mastery vs Sword and Board vs Dual Wield) rather than "Please tell me about every unique item in the game and how I should optimise them"
I just don't see the big benefit to have to run to 5 enemy points and have a 20% chance to get the thing you want immediately. If i am unlucky i played those 4 other fights without the item i wanted and lose out on the experience how the other 4 fights would have turned out with the item.
The general idea, and my insistence on reducing build critical items, is to reduce the need to rush and get the thing immediately.
Meaning you play more organically, going to take on areas and fights when you naturally get around to doing them. Rather than "I NEED to go do X, Y and Z in that order to make my build work ASAP"
Having more freedom to do things in different orders to get different experiences, rather than playing like a speedrunner and doing the same exact thing every run.
What would be an example of a less impactful gear? To me it would be super boring if its just stats and maybe +5% more fire damage or something like that. There would be no creativity in that.
There's plenty of examples in BG3.
Stuff like the Gloves of Belligerent Skies and Luminous Gloves. They're nice and can be pretty good in certain builds, but they're hardly game changingly powerful and aren't necessarily broken if you can have multiple of them.
Same with the Heat items, they can be interesting to build around (Even though Heat sucks horribly in BG3), but aren't necessarily broken if duplicated.
The problem items are the really game changing ones, such as Headband of Intellect and Gloves of Dexterity which can allow you to dump those respective stats. Or really strong items like Knife of the Undermountain King or Markoheshkir that are either ridiculously good stat sticks for any build, or provide a powerful ability to any caster.
Its not that easy to achieve though. On one hand it feels odd, if you did a whole combo of like 5 skills and not do a lot of damage, since that wouldn't feel very rewarding and on the other hand it would feel very boring if you just one shot everyone after you did your combos. Getting that sweet spot is propably really hard.
It's not that hard. If you combo'd 5 skills, it means you combo'd 5 skills that are 1 AP meaning they're going to be weak.
Bigger AP costs will do more damage.
Meaning that all you have to tune, is how much damage you are capable of dishing out with the AP you get per turn and multiply that by the number of characters in your party and then average out this result against how long you want the standard enemy to last.
If you want standard enemies to last 1 turn, then have the damage possible from all your characters equal their health. Thus, stronger enemies take more turns by nature of having more health than the basic dudes.
I don't quite understand.. you had your "normal" attack and the sills usally did more than that with equal ap costs. Whirlwind for example does 100% fo your attack damage as an aoe, so minimum it does as much as one attack vs 1 enemy but it can do 5x that if there are 5 enemies around you. And skills that less than your actuall normal attack had like a big debuff, such as battle stomp with 60% of your attack damage ( though it also does aoe so it can deal more damage than your normal attack vs 2 or more enemies).
That's the point. Whirlwind was one of the few skills worth actually getting because it had the potential to deal more damage.
Most of the Scoundrel skills for example did exactly the same damage as your regular attack. But only hit 1 target. The "Debuffs" they provided were irrelevant because of the stupid armour system blocking them (With the time when enemies had bare health and so could be affected by debuffs being when they died in like 1-2 character turns because 90-95% of enemy "Health" was their armour)
Even with Divinity Unleashed that reworked the armour system and so all enemies could always be affected by debuffs... Most of the debuffs were watered down to the point of irrelevance, especially with co-ordinated attacks to nuke down single targets (Which is generally how combat is best done) meaning that the target wasn't affected by them for long enough for them to matter.
I think 5 ap instead of 4 is fine though. It just shouldnt get to like ridicolous levels of 10 ap or so. Also because your turn might take years.
A higher cap is necessary with more AP per turn, since you need to facilitate AP saving as a mechanic. As it is a gameplay feature that provides more flexibility and options compared to a strict "If you don't use all your available actions, you lose that resource" which plagues BG3 and the need to weaponise Bonus Actions as a result.
Not to mention that with higher spenders then high caps don't necessarily take long to deplete. Like, if I have 10 AP and use 2x skills that cost 5AP then that it done. It's only an issue if for some reason, your play is to do 10x skills that cost 1 AP (If you even have that many, realistically, there would be more focus on 2-3 AP skills with 1, 4 and 5 AP skills being less common, so you're doing on average 2 actions per turn, similar to BG3 and your Standard + Bonus action)
