Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback [CRAFTING] Upgrade gear to player level

I feel like there is a problem with equipment right now : you buy yourself a piece of gear with awesome bonuses, it costs you maybe 2000 gold, you are super happy when you put it on, and then ... 2 levels later (which is relatively fast), every pieces you find, even the crapiest ones, have a better level and much better physical & magical armour than the one you have.
Your armor's bonuses are still as nice as before, but its phys/magic armour make it quite obsolete.

Wouldn't it be great if we could, using anvil (+ maybe some other ingredients), upgrade the level of a piece of equipment to match the player's, improving its physical & magical armour.
Or maybe "player's level minus one" or something, so that gear of merchants still have better armour, and player is still encouraged to look at their stuff.

Aww that's a painful topic for many players... You've run into one of the major issues with the game.
It's not even every 2 levels - vendors receive better inventory every single level.

The problems are:

- Armor stats of gear increase too quickly each level, so you have to get new gear very frequently to be in good shape. You have to do it much more frequently than DOS1.
- Vendors carry a ton of good gear (legendary, unique, etc.), and on one hand that's good, but that really makes "legendary" and "unique" things quite meaningless, if you have to replace it almost every level, and they are always available at vendors. In a good RPG the player finds rare gear from exploration and questing, and it lasts a while if it's really good. I miss that. Games like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls have that.
- The devs really castrated the crafting system. In DOS 1 crafting was so good that the best crafted weapon was almost always better than anything you could find. You could craft a weapon and enchant it in several different ways, and it would last several levels. And rarely I would find an even better weapon from loot, which was really 'unique' in the true sense.

I miss good crafting and exploring for good gear that I can actually use.

Totally agree. Even with the crafting overhaul mod (which is great btw), crafting still feels like it could do more. I would love to have crafting a focus for me in this game, but even as someone who enjoys crafting, I have yet to find enough interest in it in this game to even bother. I think the closest I get is making lockpicks out of nails, and pounding a few nails through my boots to keep from slipping.

I haven't played #1, but I would love to see something like what is described above. Would love to spend time altering and adjusting my crafted gear for optimum stats and making legendary style gear.

On a side note OP, there is a mod that allows you to do exactly what you are asking for, at least as it pertains to uniques. It's called:

Upgradable Uniques

I believe it's on both the nexus website and the steam workshop. it essentially does exactly what you are asking: you use the Anvil, and it upgrades them.
I also tend to use it hand in hand with another Mod that actually makes uniques viable and competitive with gear of similar levels:

Interesting Uniques

Another great mod, this one changes most uniques stats to be more interesting, versatile, and often even adds new ones too! very fun mod. Biggest issue with most uniques, even outside of the stat scaling that pushes them into obsolescence in a level, many of them have worse stats then a green of the same level! This mod fixes that, and most of them are often comparable with decent gear of the same level, though not the best...you'll still find upgrades at the vendors that can outperform the new uniques.

I like the balance that those two mods bring. It allows my Uniques to be competitive with how the current game scales vendor gear and stats, and also allows me to keep a unique for far longer if I want to.