And this is what made Baldur's Gate a borefest on multiple playthroughs. Since the magic item loot was set (which I'm assuming you want since set trash loot has no purpose), you would end up having a formulaic playthrough. Rush to get Celestial Fury, get Flail of Ages, get Carsomyr, etc etc as early as possible. It's a horrible system.
Playthroughs degenerate into item checkpoints where you only progress on to the next stage when you have the set magic items and everything else can be skipped since you've got the best stuff in that area.
Your complaint makes no sense. Having set items makes for a formulaic playthrough? How does not having them solve that? There's still an optimal path to take through the game just as in games with set items... there's literally no difference.
At least set items avoids the problem where 99.9% of all the items you loot are vendor trash of no consequence. If I hadn't realized that vendors reroll their loot the first time you talk to them after leveling up, and done that to the skeleton vendor in order to roll items that weren't total trash for my characters, my guys would've been using the same gear from lvl 5 to lvl 20. Heck, some of their gear was the same from lvl 5 to lvl 20... and I was running around with 300,000 gold because there was nothing to spend it on except those tomes from the secrets chick in the homestead.
