I disagree: I think there should be chests, maybe even doors, that can only be lockpicked. In an effort to make everything accessible by all characters, abilities like lockpicking can become useless except as a minor convenience.
You are talking about big design changes, so I don't follow. Chest can be broken, buried treasures can be digged with good perception.
I know the game can check your lockpicking ability and offer you a special dialog option, because the Queen Spider does a charisma check. But that is the only instance I can think of.
Additionally, and adressing
The rest of your post mostly highlights the fact that ability bonuses on loot are way too excessive.
aswell,
even if bonus loot were less excessive, those abilities would remain subpar by design.
Lucky Charm is a money-making ability: I have not seen any blue or green item proc from it (I might be wrong or particulary unlucky, but lucky charm proc alot, and junk loot most of the time, extremely rarely rubies/tormented soul and essences, but that's just money because souls and essences can be bought plentiful). Bartering and Pickpocketing are money-saving abilities (maybe you can steal quest items to NPC, I haven't tried, but I doubt it).
And Crafting/Blacksmithing, on top of being gear-improving abilities, are money-making abilities aswell and way better at it.
That you can get 8 points in lucky charm without investing a single point is absurd
I think it's even 9 starting some level where crafted daggers give 2 lucky charm. 11 with karma. But, again, I don't know if going above 5 has any impact, and it's not that interesting anyway even at 5 (no gear).
By design, you can swap gear. By design, there are non-combat stats and combats stats that share the same resource: ability points.
I agree with you that there are too much non-combat stats on gear, even though I think it's pretty minor in the current state of the game. I agree with you when you say it should be made rarer, but I'd go even further: non-existent. That or make them not compete with combat stats and create a new resource for them ("out of combat ability points"). In place of the traits for instance.
I see you often discuss game design, what do you think of
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=573949?
