Haven't posted in a while, but finally got to playing D:OS 2. Quite enjoying it. Anyway, I also found the repair hammer change questionable, and the identify glass one moreso. Repair hammer consumption at least disincentives chest-bashing, but barely. A single unbreakable weapon makes that a non-issue, or just use spells as error3 said. Or even just using the million extra junk weapons you find. An extremely ineffective solution with the cost of more inconvenience.
I prefer other ways to "punish" bashing open chests and doors. Breaking items in the chest, like Surrealalis suggested, would be a strong deterrent. Maybe just slightly, but permanently reducing the armor/damage on weapons and armor looted in a broken open chest?
Maybe a few abilities that set items to 0 durability could be cool, but mostly player abilities. For example:
Careless Strike: Strike with a high damage and guaranteed crit + bleeding (or whatever), but you break your weapon.
Overcharge (Aerothurge?): Double the stats of a piece of armor for 2-3 turns, but at the end of that time, it breaks. Difficult to balance, but could be cool.
Scales to Bone (Geomancer?): Heal for the remaining durability + X on an equipped item, breaking it.
These would synergize nicely with a talent that would let you equip weapons or armor for no AP once a turn or something like that.
Even these abilities could be easily done without durability just as well. Make them unequip the items and unable to re-equip them for a few turns, or the like. It's going to take a lot to make durability interesting, but abilities that interact with durability would be a great start. They would make for both tactical decisions about when you'd want to sacrifice an equipped item and resource ones, where using these abilities would cost money, though they could also open up new strategies for using the many weapons and armor you find that you might otherwise throw away.
If limited use repair hammers stay, I also agree they should have a repair amount instead of just single use. The higher the blacksmithing, the more you can get out of one hammer. And if that's the case, a repair all equipped items button would remove a ton of tedium. I don't know if it's worth the effort to make durability interesting, though.
