My humble suggestion for a few changes with the durability:
- Remove the durability and replace it with just two states "intact" and "broken" - Each "intact" item has a chance of being "broken" upon its use: a weapon when it is used to stike someone or something, armour when the character wearing is attacked - Different items should have a different chance of becoming broken: kitchen knives e.g. 10% (meaning that a kitchen knive will break on average every 10 times it is used), legendary swords less than 1% - Increase the chance for being broken when attacking doors or chests - If an item is broken, it can no longer be used and must be repaired (for example with a repair hammer which can be consumed)
With such a system, there is always an element of surprise of a weapon becoming unusable in combat. The player also does not need to repair all items after the combat but only one or two which got broken.
I don't think this would be any kind of improvement on the current system.
It would result in equipment breaking much more frequently, possibly in each combat if the RNG is bad. Even if the chance of a break is only 5%, that's one out of every 20 attacks, which is a lot given how many times you can attack in combat.
Once the item breaks in combat, you have two options: Waste your AP on a repair or flee combat and run back to a blacksmith to repair it, then run back.
This also dramatically affects melee classes much more than any others.
"Surprises" are not always a good or fun thing. I don't know where some people get that idea, that if something happens which is unexpected, that's automatically fun. Life offers up lots of incredibly horrible and unfun "surprises".
Larian could program a surprise "Hard Drive Wipe LOL" which has only a 1/10000 chance of occurring when you save your game, but that wouldn't be fun, now would it?
