This might have come up other places before, but I'm a bit peeved over the current gear progression in BG3, and it's a bit interconnected.
1. Character Creation
In DnD 5e you get a lot of choices for starting gear during character creation. This is to me a big part of making a coherent build.
Being able to select mundane gear that suits your idea for your character from the start is almost as important as picking your stat points and class in my opinion.
2.Mundane Gear distribution is oddly structured
The progression of gear, and distribution of the gear is very oddly structured.
My fighter starts with medium, even though I'm a strength build character and can take heavy armor. Many classes starts with gear that's beneath their 5e starting gear class equivilent.
No class starts with heavy armor(!) And no equivilent heavy armor is available until almost the end of EA. Chainmail is the "basic" mundane armor for heavy armor classes. Ring mail is usually reserved for NPCs.
Right now you can't really build a "Dex dump stat" character, or be penilized with bad armor. AC14 isn't really "OP" nor is AC16.
This is made further frustrating by the fact that Scale Mail, and Scale Mail +1, is readially available, so if you spec 14 Dexterity you already start with AC16.
3. Origin Character Privilege
Show of hands. Who steals Lae'zels armor first chance they get?
She starts with a half-plate(!) this is the best mundane medium armor in DnD5e it usually cost quite a lot of gold, and she starts with it.
Shadow Heart on the other hand doesn't get a breastplate, even though her armor looks like one, no she get's a Chainshirt (Which is made worse by her 9 in Dexterity... urgh)
Astarion, ther Rogue, get's Padded armor(!?) which gives him disadvantage on stealth. His jacket looks like it's made of leather, why isn't this leather armor?
My advice to Larian is to look at the actual gear distribution in DnD 5e, to learn what is considered "average"
Thing like Half-Plate and Full-Plate is actually something you can consider giving at the end of Act 1, not at the start. And Chainmail is something you should have from the get go as a Heavy Armor user.
When we fins +1 magical armor for Light and Medium armor BEFORE we find a freaking chainmail armor you know the progression is misunderstood. Heavy armor isn't a "level up" from the other two types, all three types are their own progression paths and dependent on class and racial features.
And that brings me to the second part of this post.
Getting to select your starting equipment, similarly to 5e
I have two ideas here:
1. Just let us select it after the first time we press "venture forth" at creation, before we get to design our dream person.
2. Have class appropriate gear available in the first pod room.
3. Both of the above. Let us select our load out, but let it be something we have to find in the first room. Let it be the first quest to teach us how to navigate and jump over the fire etc.
