I was thinking about this. A lot.
Already back with D:OS2 I disliked three aspects of itemization done there:
a) Items lose their value quickly (because of stat bloat, but...) - this is especially painful on items that provide unique bonuses (
a certain compass comes to mind
)
b) Shopping for new items every level up, which can take 30-40 minutes in act 2 and even longer in act 3 because of limited supply there
Therefore:
c) Items acting mostly as a time / gold sink which comes with its own set of problems (counterbalancing the sinks by abusing thievery in early mid game, player not really looking forward to levelling up, instead thinking "hm, ok, I level up and then I take a break, I don't have the nerve yet to run to all the merchants to get gear", which is something I experienced a lot)
So, my thoughts regarding itemization, and this is a relatively mature proposal:
a) Only relatively few items which are really good ("Divine" level for example)
b) Those very good items
c) You need to fight / quest to get them, some may be hidden (not all, that would be bad)
d) Item stats scale with level (all items, not only the very good ones) - alternatively: have an easy to execute "upgrade" path ("add 3 drops of toad brew to this Sword of masterful Source Vampirism") which requires a few items, though
e) Excessively good items scale extra with quests for that item (we get something like this in WotR, which is currently a source of inspiration for my ideas)
A goal of my proposal is that trips to vendors are rare and mostly serve to "fill the gaps" and get some incidentals in most cases.
A good example in D:OS2 was a certain bow you could get in act "2.5" (as I prefer to call it) if - and only if - you made the right decision in relatively early game (about 3 hours in?). I loved that bow, but only on level 16. Had to replace it with some random vendor weapon again on level 18 already. :-(
