The crux of this is more so the fact that you have these build critical items in the first place.
In BG3 you need specific items for your build because they come with passives, that allow you to create synergies. If they only come from the classes/schools or talents i think that would vastly limit the variety of builds. So in that sense they should have passives and therefore be crucial to your build.
Maybe I misunderstood you but it sounds like you want the gear to be more like stat blocks and the effects coming only from your classes/talents?
Also, I don't think the majority of people who rerun the game plan out builds. A lot of people play casually and will rerun to see different options, play different classes, romance different characters.
I think even if you just want to get different endings/dialog options or play different characters, you most likely plan your build for the next run, since you propably don't want to play the exact same as in the previous run.
There is a reason that there is a subreddit with over 200k people solely with the focus of creating builds. You see plenty of people wanting to just roleplay and still asking for a fitting build. And in order to create synergies for builds you need to optimize somewhat (and I would argue that humans do have a tendency to optimize that you just can not get rid of and should not try to). Of course not everyone is min maxing trying to squeeze out that extra 3 damage per hit but i also don't think there is anything wrong with that.
they can still min-max and rush to all potential spawn locations to get their desired items as fast as possible.
I just don't see the big benefit to have to run to 5 enemy points and have a 20% chance to get the thing you want immediately. If i am unlucky i played those 4 other fights without the item i wanted and lose out on the experience how the other 4 fights would have turned out with the item.
I mean it wouldn't be the end of the world or whatever but i think i would rather percieve it as a negative than a positive as a player.
And if you want to have less impactful gear the rng-element would matter even less.
The less impactful gear needs to be, the less of a concern being able to duplicate (Or improve by way of making "Perfect" statted versions of) items would be.
What would be an example of a less impactful gear? To me it would be super boring if its just stats and maybe +5% more fire damage or something like that. There would be no creativity in that.
The issue is the way the balancing works is it generally means "Moving is almost always worse than just using ranged attacks"
Yeah i agree with that. Range is definetly more favoured compared to melee, at least in DOS2 and BG3. I am pretty sure you can make it balanced with walking not taking actions like in bg3 and make it balanced as well.
Ehh... It's just a balancing thing.
Damage output vs health.
Its not that easy to achieve though. On one hand it feels odd, if you did a whole combo of like 5 skills and not do a lot of damage, since that wouldn't feel very rewarding and on the other hand it would feel very boring if you just one shot everyone after you did your combos. Getting that sweet spot is propably really hard.
In addition, there's the scaling to what AP equates to an "Average" attack. Which is actually one of the issues I had with DOS2's AP system. 2 AP was an average attack and since most skills used 2 AP they all did average attack damage so it was like... Why do I care to even obtain these skills when I can do a regular attack for the same damage?
I don't quite understand.. you had your "normal" attack and the sills usally did more than that with equal ap costs. Whirlwind for example does 100% fo your attack damage as an aoe, so minimum it does as much as one attack vs 1 enemy but it can do 5x that if there are 5 enemies around you. And skills that less than your actuall normal attack had like a big debuff, such as battle stomp with 60% of your attack damage ( though it also does aoe so it can deal more damage than your normal attack vs 2 or more enemies). I think 5 ap instead of 4 is fine though. It just shouldnt get to like ridicolous levels of 10 ap or so. Also because your turn might take years.
