What I mean is something like the difference between Returning Pike and Ring of Flinging.
I think the other items you mentioned are all build enabling items to me. Ring of Flinging would be the odd one for me since it feels more like plain added damage. At least with heat (if it was implemented in a more effective way) you could think of ways to maybe burn you and get another advantage out of it by beeing burned and getting the heat stacks on top or whatever.
Rushing to a critical item for the build feels especially bad currently, because the items are looked away and you want to experience the new run with that one in mind. Like trident of the waves has an interesting effect in bg3 but it is locked behind act 3, so making a build around it is basically pointless. If effects are not locked down to one specific item that exists only once in the game and you can only get it after already beating 2/3 of the game, then i think it would already be an improvement of the current system. You would still have the rushing bit not to the degree we currently have without reducing the significance of the gears. You would also have the same problem with skill books if that continues from DO2. People will propably rush to get the specific skills as well.
Not necessarily in much detail.
Sure to a variying degree of detail, some just ask for class levels like idk 5 monk / 7 barbarian others want specific gear. But its still a huge a mount of players who just love to craft builds.
From what I've seen on these forums of people asking about builds, they're mostly just asking about party compositions, class combos and combat styles (Great Weapon Mastery vs Sword and Board vs Dual Wield) rather than "Please tell me about every unique item in the game and how I should optimise them"
Yeah mostly nowadays, since builds have been figured out by the community.But there where a ton of people making guides, ranking gears, items builds etc.
The general idea, and my insistence on reducing build critical items, is to reduce the need to rush and get the thing immediately.
Don't get me wrong I completely agree that rushing for items ins't appealing and i suppose with randomized items you would never have this issue. I just don't think it should gut down the interesting effects that gear can potentially have and the build variety it enables.
And I guarentee you people will still rush to their items but instead of knowing the exact spot they would just rush trough all 3-5 possible enemy camps where the drop is and be more midly annoyed than how it currently is. And once they have it they can enjoy the game the way they intended it.
The problem items are the really game changing ones, such as Headband of Intellect and Gloves of Dexterity which can allow you to dump those respective stats. Or really strong items like Knife of the Undermountain King or Markoheshkir that are either ridiculously good stat sticks for any build, or provide a powerful ability to any caster.
i completly disagree with the Headband of Intellect and the Gloves of Dexteriy. The stats they give you arent amazing and most of the time you are better of using something different as a slot in gear. Beeing able to dump a stat doenst make the item inherently strong. Its nice but as long as the stats they give you arent broken i don't think there is an issue. I can't even think of a build of the top of my head where i want the Headband of Intellect over another helmet. The gloves are for sure better but i rather just go the natural route of 16 dex and then use the glove slot for something else, thats like a +1 attack/damage roll advantage, not the biggest deal.
Markoheshkir and Undermointain King are strong i do agree with those but its not really because they enable a build or have an interesting effect. Id go further and say that you wouldn't rush to those type of items because they don't unlock your build (aside from the fact, that markoheshkir is a late game item).
Then you have items like Titanstring Bow, Hat of Fire Acuity and Helmet of Arcane Acuity, where the reason they are game breaking is because they do not have a hard cap attached to their effect. Titanstring Bow has basically double scaling (so cloud/hill elixir + Maxing Dex gives a lot of damage), and both hats can easily get 10 stacks before the fight even starts by hitting furniture.
Meaning that all you have to tune, is how much damage you are capable of dishing out with the AP you get per turn and multiply that by the number of characters in your party and then average out this result against how long you want the standard enemy to last.
If you want standard enemies to last 1 turn, then have the damage possible from all your characters equal their health. Thus, stronger enemies take more turns by nature of having more health than the basic dudes.
Its still not that simple you have skills that interact with each other, surfaces other environmental effects, buffs, debuffs, strong or weak cc, positioning (high and low ground, spread of enemies and allies) damage multipliers from equip and so on. Then you don't want all the skills to just deal the same amount of damage so there has to be variety as well. I am sure a game dev can tell you how difficult it is to make it balanced.
Most of the Scoundrel skills for example did exactly the same damage as your regular attack. But only hit 1 target. The "Debuffs" they provided were irrelevant because of the stupid armour system blocking them (With the time when enemies had bare health and so could be affected by debuffs being when they died in like 1-2 character turns because 90-95% of enemy "Health" was their armour)
Even with Divinity Unleashed that reworked the armour system and so all enemies could always be affected by debuffs... Most of the debuffs were watered down to the point of irrelevance, especially with co-ordinated attacks to nuke down single targets (Which is generally how combat is best done) meaning that the target wasn't affected by them for long enough for them to matter.
Sure maybe there needs to be some balancing. I did not like the armor system either, so im glad its gone. I havent played unleashed so i dont know how well it worked or not. But i feel that point goes back to lowering the overall damage so debuffs can matter more.
A higher cap is necessary with more AP per turn, since you need to facilitate AP saving as a mechanic. As it is a gameplay feature that provides more flexibility and options compared to a strict "If you don't use all your available actions, you lose that resource" which plagues BG3 and the need to weaponise Bonus Actions as a result.
Not to mention that with higher spenders then high caps don't necessarily take long to deplete. Like, if I have 10 AP and use 2x skills that cost 5AP then that it done. It's only an issue if for some reason, your play is to do 10x skills that cost 1 AP (If you even have that many, realistically, there would be more focus on 2-3 AP skills with 1, 4 and 5 AP skills being less common, so you're doing on average 2 actions per turn, similar to BG3 and your Standard + Bonus action).
I suppose if you skipped your turn with 5 ap your next turn should have 10. But definitely not starting of with 10 thats what i meant.
