I think the other items you mentioned are all build enabling items to me.
Ehh... Not really.
Like, your build still works without these items. They just get a little extra bonus once you pick them up.
It's not like say, the Tempest Cleric cheese that relies on the Watersparkers and The Sparkswall in order to enable them to electrocute water by standing in it, while being unharmed by said electrocution.
It's just "I now do a nifty debuff" or in the case of Heat "I now get some extra stacks of Heat and occasionally deal some extra points of damage"
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.
Well, skillbooks were limited in access based on level.
So it's not as if you could just rush them, you had to go and do whatever content to actually level up in order for the books to exist.
I just don't think it should gut down the interesting effects that gear can potentially have and the build variety it enables.
I mean, the entire point is to push the build variety into other sources rather than gear.
You don't necessarily lose build variety if you incorporate all the effects that would otherwise go onto gear, into actual character building itself.
You can even gain build variety by ensuring that cool, build defining effects, are never stuck on bad items (There's plenty of items in Act 1 BG3 that could be interesting... But they're stuck on +0 items and so get outclassed very quickly by the +1 and +2 items you get early)
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.
If that's their prerogative then sure.
I make the suggestion because, I, personally, would like to have less incentive to play the game the exact same way every single time because of the implementation of static loot meaning that once you know where they are you can rush directly to them at the start of every run.
I, personally, feel it's super lame to ignore every quest and exploration opportunity and dart straight to all the vendors in the zone to pick up the static loot options that massively power up characters
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.
You're really not a min-maxer then.
Being able to dump a stat is MASSIVE. Like, the stats these items give themselves aren't huge, but the real benefit is that they're "Good enough" and you can dump those stats and put the points elsewhere. Such as getting CON or CHR high.
Like, one of the reasons why the big meta in regards to optimal play is to use Elixirs of Strength is so you can dump the stat and put the points elsewhere (With the other being that eventually you get Cloud Giant elixirs that give ridiculously high STR)
I literally can't think of a better item to use than Gloves of Dexterity that not only gives you a decent Dexterity score, but allows you to shift the points you would have sunk into getting like 14-16 Dex into other stats. Like the only downside to them is they come at the start of Act 2 so you need to finish with the Goblin Camp before you can get them, thus you need to either rely on respeccing or run Act 1 with only 8 in the best stat in the game. Oh and the gloves also give +1 attack rolls, one of the best stats in the game to boot.
Headband of Intellect is more niche, but it's amazing for builds like casters that do 1 level dip into Wizard to scribe spells (Up to 6th level because of the dumb way Wizard works in BG3) as well as EK and AT who get access to some spells that work off INT but also want DEX/STR for using weapons.
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).
Knife is ridiculously good and is a primary reason to go to the Creche. Also, the statement I was making was not about these being rushed too, but that these are problematic if you could duplicate them.
Knife is good on basically every character. Even if they don't actually attack with it, just having it equipped provides significant bonuses (The crit multiplier and occasional advantage on attack rolls). If you could duplicate it, meta builds would revolve around having at least one copy on every character, if not 2.
Markoheshkir is another item that is also very powerful and if duplicable you'd literally duplicate the heck out of it. Even more so given that you can swap out to different versions of it to get additional uses of its ability (Meaning that a min-maxed meta would be about having like a dozen of these plus the Feat that lets you swap weapons as a bonus action and you'd get basically infinite free Level 6 spell casts)
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.
It kind of is that easy.
The main balance concern is balancing each skill between each other. That's the tricky part, so as to not have certain skills be outliers (Either positively or negatively).
Once that is done, it's trivial to balance out what a character can do in a turn versus enemy health.
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.
The actual value doesn't really matter. You could start with 10, or 100 or 10,000.
The crux is how many action(s) you can perform with the value.
Like, if you started with 10 per turn but everything costs 5 AP then you can only do 2 things.
The advantage of higher starting amounts is you have more potential to split the usage among differently cost skills. Compared to the default 2 AP where you only have the option of 2 AP skill or 2x 1 AP skill.
