So, after playing many hours and just recently starting Act 3, there’s been one thing that’s been bugging me and I finally have it sorted out.
The whole “rarity” attached to gear is really dumb and misleading.
It’s using the overly used grey/green/blue/‘purple’ coloring and naming that’s common and many other RPGs. But in those games, it’s somewhat reflective of rarity… which is what it’s described as in BG3, the rarity of an item. But it’s a lie.
Example Periapt of Wound Closure is an item that’s sold by a vendor. How is it rare? As far as I can tell, there’s just one in the game. But every named item I have, there’s just one in existence.
I think labeling things as common/uncommon/rare/ etc. is wrong and thus makes people think certain items are better simply based on the ‘color’ of the gear instead of considering what the gear does. I’ve already had this conversation with multiple friends who absolutely think they’re going to give a “stat stick” to their caster, because they’re so used to Blizzard’s way of thinking. Or that they ‘needed’ new gear because they leveled up and now must replace gear asap (even in Act 1). The fact I showed videos of some guy soloing the game, or beating the game as lvl 1s, or a video of some guy causing havoc by chucking potatoes and only potatoes… falls on deaf ears.
I think if the naming was swapped from ‘rarity of item’ to ‘quality of enchantment’ it would make more sense, but I still think it’s not necessary. Or if it was standardized to like normal gear (nothing special) remains grey, gear that’s just slightly enchanted (like +1 Sword) is green, and all unique named items are blue. Since you certainly can get lots of grey, fewer greens, and only one named. But that’s just an idea.
This is inherited directly from pen and paper dnd. So it is a faithful representation. While in game the rarity might be the same for a common item vs legendary - 1 of each. It more represents how rare is the item compared to general lore. In any case the colors dont mean anything and for a particular build some common magic items might be more usefull than other legendaries
The rarities do somewhat correlate with power in a vacuum, but synergy>raw stats, generally.
That’s the exact thing I’ve been trying to express to people, including people who play DnD (as I do not). But they’re so tied to the Blizzard scheme. I get reading from your reply and that of @bennel it makes sense in the DnD game… but I think it’s something that should have been maybe changed for the sake of the video game adaptation. But perhaps they did consider it and found it’s negligible in terms of the overall user experience and I’ve dedicated far to much thought to this one aspect of an otherwise, amazing game.