I dunno if this would work but it occured to me the other day.
Instead of eq being predetermined with x amount of ac, y amount of hit/dam and z amount of saves; what if eq had a rating. The rarer the eq the better the rating would be. Now here is the cool part, your char adds up the total "points" of his eq and can then distribute them however he sees fit among his stats. This way you can get any piece of eq and suit it to your needs while still making rarer eq more valuable because it allows more points.
If this were done we could also allow players to rename their equipment for cool custom sets, and when they die and get looted the victor can then use the points to adjust his own stats and rename the eq to his own liking.
I think this would have two benefits. One it would allow people to decide more closely how they wanted to suit themselves, whether going for certain saves, hitroll, ac, hp whatever. It would also make looting a little less harsh since even with a crappy set of easily obtainable eq you could still give your char what he needs to get better stuff.
I think this would also help melees a lot since you can only carry a few extra rares in the inventory. This way you can go from fighting a shaman to an invoker to a berserker without needing tons of spare wares.
The only thing that would need to be balanced is how and how long it would take to set the properties of each piece. If it were instantanious then it would be to easy to adjust ones stats for the current opponent...
Maybe you would have to go to an armory and take about 6 hours to alter a piece to your liking, and to change the name youd have to have imm approval so people dont make dumb things like "My badass sword of noob killing". Of course you'd prolly need a new imm in charge of eq strings ![]()
Anyway, just a random idea.
