I would learn to code. I would program a bot, and instruct it to do the following things:
- Reroll all encounters for max enemies. I do this already, it doesn't take long.
- Save before every action, and reload if I didn't get the best possible outcome. A max damage crit or what have you. I rarely do battle reloads and I never do them hoping for blind luck to triumph.
- Reload if my enemy didn't get the worst possible outcome (chose the worst action or just missed). This would be needed to keep clearing act 1.
- Reload and redo the whole fight if I didn't get the theoretically best loot.
- Reload and redo entire act 1 (if that's how far back I'd have to go) if not everything respawns every time I rest.
- Restock shops until the absolutely perfect items appear: Every stat I want in the right amounts, no stats I don't want, and enough of these perfect items that I can spend the amount of gold I want to spend.
Now let's say I was writing a guide for how to equip your party. Go to the forge, pick up a big hammer. Oh... there isn't a big hammer for sale. Go to the jewelry section and pick up a heavy +magic ring. Wait, there isn't one. How about tons of speed? Nope. Sure are a lot of resistances available though!
The problem with stores is they sell tons of junk. And they only restock by themselves once in all of act 2. If I don't play roulette, I don't come across enough upgrades. I would finish the act with even more spare gold than I already do. I could easily see myself living without roulette if the default equipment in stores was exciting. What is junk? Resistances are junk. What isn't junk? Bonus defense, attack, magic and speed isn't junk. Also regen isn't but that's a separate topic.
There are fifteen different resistances in this game. All of them can appear on jewelry. That's a 15/19 chance on any non-rare jewelry to be boosting some resistance. Armor can have 10 of them, making it a 10/15=2/3 chance that an armor piece is junk.
But it's not a simple issue. Some might like resistances. Someone might have this epic story of how they couldn't beat a fight but then they visited a shop and it had the right resistance item for sale and they won. If nobody has such a story... I have one myself - did not roulette those items. However, what's the likelihood? It's pretty damn unlikely to find the actual resistance you're looking for when there are so many of them. Furthermore, as far as spells go, increasing your magic is usually a better defense than increasing resistances.
In fairness, I think we (myself especially as it was my suggestion) did resistances a disservice with the change from binary resist to duration reduction, as most debuffs have such short duration that you can get them to the minimum duration without any dramatic resistance. I'm not sure it was a good change given the turn system. It's a different topic though. But they could be a little less annoying to see on gear.
So ideally, I'd like to see the armor and jewelry sections crammed with +attack, +defense, +speed and +magic (and threshold for armor). If they were, I would probably find enough excitement among them that I could live without roulette. The weapons, I'm not a fan of elemental weapons but I'm not gonna argue for their removal in SotW. I would however like a guarantee to see some big normal damage weapons there. +stats on weapons are nice and all, but I find that the raw damage is overwhelmingly important.
The problem is then that if we're gonna spam out the basic stats, making resistance items rarer, while keeping 15 different resistances, it's gonna be pretty much hopeless to find a certain resistance item if you want one. And I'm not sure I have a simple solution here.
The last issue is regen, a pretty amazing stat - mana regen at least is. Very rare though - it can only appear on rare weapons and jewelry, and jewelry can have a ton of stats, so first you'll need to random regen and then you need it to be a significant amount. It's also very expensive (5 SPR jewelry ~ 1,600 gold). Again I'm not sure there's a simple solution, but perhaps someone could work out the probability of finding an SPR item in act 2 without rouletting. Probably <1%. That's a <1% chance of a pretty gamechanging event. This is representative of the equipment problem - there are such heavy extremes. One player randoms some SPR gear and kills everything in act 2 without using taverns or potions. Another player randoms resistance gear and suffers and struggles.
I don't think I want to argue for the removal of SPR from gear, but it can't be down to blind luck. Maybe the stores could sell a few legendaries? Or rares if you don't want to diminish the legendary effect by offering them for sale. The point is these items are set (both stats and stack size), not randomized. You're guaranteed to find a 4 SPR necklace in the Galanna store or whatever. It can be expensive, sure! But everyone can buy one if they want, without needing to spin the slot machine. And then lower the amount of SPR you can find on random rares, or perhaps just let rares be these "default store items" and not something you can random forth.
You don't need to change anything and I'll keep gambling. You can disable gambling and I'll stop playing with no hard feelings. I hope I have explained why I do it now though and sparked a discussion about it, or else.
(grammar edit)