Edit: woops, it's not me, it was Dan. All good.
I'm not sure where the quote came from about not wanting gear to be as high a percentage of your power as other games but if you've got a source, it's like 99% chance going to be from me. I do the weekly dev stream and this was a pretty hot topic a few months back so I answered a bunch of
I think it might be assumed that we would have been just talking about PoE and the amount that we would be referring to is probably less than it seems.
If was me, I was probably mostly talking about D2, not PoE, which for the most part is extremely gear dependent (except a few select builds, looking at you smiters).
Second, it isn't saying that we don't want gear to be impactful or important. Quite the opposite really. I'd like people to be able to get to end game and experience it with average gear but need to hunt for significant gear upgrades to be able to do the very top tier content. Prior to some recent changes, there were popular D2 builds that have almost zero chance of ever completing the content available. Then another set of builds that could do it if you had a full compliment of very specific mega epic godly gear. So, just aiming for less than needing to have 30+HRs worth of gear to do Ubers. (Yes I know that's an arbitrary amount but if you've ever tried to do an Uber sorc killer you know what I'm talking about.) Disclaimer: D2 is probably my favorite game of all time.
Lizard is probably one of, if not the, most experienced LE players in the world at this point. The vast majority of builds can't do end game content with only a couple pieces of gear. Part of the issue here is just skill balance and has little to do with gear in general. The big problem comes from how the optimal way to build most skills is just to search for the more damage nodes, regardless of if they can do end game "naked" or not.
All of that is not to say that this isn't a problem though. It's just a solvable one that we are working on. We haven't had a balance patch come out since the issue was really heavily raised I don't think either. It's mostly just number tweeks and updating some old skill trees. We've got a couple systematic changes coming down the pipe to shift some power from skill trees onto items and we will be looking to feedback after that happens to make more adjustments as needed.
I'm very confident that at 1.0, the gear hunt will be in a very healthy spot. Gearing up a character will be fun, engaging and reasonably attainable. There will be super stretch challenges for people who want to extract every drop too.
There is also a video out there on YouTube of me saying all this and more with some examples. Couldn't tell ya where though, sorry.
I am also mega biased on this topic as I am a senior developer/designer on the project, so, pound of salt I guess?
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