[Fern]

Yeah, the problem is just kind of everywhere rather than being restricted to a certain archetype. I mostly just brought up basic attacker examples since they were really easy ones to mention, but I believe that the mage examples you've brought up are important as well and I don't particularly disagree with them, specially with the sentiment of:

"When it comes down to it, creativity is stifled by the fact I can look at the item list for the game and heavily rule out half, if not most of the weapons and items for any sort of build meant to go up against somebody at some point, except in rather niche situations. It's okay to have niche weapons, it's not okay for most weapons to be niche or nigh unusable."

That's one of the bigger problems in the picture I feel.