I completely agree with you SpyPuppet!
It’s an ARPG — it should have choices
- do I want to pick everything up or be selective?
- am I okay with a full inventory (and ignoring drops), or should I go back to town?
Because you’re not sure which materials will be needed, it’s best to pick up pretty much everything. Then the cycle continues: head back to town and sort everything out (wood here, gems there, bones over there…). The same applies to items and enchantments. There’s no loot filter, so until you reach BIS items, you’ll need to check every drop to make sure you don’t miss an important stat.
But exactly as you said: is this really what I want to be doing? Activating time-limited buffs, then shortly after running back to town, sorting items and materials into the right stashes, repairing my gear, and returning again five minutes later?
I like the Torchlight approach. You had a pet you could send to town with selected items to sell. It took time for the pet to travel, so you couldn’t spam it. At the same time, you weren’t forced to interrupt your current action, which worked really well from a UX perspective.
Edit: By the way, I’m not a fan of having multiple stashes. It makes sense to separate certain categories, like keeping weapons and armor in different stashes, but I’d prefer all materials to be in a single stash. Same with runes—right now I have them spread across four stashes, so when I extract something, I’m never sure whether I already have it or not.
One more unintended consequence: even though you can decorate your house in many ways, it usually ends up being just a storage space—because that’s what you actually need. A possible “solution” is to have a separate, nicer house, but then why would you ever use it? All you really need is a bed, and that can sit in the storage as well.