Weight on all items is so incredibly high compared to player base equip load and even per equip load attribute point bonus, as they are balanced that way with the intention that you are meant to roll weight load decrease on them, all of the time or most of it. That, or use feather for the items gem slot. This is not very fun to work around when you could instead fit in other affixes that make your build actually fun, such as poise resistance or stamina regen, or anything else. It is especially very annoying for equipping gear at the beginning, and don’t have 5 levels to waste on equip load to accordingly get the weight you need, if you can’t get blues early on - Leaving players naked or only with half the gear they can equip even for lighter armor such as a full set of low level leather, I know myself and many others really do not appreciate or enjoy the current system with gear affixes for weight values.
Additional; Bloat affix is ‘durability increase %’ now that repairing is about 2/3rds cheaper, and durability loss on death has already been halved or so, repair powder made easier to find - This stat is very irrelevant and is only another bloat affix you’re wasting time rolling, and could very feasibly be removed as of hotfix 1
TLDR;
I would reduce the weight of all the items globally and accordingly, work around touching up all the weight values, and giving equip load as an attribute/stat itself more meaning since currently it means much less than running high equip load decrease rolls on gear - Remove equip load increase % & decrease % affixes from gear, reduce weight load of all items to make up for this, make equip load attribute mean more. Rework feather into being speed and fall damage related, for those who struggle with traversal or unnecessary fall damage deaths.
This DRASTICALLY would improve players ability to experiment much more freely with enjoyable actually gems & affixes rather than dedicating 1/4th of each of their equipment to having weight reduction on it, but also incentivize players to be much more rewarded by weight load stat itself. This would also make gear rolls themselves feeling much more rewarding, since a high priority affix will no longer have to be something that isn’t actually power-related such as healing, stamina costs, attack speed, additional defense, poise, or literally anything else we can currently get, removing weight load decrease & both increase, would remove more bloat on rolling gear that doesn’t particularly feel equally rewarding to play with - It also sets each armor category such as Cloth, Leather, Mesh and Plate into dedicated rolls for what they attempt to achieve, many builds just dedicating jumping into as much weight reduction as they can get; Personally, it is a little too much overdone and is an extra way to bloat what stats can roll on gear.