Ill be honest. A lot of rpgs I've played had item degradation in them from morrowind to fonv. It did add a certain something on a character who wasn't a blacksmith have a sword go broke in the middle of a dungeon. It added that little something. Then I played skyrim and it did away with item degradation and it felt something was missing and it erk me (granted it was one of the MANY things that were missing but item degradation was actually mear the top of the list).

So me personally I'm happy to see item degradation in PE, it feels natural to me and adds that extra layer to the game. Hell it gives me a reason to carry more weapons.

I'd still love to see it re-imagined.

 

The problem with most durability mechanic implementations is that they are a chore. The problem isn't that durability is a chore.

 

Hitpoints follow the same principle, and they aren't a chore. Status effects, too. Also not a chore. Ammo. Not a chore.

 

Plenty of things in the game must be replenished, and yet we enjoy them.

 

So, yeah, if done properly, it could be made an actual part of strategic/significant decision-making, as opposed to just something that always ticks down, and none of your characters so much as oil their own swords unless you manually tell them to do so, even though they apparently eat and go to the bathroom all the time, and bandage their own wounds and heal up when they sleep (all abstracted stuff in the game). But, every single attack contributes to your sword possibly cracking in half at some point, and you've got to manually fix it, which is just an extra thing you need to do and are never going to NOT do.

 

Really, to put it simply, there's got to be some aspect to the mechanic that provides SOME situational benefit to not fixing your weapon, and/or risking damage to it as opposed to avoiding damage to it.

 

Heck, even with Health, as it stands in PoE, you've got choices to make to better preserve it. Rotate people around, change tactics, etc.