One of the issues this game has right now is gear diversity. There is generally one best thing for you to have for your class at any given level bracket, and you get that one item, and you’re set.
I believe that for most of the other pieces of gear, just adding in more / unique pieces of gear will fix that problem.
What can’t be simply fixed is the existence of offhands that increase your elemental damage. The arde dagger and karacha dagger.
For just about any class that’s concerned with DPS, an Arde or Karacha dagger is the best possible item that you can have in your offhand slot.
In fact, when making builds, it makes me steer away from any class that can’t offhand an elemental damage boosting dagger. For example, I’d like to make a DPS Rodelero, but the fact that they use shields ( and can’t be using an arde dagger, gaining +elemental damage ) makes them far less desireable for a DPS build.
There’s not even an interesting elemental choice here, as both items do +fire damage. You can’t even choose your element, unless you’re a certain class that can use a Viper (+poison) or can use a Mana Mana (+lightning).
This is my suggestion to help fix gear diversity, and remove arde/karacha dagger from being the best-in-slot item:
Create new types of gems that can be socketed into items, that increase elemental damage, and reduce the amount of elemental damage that is gained from wearing an arde/karacha dagger.
For example:
You could have a different gem for each element ( fire / ice / holy / etc ), and when socketed in a weapon ( main hand or offhand ) it would increase the elemental damage for that element by an amount proportional to its level ( and decrease your elemental resistance for that element as well ). In this way, shields would still be worth wearing for a lot of classes, and you could actually choose what elemental damage you’d like to use, rather than being restricted to just fire.
Please consider and thank you 