Attribute requirements on items

Motivating exaple:

When changing gear in the endgame satisfying gear requirements often comes at a currency cost, at least gold. Lets say you have 50 inteligence and want to equip an item that has 80 inteligence requirement and gives 30 inteligence. Once equipped this item solves the requirement for you, but while unequipped you need to raise your stats somehow before equipping it, and then likely revert the change you made to raise your stats. For example, you can do this by spending gold to respec stats in the skill tree. And then do it once again when you are finished.

This can sometimes be solved simply by having a stat item on the side, but in more involved gear changes where you want to change more than 1 piece of gear that is often impossible.

Proposed solution:

1. Currently it is impossible to equip an item that doesn't satisfy attribute requirements.

2. If you lower your attributes somehow so that you no longer satisfy the attribute requirements the item will remain equipped but unusable - this will communicated by the red background in the item slot.

I would like to suggest that mechanic 1. is removed from the game. Making everything equipable. In that case the already existing mechanic 2. will do all the work related to satisfying item requirement.

Pros:
- 1 mechanic instead of two is simpler
- less code to maintain
- makes end game gear swapping much simpler (See motivating example)

Cons:
- new players may get "tricked"

Conclusion:

This kind of friction is somewhat annoying, and could probably be solved with minimal work - removing mechanic 1. As far as "tricking" new players goes, I'm not sure what the correct way to go about that would be, maybe a warning message first time it happens.

Thanks for the amazing game you are making :)