The patches made clear that the programmers either don't care or have serious problems balancing the weapons, also all armors at some point become available making the weaker ones quickly obsolete.

Regarding the weapons sold to adventurers, they all tend to wait until they can buy the best, thus having a bunch of champions in the end dressed up with either legendary or master weapons, result: they all end up looking the same and 90% of weapons are useless.

If only certain cities got the best weapons (randomly, with the bigger cities having more chances to get the best equipment) one had to plan where and when buy the equipment, that would become a strategic element, and champions would often be forced to wear whatever they find.  In fact it is possible in real life that a scimitar cost more than a hammer but produce less damage, so why going nuts trying to make the price proportional to its power: people would still buy it if it is the only item available in a shop!!! (Besides that's how it usually works in RPGs)

To further vary their look certain things could be made of different colors, the most obvious being the magic cloak  only certain colors being available in certain shops: easy to implement and visually effective.

Of course teleporting spells would spoil this idea, like they spoil anything else that tries to be strategic in games like this (please, please remove that vile sci-fi device). A magic caster unit could just teleport everywhere and do shopping for every one.