For lack of a better word, I mean these ARPG elements or looter shooter elements of loot dropping in numerous rarities with stats and random attributes to min-max and crafting and stuff like that. Khazan uses this and, as far as I know, Nioh does as well.
I'm a little torn on this. On the one hand, it opens up build variety and presents an incentive to play the game outside of story progression and bosses in the form of grinding out materials to build weapons and armour, tailored to your liking and playstyle. On the other hand, crafting oftentimes isn't really worthwhile since a random drop off an enemy could have better stats, making your time spent wasted, in a sense. It also breaks the flow of the game so often for me because I keep checking my gear upon another pickup. I have to actively stop myself from checking every single loot drop and just re-check my gear once I return to the hub.
What's your opinion? Do you like it when soulslikes bring in elements from other game genres or does it just get in the way of the game for you?
I don't think that's necessarily a problem. Switching to a new weapon mostly just replaces the mechanism of upgrading your weapon.
Instead of "in this area you should have a +M to +N weapon, which should deal +X to +Y damage", you just cut out the middle man and have "in this area, the weapon drops should deal +X to +Y damage" (where X and Y obviously depend on the weapon type).
Not that it should be flat damage based, but if you can decide what the right stats for a +7 axe should be and in which areas a +7 weapon is expected, then you just drop slight variations on the +7 axe without putting "+7" in the name.
It's been a while since I've played Borderlands or Nioh but from what I remember they played differently. In Borderlands, if a great shotgun dropped I might swap out an assault rifle I had that was starting to underperform. Because I didn't have a strong affinity to a particular weapon class. In Nioh 2, I focused on kusarigama and tonfa so if a great spear dropped I wouldn't bother equipping it because I hadn't unlocked any skills on the spear skill tree and it wouldn't scale with the stats I was leveling.
That's a similar experience to my Khazan playthrough. I quite like playing with the spear, so I also started speccing into its skill tree. Whenever a dual wield or a greatsword drops, I just chug it into storage or salvage it because I probably won't bother regardless. Luckily, skill tree perks can be reset individually or all at once whenever and however often you like so keeping other weapons around isn't even a bad idea in case you want to mix things up