I understand about the overall feel of the game and about item acquisition being a major part of testing - but this wouldn’t be affected, like I said. I’m still playing and enjoying the item hunt etc.
Item and skill combinations such as https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/disintegrate-op-nerf-please-parental-advisory-explicit-content/25257 are easier to find during testing if players have access to the right items - in this case, 2 uniques.
Getting build mechanics right is very important though, to identify imbalances early on and to test the upper limits of builds to make sure it aint broke.
When protections, resistances, armour, mana generation, ward generation, skills and passives etc all change at once as they did last patch it can be very time consuming to rebuild your items, that’s all I’m saying - and making it a bit easier to create test builds would not detract from any other aspects of the game.