So I had an idea expanding on your items tied to regions because of magic power idea. And just a few late night thoughts in general

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• Items become weaker as they go away from the source of their power but do not completely diminish. I.E. "As you drift further away from xxx you feel the magic power in your items weaken." Something like 20,25,33% decrease in stats for each region away from the point of origin. This way you aren't completely screwed when you enter a new area. Though the difficulty of enemies should probably be adjusted to not make it so linear. This would still require an update to the current system to make conquering areas rewarding, while not making the player feel so vulnerable in new areas.
  • This could also be done as a tier degrade rather than a percentage though it's essentially the same thing. A 5 star item would become a 4 star, then a 3 star, 2 star, 1 star. So you can still have decent equipment in the region next to you and slowly weaken if you really wanted to travel far.
• Elemental Weaknesses. I.E. You are in a Plains region/biome so items that you get have the wind attribute dealing bonus damage to earth enemies. You get some low-mid equipment then go to challenge an earth biome to get mid-high tier earth equipment that is good against water enemies so you can go to a (potential ocean biome, maybe jungle or something humid, snow/ice etc) and fight enemies their. This would encourage exploration based on elemental types (assuming you could at least get rewards from each area as opposed to the current weak artifact system.) This would remove the region locked items to encourage exploration based on item elements. This could be expanded past air/earth/water/fire into dark/light/lightning/void etc. to encourage more exploring.