Feature request: lock items in vendor's inventory

Hi, imagine my world for a moment. You login for the first time in POE2, arrive at level 2 in town, check the vendor "as it is good now" and lo and behold, a staff with +2 to fire skills and 40% spell damage, for the small sum of 500 gold.

Incredible, I think! But then I realize, I have only 200 gold, so I go farm some more. Thus, I, of course, level up. Then come back with 500 gold, only to find that items have "been refreshed", and the item is now gone.

Realizing that I shouldn't have levelled up, it felt bad. A game should not make you feel bad about levelling up, nor tease you with literally impossible loot to buy. There was no possible way for me to acquire the necessary gold without levelling up, not that I should have to in the first place.

Plus, on a "role play" side of things, I should realistically be able to say to the merchant : "hey, I like this one, mind putting it aside for me while I save the town and get the required gold?"

I understand that this won't be a priority, but I do believe that a "ritual-like" feature of marking items in a vendor's inventory (to the cost of taking-up space and limiting future refreshes for that item type) would absolutely be a plus.

The problem is they learned nothing from ruthless with gold; the main intent of gold was supposedly to support gearing while leveling, but it doesn't do that anywhere near as effectively as POE1 does with just crafting currency and vendor recipes. The gold is largely useless because the prices for everything are exorbitant.

I also saw an item like you described when first making it into town, but something like that only shows up at very low level, while costing orders of magnitude more gold than you could possibly have at that point. By the time you can afford to buy anything from the vendors, items like that aren't going to be available from them, and what is available is rarely any good and even when it is a decent starting point for further crafting (assuming you even have the crafting currency for it), it'll cost you most if not all of your gold and be obsolete before you even make that much gold back, assuming the further crafting even goes well.

Last Epoch, which also has a crafting system that requires a lot of bases, handles this exact thing much better. Vendors sell gear while leveling that is cheap enough that when you really need an upgrade and drops haven't gone your way, you can afford to buy a base from a vendor, attempt to craft it, fail, and buy something else and try again, and repeat that a few times. In POE2 you can't do that, the drops are trash, and what the vendors sell is extremely overpriced (a single piece of gear from a POE2 vendor might cost most of the gold from an entire act) while also being trash.

yes, either lock or favorite option.