I think the gameplay would be considerably improved if we’d have less stats for each item in game.
To elaborate : take food for example. It takes x min to cook something that has EXACTLY y nutrition quench, and it tastes PRECISELY z. This will make me almost always go for the optimal (easiest to get and most filling) food. If for example food would have some vague physical description, combined with the already good general description, or no physical description at all, this would make players vary their diet, allow the game to add some extra effects (like the mushrooms - the wrong type will give you hallucinations) and allow the player to discover for himself how good each recipe is.
Same can be applied to weapons and clothes. Mind you, i’m not saying to remove the stats from the game, but to make them more fuzzy, to both discourage metagaming and frankly, boredom and lack of motivation to try a newly found item. When i can see directly that this gun has less dmg, acc and range, there’s no reason to pick it up except to satisfy my hoarding instincts.
A lot of what a roguelike survival game has to offer consists in surprises, most of them unpleasant :). As it is now, Cataclysm DDA leaves little to imagination and surprise, and once a player learns the mechanics it becomes a … idk… something not so fun anymore.
I love for example how monster are introduced. No total HP, speed, dmg and so forth. You have to fight them to see how best to defeat them. I’d like for some of them to be able to sometimes insta-kill my char, instead of slowly chipping away my health.
But mostly, i’d like less numbers in the game. I’d like to see a new item and to be curious about it, not to pick it, examine it and put it away with no second thoughts.
That’s about it. Now rip it apart 
