I've seen this getting asked a lot with the wizard lately so here's the full breakdown. When gale starts asking for magic items, timing is super important since his requests come in specific windows after major story beats. Watch for the arcane hunger debuff to show up in his character sheet, that's your first warning sign and you'll want to address it within the next rest or two. The key pattern is he'll request items about three separate times with specific intervals between asks, and you've got a bit of flexibility on when to feed him but don't push it too far.

The safe approach is positioning yourself to give up some medium-tier artifacts early on, something like komira's locket works great for the first request since you won't miss it much later. What's really important is watching his approval rating, it starts dropping pretty quick if you dodge his requests and once it hits critical levels, he starts giving those explosion warnings which is definitely not where you want this going. There's this sweet spot around the third artifact where his hunger stabilizes and you can focus on the actual storyline stuff.

Maybe interesting but if you're planning to completely ignore him you need to know the exact trigger points - his final warning comes after denying him 3-4 times total and that's when his constitution saves start taking big hits which makes him way less effective in combat. After that point you're basically racing against time before he just up and leaves your party for good and locks you out of his questline entirely so definitely keep track of those request windows.