| It might work better to put soft caps on the stats based on how often you do certain things.
For example, if you cast spells mainly while grouping it would raise the soft cap of your intellect higher than that of a melee fighter. So, while items are still the only way to raise your stats, your int could be raised higher than that melee guy.
This way, people wouldn't necessarily feel like they had to carry around sets and be every class at once, you could have specific archtypes, it would just be a bit more free than most games. I might want to be an Archer/Mage type character and thus would be looking at DEX/AGI/INT/ENH as my main caps I want as high as possible. I would still find other stats like STA and WIS attractive on my gear, but my caps wouldn't be as high as another archtype so classes would still become somewhat defined.
This would also require you to cap the overall stats though, to ensure someone couldn't raise all of their stat caps to max.
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