As far as i can tell, No Rest for the Wicked has the 4 Survivability/Utility stats Health, Stamina, Focus and Equip Load and then the 4 Damage Scaling Attributes Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Faith. While its easy (for me) to understand the distinction of the defensive attributes, i have a slight issue with the offensive ones:
Attributes like Strength existed seemingly since the inception of the RPG genre. They more or less dictate the strong and weak points of a character, which a high strength attribute for example indicating physical prowess (most often raising physical damage), and intelligence indicating knowledge of magic (most often raising spell damage) which, while simple, is easy to grasp.
In No Rest for the Wicked however, all 4 stats do accomplish exactly the same thing, raising weapon damage. The only difference is which weapon type. My immersion and role-playing-adjusted brain hurts when imagining a full plate heavy weapon character with the lowest possible strength. I understand the goal of build diversity, but in a game claiming to be part of the ‘action role-playing game’ genre, i hope the role playing aspect is not swept under the rug.
As for Solutions, i am not sure. Of course giving secondary stat benefits to the attributes would be a possibility, although i imagine it to be a balancing nightmare to start this now. It could be possible to abandon the classic attribute names and renaming them to weapon proficiencies, something like:
strength → heavy weapon proficiency
dexterity → light weapon proficiency
intelligence → stave proficiency
faith → blunt weapon proficiency
To be honest, i am not 100% sold on that idea myself, my main point was to point out the issue that at least i am feeling.
Btw. i pray that the announced respeccing system will be reasonable, changing the entire character build countless time also breaks the character immersion quite a bit, especially without in a game without a ‘hard’ class system, but i understand building up multiple characters seems to be an issue for some.