After 25 hours of playtime
To me, the stats strength, dexterity, faith and intelligence, right now, just feel like flavour picks to get you to the entry level of being able to equip a weapon.
Sure one could argue those weapons themselves have runes on them that sort of apply to the whole spirit of each attribute, but on it’s own i feel like the attributes lack more oomph, they don feel like they carry any significance or are distinguishable between one another, since the ‘attribute to weapon’ scaling is very minimal in my opinion. Given the fact that we are currently limited to a cap of level 30. (but that is probably subject to change)
The following are just ideas (take it with a grain of salt):
Strength could be paired with giving less stamina consumption when having heavy/medium equip loads and less stamina consumption with any weapon.
Dexterity could give more stamina regen, faster stamina regeneration startup time and faster movement speed in general.
Faith could give increased healing spells/food effectiviness and damage increase with lightining and plague
Intelligence could increase damage done with fire and ice and less focus consupmtion
EDIT: I feel like that would invite a starting player to adjust his expectations for what the investment into a certain stat holds for him (even at least partially) in the future.
Right now if you’re not checking up guides or finding information on what weapons exist out there, ahead of time, you’re basically running in blind with your pesronal perception of what a stat should reward you with in terms of gear, which has huge potential to lead to frustration.
In other words, you could be investing into a stat, expecting a specific return, and upon investing countless hours, be dissapointed with the outcome of the loot pool you recieved and are able to play with. Because there wasn’t a baseline to guide your expectations in the first place.
so ya 100% agree that the stats should do more (passive bonuses) rather than just being a requirement check for weapons.