Critical hit! Direct hit!

[Barraind]

Anyone played a game where stats felt fun and interesting? If so, what made them that way?

Everquest's stat system for a few expansions (PoP through Dragons) was fantastic if you werent a pure melee class.

As a Paladin, figuring out gear upgrades was a game in itself. I had to balance (get as much as possible):

Secondary/tertiary effects:

ATK - Raw Attack. Capped at 300, items gave between 10 and 50.
Flowing Thought - Mana Regen. Capped at 15, items gave anywhere from 1 to 5.
Shielding - Flat damage reduction from a mob DB (mob damage base was DB + DI* (random 1-20 modified by its atk vs targets AC)
Avoidance - Chance to avoid. Capped at 20 (I think), items gave between 1 and 6 per piece.
Combat Effect - Increased Proc Rate, capped at ???, only 1 or 2 items had that stat at the time.
Strikethrough - Mitigating enemy parry/dodge/block. Capped at ?, really rare at the time.
Haste - 1 source, either 41 or 46%


Base stats:

Weapons with weapon procs (Either a group heal proc or high threat proc [Armor debuff, dd with a stun component, or straight +threat] for tanking, and then either no proc, or a DD without added threat for times not actively tanking)
The highest AC possible
resists (5 of them) - Capped at 550, gear at this point capped everything by the time you had half your gear though.
Raw Stats - This mattered a couple times while you started the gear process, but you ended up capping them all even with the AA's and buffs that increased your caps by the time you got partially through gearing. Only a couple ever mattered anyway.


Focus effects:

Beneficial Mana Preservation
Beneficial Spell Range (for heals)
Beneficial Duration (for buffs and HoT's)
Improved Healing
Detrimental Mana Preservation (This was only important for 1 expansion, because they changed it to only work on spells with a cast ime of 3 sec or longer, and the only detrimental spells paladins or shadowknights ever cast were instant or sub-1 second)
Detrimental Spell Haste (see det mana pres)
Det Spell Range (to tag things farther away, or to be farther when CC'ing them)

Some of those were found in focus effects that combined beneficial and detrimental, but at a lower %, so you might have Mana Preservation AND Beneficial Mana Preservation, because one covered detrimental and the other was for beneficial.

In that era, gear would have between 1 and 3 secondary / tertiary effects on them, and (on about half of the items) either a focus effect or an effect that was 5/1, 10/2, 15/3 or 20/4 ATK/HP Regen.


Everything did different things, there was LOTS of debate about which of the possible gearing options was the best overall (it was impossible to cap everything needed for your class with all the focus effects you wanted), so we had to weigh some amount of shielding vs avoidance, some atk vs ac, some amount of damage/threat generation vs survivability, ect.

You had to figure out what items that dropped were upgrades you could use right away, what items needed you to pick up other items first, which final boss items fromt he last expansion were still BiS, which raid zone you needed which pieces from.

Then they started putting atk, mana regen, spell damage, ect on every piece of gear and rolled half the stats into other stats. You now just treadmill gear from one set at the start of an expansion to a new one at the end.