[Chaos]

people would begin demanding crit evade buffs because strength's scaled stat diminishing caps are higher than skills.

I feel Strength should counteract physical defense in some manner, granting a form of armor penetration.

Except that between SKI/LUC, Only 1.5 Crit is gained for each point in both stats, whereas FAI/LUC give 2 points between them. Critical Evade already holds a natural advantage. For all the critical buffs that you can get, there's enough passive critical evade buffs to make all but the most die-hard critical stackers struggle. Keeping the 1.5 while pushing part of it onto STR will not change the crit/crit evade balance that much. DKA only means what, roughly 5~6 more critical in the long run, if they stack up STR and all three pieces?

And why would armor penetration bring anything to the table? Some 10 or so Armor ignored is nothing compared to the numerous DRs that players can stack up. That does nothing to incentivize STR, and making it penetrate DEF invalidates the entire point of DEF, while pushing everyone into pumping up Evade.

The issue with STR doesn't stem from it not providing enough but rather, not enough good things tie into STR too well, like access to heavy armor and weapon scalings that scale majority STR

Except we have tried to get STR in via scalings, and it hasn't made the stat any better. Buffing weapons that have majority STR (which usually offer more damage than utility to begin with) isn't going to make STR more appealing; not when the outliers offer that much without forcing points into STR.