[Autumn]

The Problem

In my personal experience thus far, I've run into a problem with stats more than anything else, when I am building a pure tank or mage autohitter, I usually have very little issue with stats and can fit in what I want to fit in (such as FAI or LUC or CEL), its these freedom of stats that can create a lot of build diversity in my honest opinion, because I am allowed to use so very little stats, I can invest my 6th or 7th sub-set of stats into what I want to, which feels good, I like to be able to do this.

This however does not apply for basic attackers, basic attackers need in total, 6-7 stats to function, which is on the very upper cusp of what you are allotted for stats, to put it into light, as a basic attacker you will need:

-STR for Weapon Scaling
-SKI for Hit/Crit 
-VIT Because HP is practically mandatory in every build.
-LUC for Hit/Crit 
-GUI for Critical Damage, otherwise you're doing less damage than autohits/mages.

Now, for 3 of those stats, STR/SKI/LUC, you're opting in for very high amounts of these, upwards to 60 in each of them to compete on the level that other builds have mustered up their defenses like Evade or Crit Evade to be.

Now you need to choose some defensive stats, if you opt in for Celerity, you get the cheaper stat investment in place for being absolute glass, with only evasion stopping some of the damage coming your way, and unless you're a Verglas, Spellthief or Aquamancer you can't really improve upon that, the only exception to this is Demon Hunter's Cobra Stance, given that its complete damage immunity so long as you "Dodge" things from the front, it ends up serving as a large aggravating factor when facing dodgy characters.

If you opt in for defenses instead, you're thinning out your stats among DEF and RES for what should be normally medium-high values. Most people will settle on 40/40 for tanks since that appears to be a good stopping point, but in doing so you're sacrificing much of your GUI, to off-set this...many people have opted in to creating these weird as hell, but still functional builds where you invest in no defense at all, and only RES/GUI so you can pump out as much DPS as possible.

And once you're finished with this, you have very little stats to work with, you'll find that almost all basic attackers have the same stats, with of course the exception of Magic Gunners and Void Assassins, which I will get into shortly:

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The Exception

Currently, I find that basic attacking builds who are not required to build STR get away with a lot of diversity, this is because they're free to build SKI and GUI as their damage stats, and not have to opt into the STR tax, not that STR is a bad stat either mind you.

Bringing one of my builds into light, a Void Assassin corbie who has been regarded to as probably one of the more meta builds on the server, is a dodgy basic attacker, despite their drawbacks.



This is because the character in question has the freedom of not being tied to STR, and has the consistent crit rate of Void Assassin, and the incredibly consistent Hit Rate of a corbie, because of all of these he is able to compete on the level of most meta tanks in the game, its wondrous having 100% hit and crit rate I will say.

But notice here that I was able to fit in stat that I wanted to fit in, that one being SAN specifically, because my weapons do not scale STR, I was able to fit in the stats that I wanted to fit his theming, which was originally an aerial assassin-like skirmisher, having experience in doing so from hunting harpies in Alstalsia.

Another one of my more successful builds lately has been this one:

Kon, a build I pursued with the complete intention of just being a gritty, tough ass pirate man. I had ideas in my mind such as "I am required to be using Swordfish Sword and bombs" so I chose Black Knight/Engineer for fulfilling both of these purposes, and even gave him a gun.

I originally thought this build was going to be a B-Tier build at best, due to no action economy from Fleur, however the existence of Grenade Launcher made me realize that he rose up to a vaguely monstrous build very quickly, though his stat spread is still the exact same as any other basic attacker, I think the STR is more fitting for this one than GUI given the nature of Shaitans, and the bulk it gives.



This would be a good example of the "STR-based basic attacker" archetype.

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Failures

Of course, for every 1 of my builds that ends up succeeding, at least 2 or 3 end up failing completely or just falling short of being something I would enjoy. Here is a recent example of that from my repertoire: 

Hikage/Tsukikage are legitimately good weapons, however I ended up falling short on stats drastically so, I wanted to test it out, but the stats are too thinned out to work in practicality, though I have a good chunk of damage, I fail to utilize it too well. Even if the Hikage is mutated into a gun.

because of the need to invest so much GUI and STR, and on top of needing WIL for Divine Eyes, I ended up having no stats to throw around elsewhere, and ended up with extremely sub-par defenses.

Another example of a build I tried summing up was a Verglas who would attempt to make use of Spellthief and the new Trickery effects of Quick Tumble, unfortunately it fell drastically short:


Here, you can see a build that never even made it into the game, because it is impossible to boost up my LUC to a respectable level for Evade, while being left with paper thin defenses and only a 55% chance to activate Trickery, though I realize this is because of my egregious investment into WIL and SKI, but I also wanted to be able to cast magic, not to even basic attack using that SKI/LUC or GUI.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, I feel as though character diversity for basic attackers specifically lies on a lot of the problems that basic attackers run into when investing stats, I don't know how to potentially fix this either without some drastic changes, because here is what I forsee the problems in changing:

-Changing certain weapons to be completely rid of STR (Such as Raijin or Sogensara becoming SKI/GUI/LUC scaling weapons) will end up flourishing basic attackers greatly, they will finally be happy with scaling their damage stat from GUI, however this will eventually wind up in an HP disparity, given how much HP you get from STR now.

-Changing HP Values to be more reliant on level (Per stat point) instead of VIT will cause much less of an HP disparity but chop out a tiny bit of character diversity, the healthy 1.2k Health tonk will be closer to ground level than a squishy duelist basic attacker would be.

Though despite that disparity, I believe both of these changes would change the scope for basic attackers by a lot.