I knew that this kind of objection would come.
In general one could agree with you, but here’s the catch:
If you have decreased damage on these skills, until a certain degree of investment it’s not very compromising to stick to a certain stat.
Let me elucidate for you why this system would be stable:
Physical attacks are objective to accuracy and critical rate, which means that unless you invest into DEX statwise, you can’t get the maximum damageoutput here.
So if you equip a rod to get a high matk to scale all your attack skills with matk, you lose your Dex boost on attack and 10-20% potential skilldamage due to the conversion penalty.
The same goes for INT builds, they can never pull the full potential out of physical skills because they lack the DEX/crit rate and accuracy to do so.
My suggestion would allow them to utilize those skills to a certain degree, though, especially if they transcended a weapon, because one of their attacks (either patk or matk) would be significantly larger, thus making skills that currently scale with only one of these attack types significantly stronger than the other one, which restricts physical Cleric builds and magical Cleric builds to contain only certain Classes.
If my idea gets realized,though, all Clerics could use all Classes and their skills, but with a slightly lower potential on their skills. This wouldn’t matter that much, though, since Rank 1-3 classes are basically only magical damage dealers and their skills useless for physical builds when reaching the lvl 280+ range of approximately 600 levels in total.
But back to your argument about maces becoming useless:
Mace will always be used because it gives bonus damage vs plate armor and grants magic attack as well as physical attack, while enabling you to stun enemies with a 10% chance when attacking them physically due to the Clerics Class attribute.
However, some people might then priorize rods and some swords, which is a good change, instead of currently being forced onto maces by default although rods and swords can be equipped,too.


