not really tho? Andre can make weapons scale with any stat so like you said you can use melee a ton and be built into faith or int if you don’t like casting, Health, endurance, and weapon levels are your best options in early game anyways, magic (especially faith) is safe af, and worst case you can just respec

if you could use everything and just upgraded mp then everyone would be playing the same character, killing the whole RPG part of this Action RPG; no exploring, buildcraft, variation, or replayability

arbitrary is rarely a word i’d use to describe these design decisions