Following the guideline which was revealed in
here few things came to my mind. Here's a direct quote from one of the devs.
The aim is to make it so that you can do anything you want in the support role without giving up combat ability.
Think of it as two halves of the character, the combat side and then (for want of a better word) his "job". Crafter/Outdoorsman/Dismantler/Repairer or a mix of these things.
So basically the aim is to make it so that every char is capable to pvp and living a normal wasteland life. I'd like to point out that having very low PE and STR can both affect seriously to the char's combat and support ability, compared to for example luck, CHA and END. Too low AGI and INT can also cripple you, but that's another story.
Let's look at PE first: if you got PE1, it's basically goodbye to serious pvp due to extremely short field of view. Seeing the enemy first is a tremendous benefit. In fact, a low PE dude sees almost less in front of him than high PE man sees behind him. How the hell is that even possible?
Then we got str, which basically cripples your every day life except pvp when switched to very low. 24 carry weight is a joke. If the aim is to allow everyone to have decent pvp and questing/crafting experiences with one char, it is easy to cripple by having too low str.
The
actual suggestion here is that field of view would be almost same for everyone. Having higher PE would affect more to long range shooting accuracy. So that the old PE range would act as a line that determined when your aiming starts to suck badly. This means that PE1 dude better not shoot at targets beyond 23 hexes, but he can still see like 40 hexes. This way even low PE fighter could spot his enemy from afar, but couldn't attack him yet due to his preferred short range weapons.
What comes to str is that everyone would have default carryweight of 45, it can never go lower than this but could be raised with more str. This is because carryweights lower than that begin to be rather troubblesome when it comes to hauling ores, wood or loot. What's gonna happen to small frame then? It better get changed because the carryweight penalty is directed to crafting abilities while +1 agi is related to pvp.