Stats

This is actually quite true, to a greater extent than most realize. For 90% of the population, your skills, hidden attributes, off/def etc, and even the friends you make, will all have a much greater impact than your stats.

Stats become of prime importance when two equally skilled up characters go at it. This happens a lot when sparring. And since combat-oriented characters spend a great deal of time sparring, stats assume a heightened, fetish-like importance. But it's not a mistake - the stats really are making the difference. If you want to dominate roughly equally skilled players in a sparring circle, stats are of pivotal importance.

In every other respect...Well. I've been involved in dozens of fights throughout my time in Arm, and I can only think of a rare few that came down to stats. 

As a general rule, equally skilled and equally lethal characters prefer to avoid straight up fights with each other. So fights happen when both sides believe they're clearly superior. This was more of a thing when one's skills were hidden, and you were more likely to get an overconfident warrior. Nowadays, they know to not start swinging their dick until they start seeing (advanced).

Gickery and magick shennanigans is a whole different kettle, of which stats matters not at all. Mostly who you know.

It's really mostly strength. The other stats don't matter so much, but strength has such a gigantic influence on combat that it really never evens out. Even once you're in the plateau area (journeyman/advanced), which is where 95% of fighters end up, strength is a huge factor.

If you have, say, good strength, you'll typically hit somewhere between lightly and wounds. If you have exceptional strength, you'll hit somewhere between solidly and grievous with the occasional unspeakable. This is with a human, it varies a bit from race to race, but it's not something that skills will mitigate very much. You'll never do consistent big hits if your strength isn't high, unless you actually branch an advanced weapon skill or something.

Without that strength, half your hits will just be weaksauce and you'll get trounced by people doing twice as much damage, not to mention their ability to wear the heaviest armor in the game and carry multiple spare weapons and so on. Max strength also enables the use of bludgeoning weapons to optimal effect, which is pretty broken. You can easily two-hit KO people on a human warrior using a one-handed mace with exceptional strength.

disagree, whirans are pvp king

An arrow materializes from the elemental plane of archery, striking you in the head.
An arrow materializes from the elemental plane of archery, striking you in the neck.

Your vision goes black.

[MANTIS HEAD]

whiran ranger is a rough fight for both sides. if the whiran is invis/flying the ranger kind of has to book it or hope he can melee the blur in time to get some solid shots off with whatever weapon he has. if he has peraine can probably land it. otherwise impossible to arrow an invis whiran especially if its mon invis, lower than mon maybe. if the whiran is dumb enough to not be flying and the ranger lands a charge with his mount the whiran is all but dead.

>implying detect eth doesn't solve that

or do you have to have kizn to use detect eth on another person, the last time i got down to whiran shenanigans everyone had kizn (including me). kizn on a whiran is hilarious incidentally