Weapons will have zero combat stats on them.
All of the stats you would expect from them have been redistributed among the other item slots.
Weapons will be entirely appearance items and they are restricted by your specialization.
Weapons do not have influence on the type of skills that you can use, and they aren’t used to restrict skills from you. Skills are assigned via specializations. The only exception to this is Black Orcs, who has a base class mechanic, have access to a weapon-swapping style.
This also means there is no auto-attacks.
There are not armor types such as light, medium, heavy. All items which come with innate armor have the same base armor determined by its item level and item slot. The item affix system for gear has restrictions built into it for green/blue gear and even more for purple gear. One of those restrictions is that an item can only roll one of these four affixes: Extra Armor / Strength / Ballistic Skill / Intelligence. This means pieces of gear with extra armor will have far less offensive stats available to them even outside the normal power point distribution system. This will create the equivalent of heavy armor pieces. But any person is capable of equipping any combat item.
Combat item slots are the same as they were on AoR minus weapons.
The slots are:
- Head
- Shoulder
- Chest
- Belt
- Arm
- Feet
- Back Accessory x4
- Pocket x2
Pocket items will not have combat stats on them, normally. In general they will be on-use effects or procs which affect combat. There are generic pocket items in addition to class/archetype/specialization restricted ones. A few examples: A self heal, short movement speed skill, self-CC removal.
Combat items at the same ilvl and item slot will have the same amount of “power points (pp)” attached to them via affixes. This is one of the reasons that they broke %stats into ratings; so that you could essentially get 65 critical hit rating (0.65%) on an item to make the PP the same. PP values of each stat is mathematically built with the base value of health = 1pp.
Combat armor pieces that you equip will automatically apply an appearance based on your base class. This appearance will always be the same regardless of what combat gear you equip.
Appearance armor will be class-restricted.
At launch, it will be based on your base class. As a general rule of thumb, I wouldn’t expect cross-class armors except where it could be allowed in lore.