So, in vanilla WoW we used to have hit, expertise stats and weapon skill (you leveled weapon skills by using weapon), we also had some items that gave +bonus weapon skill, to explain how it works I will put video of a guy explaining this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yanQgO0wg64
There is also something called as glancing, which reduces your dmg. If target is higher level the more chance glancing to happen. It is impacted by expertise and weapon skill.
https://vanilla-wow-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Glancing_blow - Glancing topic site.
Why this was important in vanilla? Because of unique itemization. Sometimes if gear had lower agility/strength/crit chance was better then gear that had more of these stats only because it had +weapon skill or hit or expertise. So it gave us this vibe of sandbox design when even item 47 lvl was BiS until phase 4 (1 year later patch that was released), this item for example was BiS for warriors and it was rare drop from some mobs - 47lvl. It costed around 4k gold on auction, so it was very important piece of gear to have - because it gave a lot of weapon skill bonus and some hit - without any basic stats such as strength / stamina (which increased HP pool) or agility. It was even better then any piece of gear from raids until patch 4 (1 year later).
This can improve our sense of itemization and it will give us many options to choose gear and how are we going to design our class / min max via stats / gear.
What do you think, will Ashes of Creation team make something similar, and how will they do it?