I would like to revive this thread and shift the focus of the discussion a little bit. I'm working on shop mode right now and one of the things it does is display elemental and status attributes of weapons/armor. There are a few questions we need to have a rough answer for in order for me to do my current work. Those questions are the following.
1) How many status effects do we want to have in the game?
2) To get an answer for (1), we'll need to also know what are the consequences/benefits of the status effects? In other words, what do the status effects do?
3) Can/should status effect intensities go "both ways" like elemental effects do? (Consider for example the cliche poison effect which drains HP slowly over time. Would the other side of the spectrum actually heal? Does this make any sense?)
4) Should status effect properties even be part of our weapons and armor in the game at all? Would a piece of armor with positive poison intensity status make the character more resistant to poison while a helmet with negative poison status makes the character more susceptible to poisoning?
My own initial thoughts:
1) I think we should shoot for a range between 12 and 20 or so. Just a rough guess.
2) Well first I think we should have an obvious set of "stat boosters" that increase/decrease an actor's stat. There's 8 status effects right there (HP, SP, strength, vigor, fortitude, protection, agility, evade). Then we can have a mixed bag of other statuses like stone, berserk, blind, etc. Maybe a total of 8 in the mixed bag for a total of 16 effects?

3) I think the answer to this question is both yes and no. For the stat booster effects I mentioned, of course it makes sense for them to go both ways (can either positively or negatively affect a stat). But the other effects like stone...what is the inverse side of having a stone status effect? There's no good answer here. So yes, I think some effects should be only negative, perhaps others are only positive, and then there are effects which can be both positive and negative.
4) I'm conflicted about this one. Lets use an example to think about this. Lets say we have a breast plates with status effects of "pos stone", "neg blind", and "neg HP". What would that do? Does that protect against stone status, is weak against blind status (more likely to become blind), and is weak against negative HP status? Or do the "stat boost" effects cause the character to start in that state, ie with a negative HP status already inflicted? And would the armor have any effect on a positive HP status being applied? It seems confusing.
Lets think of a sword now (and name it "Mixed Blessing) with a high attack rating, neg blind status, and pos HP status. So would this cause a target to possibly become blinded and also possibly be given an HP boost (HP increase over time)? Or does this mean the player is given the pos HP status boost when the battle begins? You might be asking why would we want to put a pos HP status on a weapon. Well as I said the weapon is powerful, but has the unfortunate side effect of healing foes occasionally. Might make the game more interesting if we do things like that and the player doesn't always have an "obvious best choice" for all available weapons and armor.
Also lets not forget that weapons and armor have sockets that shards can be put into to customize them. This could possibly offer stat bonuses (not in the form of status effects, but on a permanent basis), elemental properties, and yes perhaps status effects too. So even if we remove the ability for weapons/armor to naturally have status effects, we'll probably still have to deal with having status effects attached to them via shards. So I guess my answer to the main question is "we probably can't, we're stuck with this".
I think this is a bit of a puzzel, what with positive and negative intensities of status effects.
What I want to make sure we do is to have consistency, so when we see an up arrow attached to a status icon on a player we know "this is good" and that a down arrow means "this is bad". And those intensities are applied to enemies, they're swapped (up arrow on enemies is bad for player, down arrow on enemies is good for player). And likewise I think that when a status effect is attached to a character's equipment, the player should be clear on what the result of that effect is. We don't want some effects to mean "the character will start with this status active when a battle begins" and others to mean "this has a resistance against this type of status".
I'll shut up now. I probably just made this a lot more confusing by blabbing on about it.
