For me personally, Stats are things like END or INT. So a piece of gear might give 5 strength and 10 int, and you character gets all of the various effects those stats give (int might give spell damage, mana bar, and less chance to fizzle for example).
Bonuses are more like "HP" or "Spell Power". So a piece of gear might tell you EXACTLY what it helps and how much. For example it could give +2% spell damage, you'd know that every damage dealing spell will now deal 2% more damage.
I was wondering how everyone felt about putting bonuses on gear, as opposed to just letting stats upgrade you however you need.
Personally, I feel that stats are far more interesting. Rather than focusing your character on one role, and one role only, it forces you to be at least a little bit of an "all rounder", since stats usually have various different effects.
However, bonuses may fit far better in Pantheon, which seems to have a focus on situational gear.
Does it make sense to make a wizard get a full crafting set of gear, a full damage dealing set of gear, and a set of gear which allows for some in battle mana regen and some damage, depending on the various situations they find themselves in? What about taking it one step further and adding in things like "+8 to fire damage" and making people get gear sets just for 1 sort of damage?
Personally I liked the old everquest system that had items always had certain stats not randomized but simply thats what stats the item name always had. You had to work your way up to items that had stats you needed eg by raiding or being in a group killing monsters which were out of a solo players reach. Often named monsters dropped something that had good stats for certain classes but compared to raid loot which would have +10 to all stats with resists and maybe mana regen etc. the named loot was just to get you enough to get by and help you be slightly better.
I did not like the system where randomized stats appear differently on a specific named item, to me this is a way to jump ahead of where your progression is currently at and made most items not rolling stats needed vendor fodder. I mean everyone wants high strength high stamina on say a tank or high wisdom high stamina on a priest but giving it easily takes away the hostile environment feel that I really liked about everquest vs other games where you could just browse an auction house for common items with just the stats you needed and have an easy time after your required stats were really high.
We actually have several topics already active on this subject, which can be found by typing "Stats" into the search function, it produces this page: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/search?query=Stats&type=forum_topic&submit=
From that list there are two main threads, one is identical to this one: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1558/stats-on-gear
And another one similar: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5734/randomizing-gear-stats
Within those and some other threads, we have discussed set pieces, stats and bonuses, we can't comment on it yet officially but this is something we will be taking feedback on during testing. I will go ahead and close this one, please feel free to join the already existing threads to continue the discussion. :)