It sucks when leveling because you need to choose between survivability and spell power. All of the spell power gear outside of BFD makes you sacrifice int and stam. Everyone keeps talking about “Well look how strong they are, or how much they can boost or AOE”
Ok, then why are we in the bottom 50% on the meters?
At the end of the day, pulling a ton of mobs to AoE them in a zone is worth jack squat compared to the damage of Rogue, Warrior, Feral, etc…
That would certainly make it more convenient to gear, but it’s also reallllllly immersion breaking with how little that makes sense within the environment of WoW.
(Why would strength make spells stronger?)
It’s one of the reasons I don’t like Retail. Shamans have spell damage also scaling off of Agi…
(At least in Wrath they made a talent a talent that kinda made sense- like Insightful strikes from DnD where Int contributes to damage/accuracy, but for AP applying to SP- not a perfect system, but an improvement.)
Warlocks are in a very good place atm, mages are tied with paladins and gods when in AoE situations. The other classes could use PvE buffs but they are not hopeless and are missing key talents atm and will likely get runes soon to fix their remaining issues.
While I would not mind Int giving SP as it would be really fun on my Pally and caster alts. That said I’m pretty sure it would break the games balance and ruin PvP when Spriest and Warlocks show up and just delete people.
FFXIV used to have “Cleric Stance” for healers(technically WHM, but when cross-class skills were a thing, you’d be getting it anyway) to swap your Mind - the attribute that governed healing - with your Intelligence - the attribute that governed magic damage - while also increasing magic damage by 10% and reduced healing by 20%, with a 5 sec CD between entering and exiting the stance. (It’s now gone because they just locked healers into all their spells scaling off Mind, and tuned their damage spells to scale appropriately with the stat.)
That having been said, this was with not only nearly a decade after WoW, FFXI, EQ2 all released, but it was also three years after Squenix had already launched FFXIV, failed miserably, and rebooted the whole game. Without hindsight, it’s harder to reach a good point. However, hindsight isn’t completely infallible:
As you stated here, the framework is already complete. The devs have stated several things about the game can’t be changed because it would affect not only SoD, but Classic Era and Classic Hardcore. Whether this is true or not, what you stated is accurate. Trying to reinvent the wheel within the scope of Classic would be a logistical nightmare.
That’s kinda what hunters and other doubledip stat users do now-
But yes, it would need to have a good ratio to keep them from just deleting people at 30yards while making them more than wet noodles.
I want the same thing for Pally, runes like that would be pretty fun so the two classes can be real hybrids rather than warrior lite.
Actually Cata I believe, but I still agree it’s unnecessary for SoD. Strength ONLY gives attack power. That’s it.
Int gives mana AND spell crit. It’s already a double duty stat. Melee need to stack a separate stat for crit.
Mana doesnt matter because spell power allows for more efficient casts with down ranking. Spell crit is nothing compared to increasing the power of every single cast.
the impact of those stats are not even close to being a comparison, even if 2> 1
Warriors, Paladins, and Shamans do.
Agi is AP, Dodge, and Crit for Cats, Rogues, and Hunters.
60 int per 1% crit at 60…its awful. rather have stat budget go to SP ntm the amount of spirit that gets thrown on items
Something that might work - at least for paladin, not sure about shaman - is a rune that doesn’t specifically give you spell power “an increase to damage and healing from magic spells” ( 
) based on your strength, but exchanges your physical damage dealt for X% of damage from that source instead as Holy damage. Similar to how paladin in WoD had the Final Verdict talent(different than the current Final Verdict) to replace Templar’s Verdict, with Templar’s Verdict dealing 259% Physical Damage, and Final Verdict dealing 240%, but as Holy Damage instead of Physical.
It would likely have to be a significant decrease in flat damage, especially when you consider PvP - I don’t believe there’s any way to resist Holy damage specifically, unless abilities/talents/potions that give resistance to ALL magic do for Holy as well - and would probably have to be thoroughly tested before going live (and then nerfed into the ground repeatedly before it’s not considered “insanely OP”), but it at least makes sense from a thematic standpoint, and I at least think it’d have potential. I could very well be wrong, though.
Strength also increases block value, at a whopping 1 damage blocked per 20 strength at level 60.
Yeah, it’s not really worth mentioning, and a lot of people probably don’t even bother to remember this because it’s generally inconsequential.
While we’re exploring fantasy what-if scenarios, it would have been extremely cool if caster weapons like staves, wands, and other +int weapons converted weapon DPS into spell damage. 
Something I think kinda sucks about WoW is that the staff is just a stick on your back. Wouldn’t it have been cool if they felt more thematically connected to your output in some way? Well, anyway, it’s what we’ve got.
Weapons for casters are already pretty important as fat stat sticks; putting more value into them would probably just lead to more saltiness when it doesn’t drop or someone doesn’t win the roll. Kinda like weapon drops for melee. 
Joking a bit, but unless it was like that from the start, I don’t think it’d go over well with a lot of the player base.
I would be interested in staves, swords/daggers/maces, off-hands, and wands that could have “on cast” effects, similar to a melee weapon with an “on hit” effect. I wonder if this was ever seriously considered during the development of the game, and if it was seriously considered, if it was scrapped due to time constraints, or just that they didn’t feel it fit the flow of the game. They definitely got “on cast” procs onto gear later on, though it’s mostly on trinkets, not weapons. (Legion artifacts notwithstanding.) To me, that’s a bit less entertaining, since you can’t see the trinket on your character, but that’s just my opinion.
I mean… BFD gear shows that’s going to be the trend moving forward, and more importantly it isn’t just adding SP, but also giving access to %Hit and %Crit.
The only caster I play is Warlock and just from the first 3 runes and talents alone you can tell this class will be absolutely broken in future phases, I already crit for over 1k chaos bolts at lvl25 imagine with 60 gear and talents, imp scorch, CoE and sacrifice maybe 10k 15k crits. Right now the only thing that holds me back is mana issues because rain of fire cost a lot but in the future you can just apply the debuff with the r1 spell.
Beast Mastery is just rune thing. Specifically designed to work that way btw. Blizz giving hunters the pet prio class fantasy they wanted.
And yet everyone cried for nerfs.
Rogues and Warriors are also melees.
Shouldn’t melee characters do more dmg by default, because they are handicapped by the fact that they are melees?
If they had to stand still to attack, one could make that argument.
I would like something that gave spellpower based on wand or weapon item level etc, it’s kind of dumb that Casters don’t get benefit from most stats like melee does and the itemization is terrible and overly contested.
They’re forgetting most spells have pushback too, so even a caster in pvp spamming instant casts can pushback a spell. The vanilla caster system is absolute garbage.
Let’s not even get into movement fights where melee can follow the boss without much dps loss but casters get hosed on any fight with mechanics in vanilla.