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Traditionally, dex for attacks had limited damage, so you'd need to use sneak attacks or some sort of ability drain to do any significant amount of damage. In my mind this was a fair balance for Dex also applying to your AC. One stat shouldn't be able to do everything after all. In addition, dex based builds were reasonably balanced compared to armored builds in terms of AC. They could pull ahead with monk, or incredibly high Dex, but that took a lot of planning/minmaxing, so it seems reasonable.
WotR removes both of those balance points. Archmage Armor is basically a +5 Full Plate with no dex penalty, and there's a ton of ways of applying your Dex to damage, which can be done with literally any weapon. Maybe it doesn't matter as much with a reach or mounted build, but even in that case, the benefit is so small, that it's just not worth it. I keep trying to make a strength build for my Unfair run, but keep coming to the same conclusion. Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant.
Edit:
So to clarify a few things:
- The thing that I'm annoyed about (and perhaps didn't say very well) is that armor builds are vastly inferior to armorless builds. There were a few very impressive str-primary builds mentioned below with very high AC, but they all are still going armorless. That's mainly the part that I wish the game was more in balance with.
- So, assuming we're still going armorless, for strength vs dex for offensiveness, yeah, it's definitely a trade between more damage vs more defense. I don't think there's a cut and dry win.
- Personally I've had trouble staying alive on Unfair, so I've been focusing on dex for anything that's front-lining, and not riding a mount, but that's just my experience.