What I mean, while talking about the stats, is that reducing the amount of type of weapons will reduce weapon type limitation per class while looting, so at raids every peace of loot will be usable for more classes or people. So if there are less types of weapon classes will have to search weapons by stats instead of by type.
You said that bard instead of having his own type of weapon (instrument) will use a bow with a esthetical change, so bard will have to loot bows instead of instrument. If you plan to do this with a lot of type of weapons that means, for example, there will not be dagger in the game because classes with dagger will loot swords with an esthetical change to dagger. Other example is that voodoo dolls for witch will not exist in the game and instead will have to loot a rune that esthetically will change into a voodoo doll, and that rune will be looted by every caster that will transform that rune esthetically into an exclusive class item. If you do this every melee class will loot only swords, caster will loot only runes and rangers will loot only bows, because instead of having their own type of weapon they will share types of weapons but with an esthetical class exclusive change.
Let's see, I think you're not understanding.
Not because it's melee you have to get only swords, I don't know where you got that from.
We are talking about an aesthetic mesh that identifies classes , you can still use daggers as a witch and have a heretic stick as an AESTHETIC mesh.
It has nothing to do with the loot, far from it, apart from the fact that each class must have a main weapon, apart from the other objects that you can always use, a spec usually goes with one weapon or another.
The only thing this mesh does is further identify the spec.
It has nothing to do with loot, it has nothing to do with stats, it's just AESTHETIC.