I highly disagree with this statement, when I go to the Multiverse mode and use Gear with high offensive stats these Gear pieces do increase the damage output significaty. Also how did you get this information? It really doesn't seem right.
I'm talking about vanilla stats.
Having low vanilla stats is actually better. In competitive mode they're not important (damage can be tweaked by changing moveset damage) and defensive stats make a difference in competitive mode so given how all characters have the same sum of stats, those that have more points on defensive atributes are better stat wise.
In competitive mode given how a character's damage is balanced at X, having lower vanilla offensive numbers is better because any point spent on those stats makes the % increase of X better than if X was higher.
I know all the formulas from testing them myself for several hours during each game's life span. I've labed the s** out of MKX and I2 game formulas, I have the damage scaling formulas, the meter building formulas, how stats work... I've been meaning to release some kind of video guide explaining all of them, but a combination of life getting in the way and a dose of procastination prevented it, but trust me, I've run those numbers plenty of times and I know I'm correct.
Those who are used to read my posts know that I'm always detecting damage scaling anomalies for many characters (moves scaling damage way too much when they shouldn't and that kind of stuff).
And while at some point starting to invest in offensive attributes would be ok, any investment in defensive ones specially from scratch is better.
Let's say you had 1000 at all your attributes, let's say you invest 2000 points on both offensive ones, so you have 1000+1000 str and 1000+1000 abl, you're doubling your damage output from normal and special moves. Now let's say you did the same with defensive attributes, you go from 1000*1000 (so 1000000) to 2000*2000 (so 4000000) because they work together, which means that the same number of stat points that would double your damage output, can quadruple your resistance to damage.
Of course you will notice an increase in damage output with offensive stats, but defensive stats are just way better optimized (plus making games longer rewards skill over luck so anyone with experience would also benefit from that).
For competitive play, offensive stats mean NOTHING because the balance team could make a character's damage go down without touching the stats (see Black Adam) and many character's with the same offensive stats deal very different amounts of damage outputs per combo, but defensive stats actually make characters resist more damage on competitive mode.