I’ve been building my project with the Gameplay Ability System for almost a year now and it’s really great… but since my game has an open inventory system where each item can mean a different thing… I haven’t turned them into gameplay attributes thinking that it would be a lot of overhead… but man I feel like it could really work… have an attribute keep track of how many of each item you have. Right now I keep track of it outside the GA system… but man… it would really streamline the workflow to just have access to them as attributes.
i dont work with the specific system hence a comment not a answer, but as with all things it will depend many factors. you mention overhead specifically which begs the questions of: whats the target platform? how far along in development are you? and what will be the performance hit? ok so performance is the base issue here and the best thing in my opinion would be to do an experiment, try making a dummy bp and load it up with attributes( a few more than you think you will need). from there see how much performance it takes. if its not much at all great, if not take a look at how many more systems you need to add to the game (performance decrements not accounted for yet) and where you are in relation to your target (performance cap).
just my two cents.
for sure… I ended up using a transient Ammo attribute that gets recycled… that seemed the most practical… just as far as work involved… and I agree that doing an experiment would shed some light on the idea…