honestly if you want to do some wheeling dont get a lift, just get slightly bigger and better tires and leave it at that. ive done a lot of offroading and i know a shit ton of people with both stock and built offroad rigs and its the guys with lifted trucks/suv's who are always breaking shit and having problems. if your going to lift something you really need to build the shit out of it and basically redo every suspension component to do it right and keep it reliable and increase the performance. when you add a lift, or bigger tires, or a bigger axle, etc.. or any combination of these things, it puts more strain on other components that arent also upgraded, so yeah, you may have more ground clearance, but its altering the geometry of the suspension pretty drastically and its not going to perform at its optimum level, and it wont be as strong as it was at stock ride height where the engineers designed the suspension to sit at. you put a bigger axle in and its significantly more weight, which also means more strain on other components, same goes for tires.
all this plus you have to consider that the entire car was designed with the suspension the way it is, the car was designed around the ride height being where it is now, and changing one thing is only going to negatively effect the rest of the suspension and car, that plus your not an engineer with the specific task of designing that cars suspension, your some kid who wants his car to be bigger and look cool.
so my advice, keep the suspension the way it is, get better tires, maybe a couple inches bigger at most, and leave it. if you get new rims, dont get some douchey big ass chrome rims or try to murder your car out with black rims and tinted tail lights. your only going to look like a huge tool, and ill shoot you.
