I have a question that I don't think has been answered before and perhaps only Joppa can answer at this time.
I'm more curious about this after the recent crafting video where we learned about crafters making bespoke weapons for melee depending on what style they wanted + adding procs.
Both melee and caster dps can been increased through stats and buffs.
With melee DPS also being augmented by increasing weapon damage, reducing delay and adding weapon procs.
Weapons that could also increase spell power or damage % bonuses, reduce cast times or add damage procs to spells in order to stay on par with melee DPS as they gain better weapons.
The summoner mastery spell to summon armor/weapons for the pets is on the site. "As you grow in power, the variety and potency of this weaponry will increase." So it will scale off of something, hopefully that something goes beyond just level and invested mastery points but I don't think they have released any details yet on it.
As for your main point, I really dislike how current MMOs make the weapon scale everything the PC does to such a crazy degree. I hope casters pick their weapons based on the effects they add rather than a flat buff to virtually everything. Cast faster, use less mana, use more mana for more damage, conjure stronger pets, buff random element damage, etc. It would be way more interesting than the common MMO path of how weapon damage drastically buffs everything you do. The common trope is to have the monk kick 20% harder because he is carrying a sharper dagger. Just go with it, weapon item level > all other gear.
Fair points.
I suppose that ultimately we need to see how many melee abilities actually work via weapon damage i.e. 400% of weapon damage, I know Vanguard had a lot of these across all classes.
We originally heard that abilities will use different stats to augment them too and recently some forum posters were wondering about that still being around due to tooltip changes.
So I guess my real question is essentially; for all the classes, how much can their abilities / spells (damage and healing) be augmented by stats and gear?
MauvaisOeil said: Still not sure any ability beyond backstab scales off weapon damage.
ALL 7 of the Rogue's melee abilities that we've been shown so far scaled off of weapon damage. They aren't on the class page any longer, but they ARE still on the Wiki. Anything can change.
Dire Lord's 'Thresh' abililty is the only other one among the various class abililties I can find that also scaled off weapon damage.
I personally don't like any type of increase that is percentage based. Unbuffed player power creeps up over time which makes those percentage based increases even more powerful than they were intended. I think increases should always be specific values.
That said, I don't mind debuffs that are percentage based because you always know what the basement is and there will always be a minimal value to balance against. With increases, you never know the ceiling.