The way I understood it was stats do not increase damage, instead increasing HP, APs, initiative, ability points and chances to hit. Damage upgrade seemed to come from abilities and perks (and obviously gear).
Also, keep in mind (as the archeologist suggests once saved) that all weapon types are not equally efficient against different enemies (which is a classic in traditional RPGs). If you want to max out damage on skeletons, then crushing damage is the way to go, piercing and slashing won't do much good.
Another thing, Lore Master might help you gather more info on enemies and help you understand what they do, what their defenses are, and so on, and compare those informations with your characters'. Might help you make some more sense of what's going on in battle.
Overall, it seems pretty clear to me that damage dealing is still a work in progress. There are unconsistancies of course, skill balance issues obviously, but the main issue is that the overall damage is not balanced at all. You hit very high numbers or very low numbers, there's no real in-between, which suggest that a lot of tweaking is yet to be done. Not to mention some skills that are completely borked in a way or another (i.e.: Winterbreath vs. Flurry).
My co-op partner also suggested that the segment we get to play through in alpha is not the very begining of the game, so it's possible that on release we might have an additional segment to go through before getting there, implying that our characters will not be level 1, have a greater variety of skills and different gear. Right now we play level 1 characters in what seems to be a level 5 zone. So that logically affects numbers in battle, and explains how powerful Madora and Jahan appear to be compared to the main protagonists in the alpha.
[EDIT]: I had this idea a while back and never got around to suggesting it, now seems like a proper time. I'd like to suggest the addition of a Combat Log in the game (something that others also have suggested). Something in the lines of the original Fallout games if Larian does not want to flood us with numbers and calculation, or, something in the lines of the original Neverwinter games, with a clear breakdown of the math behind every action. In any case, a Combat Log would be great and would considerably help decyphering and understanding combat mecanics and/or cause and effect on undertaken actions.
Last edited by Maali; 21/01/14 05:25 PM.