I'm going to gently contest your dismissal of Warfare and Aerothurge as being bad for their bonuses applying to physical and magical armor. It will not always be the case that you will face enemies which only have physical armor and no magical armor, or vice versa. There are times when you will be facing enemies with both.
Plus, even in the instances where there are enemies with only one type, after you successfully kill them, there will likely still be enemies remaining which have armor, and then the bonuses will matter.
Plus sometimes it might not always be possible or feasible to go for an enemy with no armour resistant to your damage type due to geography or surfaces or the amount of AP you have, and targeting an enemy which is close but has armor might be the better approach than walking into the middle of an enemy group to try and reach an enemy which has none.
This is a fair point, but isn't he main reason for my assessment.
Even when you are attacking an enemy that does have the armour relevant to Warfare/Aerothurge, the damage bonuses will only apply to the armour portion, and the enemy will have far more health than armour.
For example, Patrolman Kraus, representative of the standard Archer Guard, has 168 health, 61 armour, and 56 magic armour.
That's 229 effective health against pure physical.
And 224 effective health against pure magic.
~73%/75% of his effective health will be completely unaffected by Warfare/Aerothurge, respectively.
If we reduce the bonus to the portion of our damage that actually gets boosted, we get +0.25 and 0.75%, which is a pretty abysmal bonus.
And keep in mind, this is when we are forced to hit someone that has armour to our damage type, which we actively try to avoid.
Granted, an enemy that has purely 1 armour type will have somewhat better ratios, but the amount of boost we see will always be quite low.
If we examine the toughest boss we've seen, I believe it's 500 armor to 2k health, so only 20% effectiveness, which is even worse!
At the very least those who would consider Warfare should instead invest in a Weapon skill. Since their best, average, and worst cases are all >= to a 3% boost per point, it will have better damage output in every fight.
However, mages have no "strictly better" option to compare with. Huntsman/Pyrokinetics are the only theoretical close ones, and each have drawbacks that weapon users don't have to deal with. The fights where these are leveraged will give much bigger bonuses though, and the extra range utility from Huntsman has a value that is hard to weight.
