I have a question dealing with attributes. I see the two following statements listed:
"Strength increases your damage with strength-based weapons and skills and provides a bonus to Physical Armor." and "Skills and attacks based on Strength have +20% damage."
What I'm trying to figure out is whether this means that:
+20% Strength-based weapons
+20% Skills
+8% Physical Armour
OR
+20% Strength-based weapons
+20% Strength-based skills
+8% Physical Armour
Due to the lack of a serial comma, I have no idea which one is correct in either of the statements. These are largely game changing distinctions for me. The prior would lead me to believe that I can go as an Intelligence-based Warfare character and still have my skills non-Weapon based skills, such as Battle Stomp, scale in damage.
I feel that the experimentation potential in the first example would be amazing, though I don't know if this is the case. I'd basically allow for you to be an Intelligence-based melee wizard, which the Inquisitor class seems to imply if viable, and not suffer massive damage penalties (on non-Weapon based skills, or a Strength-based caster that's magic would actually be potent.
I think that would be a nice way to handle the scaling, so you have the freedom to dip into other stats, which was also seemingly encouraged by the developers during one of their YouTube videos. It was suggesting that as a mage, you may want to put some points into Strength in order to pass Physical Saves. Though that would be a very terrible opportunity cost just to put that point in to get the +2% Physical Armour! But if the point in Strength did +5% to your Skills still (assuming all non-Weapon based skills), and you'd only be missing out on the +5% to the Intelligence-based weapons that you would have gotten previously, which seems like a lot better incentive for dipping into other stats.
This basically would mean that if you had a character, their non-Weapon based skills damage would essentially be determined by their total primary attributes, which would be interesting.
STR 14, FIN 14, INT 14 being the following:
+20% Strength/Intelligence/Finesse-based Weapons
+60% Skills
+8% Physical/Magic Armour
+4% Dodge
would be much more interesting than
+20% Strength-based Skills and Weapons
+20% Intelligence-based Skills and Weapons
+20% Dexterity-based Skills and Weapons
+8% Physical/Magic Armour
+4% Dodge
Again, I feel as if the first example, I would definitely get a lot more creative with my builds as I feel the penalty for doing so is not nearly as severe as the second example, though still in place. If the second example is actually how the game is intending these values, then I highly doubt I'll dip into any other stat, which is a shame.
Having each character as a pure stat would result in so much more damage, cross attribute builds would be weak, especially since the points into the Skills themselves tend to favor traditional attribute distribution.
