Larian seemed to think people's complaints about Warfare was only that Warfare offers fractionally better damage, but that's wrong.
The biggest problem with Warfare is that it unnecessarily kills build diversity by making 6 other skills not worth investing in (excepting skill requirements) until after maxing Warfare. It is troubling that they did not realize that after all this time.
I think Warfare would be in a better balanced spot if it didn't apply to Bows/Crossbows, Daggers, and Necromancy.
If Warfare didn't apply to bows/crossbows and daggers then scoundrels, huntsmen and necromancers have no way to scale.
All classes scale damage output by multiplying base weapon damage by an attribute factor, an elemental factor and a crit factor. Warfare is the "physical" element.
Warfare doesn't offer "fractionally" better damage. It is necessary for physical damage dealers to scale like elemental casters. The lack of physical resistances is a boon for physical damage dealers. I'm not aware of any sources of negative physical resistance, or at least I can't remember any. I assume dodge% is intended to be a type of physical resistance but no enemy in the game has enough dodge% for it to matter.
Casters have a slightly different damage calculation if base damage is derived from a spell as opposed to a weapon, in which case certain spell damage modifiers behave multiplicatively. Casters suffer from elemental resistances but can offset it with negative resistances.
The game is based around vitality scaling. Item and enemy base damage stats are automatically calculated based off vitality and scale with vitality growth.
Every class has one core tenet: increase attribute, elemental and crit factor in roughly equal proportions to maximise damage output at any given level. Because you get far more attribute points per level up than combat ability points, this means a combat ability conferring 5% elemental bonus will always be more valuable than an ability like dual wielding which provides a 5% attribute bonus.
5% elemental bonus is always more valuable than 5% crit bonus until your crit chance is sufficiently high that you can treat it as being unconditional. Scoundrels are very powerful early on because daggers auto crit from behind, thereby allowing scoundrels to ignore crit chance. They fall off later in the game because base dagger damage is low compared to two handers and bows.
Right now, you either scale with monster hp or you don't. If you want build diversity, then you can't have damage calculation like this or itemisation that scales off vitality growth. The easiest fix I think involves doing a pass on enemy dodge% or physical resistances/negative physical resistances.
If you redo damage calculation from scratch, then you have to redo large parts of the game. Itemisation would have to be completely reworked because a large proportion of your stats come from gear. All fights would have to be manually tuned based on expected player stats at every given level. This is quite the undertaking and I don't expect it to happen.
If you spin off weapon skill as an independent damage multiplier then you will observe something similar to Diablo 3 when Blizzard introduced items like Focus/Restraint. You will briefly break the damage scaling curve before they increase vitality growth to compensate and you end up in roughly the same position as before except all the numbers are bigger and you throw away all your gear more frequently.
