Am I misunderstanding stat scaling?

[Kaplah]

For the longest time I've wondered why Brienne completely overshadows my damage output as a black mage. In hindsight that's probably because I've pumped Presence nearly every level but I only just thought of that. Before that thought, I was thinking it might be a difference in power levels of physical vs. magical damage so I ran some tests on wolves since they have equal phys and mag resist. For reference, my character was using a Curved Blade for physical tests and the Sanctified Gladius with Magic Wand for magic tests.

The test stats were:

6 str, 28 physical power and 16 armour pen

16 wil and 83 spellpower and 24 spell pen

I tested using basic attacks for physical and withering bolt, fireball and greased fireball for magic

With physical, I was doing ~52 damage on swing and ~110 on crit

With magic, Withering bolt was ~66 per cast and ~89 on crit.
Fireball was ~77 on hit and ~137 with grease.

If I was working with equal stats that'd be one thing but when I half well over double the numbers on my stats for magic, it seems bizarre that the damage output is so similar. It'd help if I could also see the output on a physically focused character but for now my only point of comparison is Brienne, who hits for ~90 per swing when I have 14 presence.

So with my admittedly limited data set taken into account... Is there something I'm misunderstanding about how stat scaling works? It feels wrong that the numbers are so close when I've put literally nothing into physical offense and everything into magic offense. Especially when I compare to Brienne who completely dwarfs anything I can do.

 

[Savin]

Presence affects a stat called Leadership, which grants your companions bonus damage. If you've jumped your Presence way up, then your companions do bigly damages.

 

[Kaplah]

I figured that my presence was messing with the numbers a bit, I was mainly using Brienne as my comparison point since I only have the mage character so I can't really compare against a proper physical build off hand. It still feels weird that my magic output is so similar to my physical output despite the big difference in stats. Is that to be expected or am I missing something here?

 

[Savin]

Is that to be expected or am I missing something here?

It depends on what you're testing on; using those powers on imps is probably going to yield a lot less damage than on effigies, while the blade will be more or less consistent. That said, damage scaling in this game is fairly gentle, all things considered, and most Black Mage abilities trade raw damage for area-of-effect damage or status effects.

Try picking up the Dominance power (which does base 55 damage) and compare that to Fireball (base 40 damage), and try and find an enemy with similar Ward and Armor stats and no particular Fire resist/vuln to test on.

The way it works is {Base Damage} * 1.{Attack Power or Spell Power}, so you should do 55 * 1.28 with Dominance and 40 * 1.83 with Fireball, before Armor or Ward are factored in.

 

[Kaplah]

As I said in the beginning, my testing dummy was the wolves in the forest since (at least according to the wiki) they have equal physical and magical defensive stats. I'll admit I haven't done much testing of magic ST and AoE vs. the physical equivalents seeing as I don't have a physical build set up, so that's something to look into... Actually you know what? This has gotten me a bit curious. Does the dev team have a a set level they design areas/encounters around that you can share? I kinda want to do a run through of the game using a bunch of builds and see how they all stack up. Data collection is always good and I've been meaning to start fresh since I accidentally locked myself out of Evelyn and the possibility of her getting a sub route wants me to reopen that road.

EDIT: you were NOT joking about soft stat scaling. I tried reversing my stats for fun, setting Willpower and Presence to base and pumping Str up as high as I could (so 14 str, 8 wil/pres). There was literally no change in my numbers. Is that... normal?

 

[Shion]

Remember that for physical attacks the damage is highly dependant on the weapons base damage, aside from a few specific skills.
Since most weapon skills add further damage bonus to the calculation. Since there are weapons with a higher base damage than any normal spell you can outdamage casters relatively easily. In addition you can use weapon enchantment skills to further boost the damage.
Cast song of storms on Brint and watch entire encounters die in a single cleave.
Spellcasting is greatly helped by the availability of spellpower on equipment. You can get up to 35 spellpower from equipment alone. It also makes it much easier to target elemental weaknesses and many enemies have weaker warding than armour. And of course there is only a single melee aoe ability.
You could also combine both into a spellblade. There are two powers that combine melee and spell attacks. Add the charge weapon at will and cleave and you got yourself quite the nice little murder machine. (Stats are strength, agility and willpower, either via thief or black mage)

Both magic and weapons (teasing too) can do a crit build as well. Both thieves and black mages get boni to crit chance. Getting crits with some of the deadly thief single target powers while wielding a two handed sword can ruin the day even for bosses in short order.

 

[Savin]

Does the dev team have a a set level they design areas/encounters around that you can share?

Old Forest = Level 1-2
Foothills = 2-4
Harvest Valley (North) = 1-2
Harvest Valley (South = 3-4
Frostwood = 4-5

There was literally no change in my numbers. Is that... normal?

No?