Riftblade damage scaling statsFollow

So after lurking through the interwebs for a few hours yesterday, and again for a little while this morning, I have yet to find a difinitive answer to the following question:

What stats affect the damage output scaling of the majority of Riftblade abilities?

After finding in patch notes that attack power no longer contributes to auto-attack damage, I decided to forego my DW build, however after playing both DW and 2H builds last night in a dungeon (granted I'm only level 18 right now, so stat scaling won't have much of an effect if any) I was doing more damage with my DW setup than my 2H build, and I am not sure why.

With the majority of our damage being elemental in nature, from our bursts and the "weapon damage + x elemental damage" abilities.... what stats cause that portion of our damage to scale? Obviously better weapons would cause the "weapon damage" portion of our abilities to be higher, but what about the elemental damage?

I've heard that it doesn't scale, which would be absolutely retarded at endgame because it would essentially mean that at level 50, regardless of gear, a Riftblade would always be doing the same or similar damage to every other level 50 Riftblade.

Does anyone have any data or official post or something that can confirm how Riftblade abilities scale with gear?

the riftblade abilities, like spears and things that do a set amount of damage do not scale at all. I mean, maybe they scale with spell damage... so you could try some cleric gear but if you stuck with plate they wouldnt scale.

As for doing more or less damage with your weapons it depends what abilities you are talking about.

If you read some of the class forums on the official boards you'd know that this is RB's primary rebuttal to the OP argument. They might be strong now, but at 50 when other players have good gear they are not.

Edited, Mar 11th 2011 11:28am by KTurner

I actually did some research on it myself because I was curious about it.

Like you, however, I also came to the conclusion that no one really knows. Some say that unequipping all gear reduced the damage, some say it didn't, some say spell power affects it, some say it doesn't.

The most reliable response I saw was someone who allegedly did some parsing, using different buffs to buff certain stats. He or she said that strength and dexterity seemed to buff the damage of the magic portion of the abilities.

Meh.

Yeah, some of the tests showed that spell power didn't have much of an effect on the damage.

It might be like the Death Knight class in World of Warcraft. They have a number of spells, but they aren't affected by spell power. Instead, the class has a modifier that increases the damage of the spells (not the Spell Damage stat) by a certain percentage of the Death Knight's attack power or strength (forgot which).

Maybe Trion did something similar and messed up the numbers, or maybe they're planning on implementing some kind of scaling, but are waiting for more data before deciding on what to do.