Earth magic nerfs / weapon buffs

EDIT: After further analysis this is a bug, earth skills aren't scaling damage off STR at all.

So looking at live my lvl 100 stone fist does 32-89 damage range 4.5 with 108 earth attune. This compared to my lvl 100 thrust in the sword tree doing 32-89 damage range 3.0. Basically all equal apart from range for the basic spammy type close range skill.

With the changes these numbers are now 27-84 damage range 3.0 for the stone fist, and 34-94 range 3.0 for the thrust.

My question is, why is earth magic being nerfed below the usefulness of weapon based meelee damage given that it has several negatives attached to it (primarily mobs being resistant to particular types of magic) that renders it situational already? Also I would like to note that the thrust damage can be increased significantly through masterworking while the stone fist damage cannot.

 

Not defending this what I view as a bad change in any shape or form, but what was your strength and intelligence for these two damage ranges? Curious as to how bad the new strength scaling is.

 

124 STR 63 DEX 59 INT with the numbers quoted above (basic grind gear)

 

Yea just hopped on the QA myself to look at things. I don't have any real mage gear but I'm wondering if the int scaling is now better (IE the strength and intel scaling were reversed or something along those lines before).

In other news the Tier 2 materials change is glorious. Finally worth using.

 

Actually, when you mentioned stats I thought I'd do a test end see how much STR buff changes the difference, and discovered that STR buffs have no effect on the damage for all 3 earth damage skills, so the scaling for STR is broken (I logged a bug for this).

So this is a bug

 

On build 577 now and I tested again.

Unbuffed my base stone fist damage at lvl 100 is 27-84
Buffed with lvl 100 Strength of earth (+21.5 STR) this increases to 28-85
Buffed with lvl 100 Enlightenment (+19.6 INT) this increases to 28-88
Buffed with both the STR and INT buffs above damage is 29-89

So it is scaling with STR, however, very slightly (about 25% of the scaling when compared to INT for my character), which seems wrong considering the earth skills specifically state on the skill tooltip:

Close range attack that does bonus damage based on the casters strength

The skill has been changed to the point where the tooltip is now deceptive

 

My results are the same as yours. Adding 50 strength did not increase the min damage of stone fist and increased the max damage by 1. This is not a "slight adjustment" by any means!