Lavi said:
Howling Fist 1.50 2.00 3.00 x2 STR_20%, VIT_50%
Does that mean for that WS, you should focus more on VIT?
No, you need to look at the entire formula, not just what attributes give a tiny boost to the damage.
The way you figure damage is by taking your attack divided by the mob's defense, this caps at 2.4 for melee, 3 for ranged attacks. They use all these calculus terms and figures, I'll just call this Att/Def.
Then you take 3 numbers and add them together to get your damage. One is the damage of your weapon, the second is your STR - mob VIT, the third is the boost from attributes.
STR-VIT is 0 if it's negative, and it caps based on the damage of your weapon. If you are in the range where you have higher STR than the mob's VIT, and are not yet to the cap, then you will see a boost of 1 to your damage for each 1 STR you add. You will normally be in this range for exp.
The attribute boost is figured by taking the percentage, multiplying it by your current amount of that attribute, and then multiplying that by a constant that starts at 1 at level 1, and slowly decreases to .83 at 75. You then round this number down to the nearest whole number. Therefore 50% VIT at 75 will boost your damage figure by about 2 for every 5 VIT at level 75, no matter what.
You then multiply the damage figure by Att/Def and multiply that by the ws damage multiplier, and by number of hits if it is a multi-hit. Adding to your attributes will do less added damage in most cases than adding the same amount of STR, and in the case of most attributes will not give you the same boost to damage while building up TP for the ws.