This should help, straight from the 1.6 patch notes:

• Ultimates and Synergy abilities now always scale of your highest Critical Strike stat instead of just your Spell Critical Strike.
• Abilities that cost magicka will now always scale off your magicka, spell damage, and spell critical strike stats.
• Abilities that cost stamina will now always scale off your stamina, weapon damage, and weapon critical strike stats.

LA & HA are still considered weapon damage, and scale off weapon power. The Skills (magicka based) will scale off spell power (which should be equal or greater than weapon power in most cases.)

Helluin wrote: »

There is an exception, Grim Focus/Assassin's Will is a NB buff using magicka but the ability activated after 8 LA or HA scales off the highest stat like Ultimates and Synergies.

It would be nice to know also, as I wrote in another topic, if:
- ultimates and synergy abilities use armor or spell penetration or none
- the stamina skills dealing poison/disease/magic/elemental damage use armor penetration or spell (not every stamina skill infact deals physical dmg)
- the weapon glyphs (flame, frost, shock, poison, foulness) use spell penetration and are buffed by the stars in the Champion System (since skills and glyphs don't change values spending points in those stars)

Ult's: Since they are mitigate by Spell Resist, etc, I would suspect they would also benefit from penetration. (Overload being the most likley for this to make sense, and the least likely at the same time - as your weapon is changed.)

Synergies certainly do, question is whether is uses the synergist's or the synergizer's penetration. It's the caster's spell, but historically, the person pressing X got the DPS credit.

Historically, if it was stamina activated, it used armor, magicka activated, spell resist.

Then you have further grey areas, like environmental damage - fall damage mitigated by amor, fire damage mitigated by fire resist - but it's not necessarily spell based or weapon based.

Regarding weapon glyphs, my gut says yes - they're enchantments, and innately arcane, but then you have Add Weapon damage, etc that are not.

They fall under the same grey area as environmental.

These are all things that are buried quite deep in the design, and I doubt you will find answers readily anytime soon. They can be argued, somewhat intuitively either way.

I suspect the weapon attack and the enchant basically work as two separate attacks (as far as processing is concerned), each with their own source (magic/physical) and mitigated/aggravated accordingly.

With 1:1 Spell resist per Armor Class, the line is now blurred even further than it ever has been.

I run some tests using a Fire Staff with a magicka (7/7 light armor) and a stamina (7/7 medium armor) build, simply using light and heavy attacks.

On bar Relentless Focus, Piercing Mark, Swallow Soul, Dark Cloak, Mass Hysteria and Flawless Dawnbreaker.
Swallow Soul was there just for some health recovery (used it rarely) and 8% max magicka.
Dark Cloak and Mass Hysteria (never used) simply for 6% max health.
Flawless Dawnbreaker (never used) simply for 8% weapon damage.
Relentless Focus and Piercing Mark for more critical rating (839) and to use Minor Berserk, Major Fracture and Major Breach before engage.
Target: trolls VR10, around 54k health.

With magicka setup I had 21k magicka, 20k health, 15k stamina, 1,6k spell dmg, 1,2k weapon dmg; light a. gear and glyphs all epic but for legendary fire staff.
With stamina setup I had 12,5k magicka, 23k health, 21k stamina, 1,25k spell dmg, 2k weapon dmg; medium a. gear, staff and glyphs all legendary.

Even if the magicka gear setup is weaker than stamina one, LA and HA (normal and critical ones) were hitting for 20-30% more dmg.

It seems then that LA and HA with staves are scaling off spell power or the bigger spell penetration grants a lot more.