Just to touch on the STR and attack power scaling, your total STR = your attack power. So if you increase str, you're obviously also increasing your attack power.

@karateorangutang - I know the old formula you are referring to, and I think its really outdated. Most of it was done during phase 3 of beta testing for ARR lol. If you want the source I can link it.

From my own testing, I found that somehow weapon damage also effects flashes threat generation. Which is why its much harder to hold threat as pld spamming flash with a lower ilvl weapon vs dps with higher ilvl. The old formula used to have x 0.8 damage penalty from ShO, which also was found to be the same as using overpower with defiance.

There was some testing done a while back that showed even though flash doesn't actually deal damage, there's still factors of damage involved in how the threat is calculated.