Auto Attack level scaling bug

[SaberSaurus]

Date & Time: April 29th, 7:09 PM Mountain Time
Frequency: Every Auto Attack
World name: Sargatanas
Character name: C'Korolon Saber
Class/Level: Black Mage 90
Party or solo: Solo and Party
In-game time: 3:27 AM
Steps:
1. Level to 90
2. Auto attack dummy
3. Do only one damage

Level 90 Black Mage can only do one damage with an auto attack, even with a critical direct hit. Tested on other casters, they do more than one damage (Astrologian comes close to 1 damage). With some other FC members we tested a few levels, and lower level casters seem to do MORE damage with auto attacks, with a level 81 white mage doing MORE auto attack damage than a level 90 white mage etc.

[Jeeqbit]

Casters are not supposed to auto-attack. Instead of auto-attacks they used to have higher weapon damage and trait damage increases, but in EW they made the weapon damage of other jobs the same and adjusted action potencies instead.

The auto-attack only works in melee range and they are not supposed to be in melee range, but if they are, it scales off of Attack Power, which scales off the Strength stat. The auto-attacks pause while casting, which you would think they are doing the entire time, but a lot of casters don't cast as much anymore. SMN rarely casts, RDM only casts every other cast and healers now have a 1.5 second cast time.

The reason the auto-attack reduces as you level is because your stats actually get weaker as you level. Think of it as them being divided by your level. They are diluted but what makes up for this is the overall amount of stats on your gear increases. Before this feature was put in the game in 1.0, there wasn't a need to increase your gear as you leveled up, so you would be able to kill level 90 enemies much more easily at level 80.

So as the strength stat gets diluted more with each level increase and there is no strength on caster gear, the auto-attack has already gone into negative territory but it can't get lower than 1.