How important is Spell Buff?

[Ms Peaches]

so in ds1 your magic was all about your scaling. the letter meant everything.
ds2 we were introduced to reinforcing our staves / chimes and scaling was a little less important.

now I'm kind of confused. the stat spell buff has been introduced and it seems that the higher the spell buff the more powerful your spells. regardless of your scaling.

for a while now I've been experimenting for a dark build and found that my pyromancy was far more powerful than my sorceries and miracles as was expected but when I got to my dark spells my pyromancy was still better despite dark spells scaling with both faith and int.

is this because my flame spell buff is still higher and my staff / chime need to be upgraded? or do dark spells more closely resemble ds1 where each class has it's own dark magic?

[Rasputin]

in terms of weapon buffs it's still a thing and many people use it.(DMB,Lightning blade, ETC.)
As for personal buffs I.E. Sacred Oath, they simply are just not worth it. from what ive tested theres only a 100-200 dmg buff difference (50 faith w/ +10 yorshka chime) based on just that i feel like most personal buffs arnt worth it

[Akutare]

It's very worth it, the way the equations work directly factor in spell buff on your casting catalyst as a multiplier, so increasing it has a huge effect on the damage spells will do. I believe int on int scaling catalysts will increase this, faith on chimes, and so on.

[Xengre]

Magic Sword buff is wicked. My go to so far in the game tho I think I might check out the Tears auto-life miracle as well, just for that off chance I screw up. It seems to add flat damage for some of the weapon buffs and then scales further based on your stat for the appropriate magic. Maybe, single scaling types scale harder at first but eventually get passed up by dual scaling? Not sure as I haven't used any real magic outside of self-buffing Spook/Magic Sword/etc.

[Ms Peaches]

Originally posted by Akutare:

It's very worth it, the way the equations work directly factor in spell buff on your casting catalyst as a multiplier, so increasing it has a huge effect on the damage spells will do. I believe int on int scaling catalysts will increase this, faith on chimes, and so on.

OK I think I'm starting to see what's going on now. I'm currently running some experiments with a low level sorcerer so I'm gonna see the differences for now. thanks you've been a great help.