Ability damage scaling is totally doable.
It was a shitty system in BL3 that was cool compared to the alternative. The day it was implemented it became very obvious that anything other than highest mayhem was less damage and a waste of farm time. It doesn't need to come back.
And with spellblade on clawbringer technically your judgement scales of spell damage as well and could hit incredibly hard
Not how that works. Spellblade effect only applies to it's melee attack not your other sources of melee damage. Also SDJ melee damage is not affected by ability damage boosts.
You said it's an ability based class but it's a jack of all leaning into ability and a single companion.
Yeah, and now it's a master of none unfortunately. It just doesn't just bring anything to the table another class wouldn't do better.
Also, while flat crit let it keep up, it wasn't good for longterm health of the class, because that was the majority of its power budget.
I disagree. Even with enough points for 2 capstones it's not like Clawbringer would have outclassed the other trees.
And ability based stuff doesn't do as little as you'd think.
It's great on Brr-zerker, Graveborn, and Spore Warden, not anywhere near as impactful with Clawbringer.
Raw ability damage scaling is scarce compared to spell, melee, or gun, but warped paradigm exists to solve that for ability scaling
Even with max spellshot power and a mod with High thread count (which is not a Spellshot/Clawbringer one) you aren't even coming close to offsetting the Awe change with your ability damage.
For example:buffmeister
Speaking of game health. Buffmeister is the return of the Bee and the "healthiest" choice would be for that spell to be launched into the sun.
Just from buffmeister and spellweaving, you can hit 250% ability damage scaling, and that's before you apply other parts of the damage formula into play, like base damage bonuses from buffmeister, or things like your enchants or elemental bonuses on tree.
So Clawbringer is fine as long as you build around Spellshot and use Buffmeister?
Also the wyvern skills do actually do plenty of damage when specced into companion damage they just happen way too infrequently to be meaningful.
They did yesterday.