After further testing, with both Wolves and Ravens, I think Zewks had it correct (or close enough) all along:
So the idea that the 11% (wolves at level 5) is calculated twice is very close. After calculating the 11% with the weapon damage it is then used again for the main stat bucket AND global multipliers (at least for the 2 I’ve vigorously tested). So you have to calculate as follows:
(weapon damage * skill multiplier) * (1+main bucket damage * skill multiplier) * (1+global multiplier * skill multiplier) * (1+primary attribute * skill multiplier)
So if you have rank 5 wolves, your weapon does 1000 damage, you have +500% damage in your main bucket, you have a 30 multiplier (like call of the wild) and 200 wisdom then you will get:
1000 * 0.11 * (1+5 * 0.11) * (1+0.3 * 0.11) * (1+0.2 * 0.11) = 180
I haven’t tested crit damage or vulnerable damage, but after all of my testing, I don’t think that crit damage suffers from this multiplier (crit damage was consistently noticeable during testing despite being base ‘+50%’) and I assume vulnerable also doesn’t suffer from the multiplier, but that’s only based on a hunch.
Unfortunately the tooltip calculations don’t account for the additional multipliers and calculate as if they were any other skill. So either the devs copied the code from Diablo 3 and don’t understand what’s going on (I’ve gotten the impression that the devs working on the game now may not be the ones who started it) or they have the additional multipliers in the intentionally and didn’t both to adjust the tooltip calculation.
The good news is that the active damage of the companions don’t seem to suffer from this reduction and ‘+companion skill damage’ appears to be unaffected by it as well (although I’m not sure if it has its own bucket or is still part of the main +damage bucket).
Sorry for the confusion. I thought that if I tested with very small numbers it would prove more fruitful as I could isolate what was working and what wasn’t, but it turns out that noticing the 8% increase of a 5% increase (0.4%) made it more difficult to account for.
Think that’s all for me on this one for quite some time. If you guys want to keep bugging Blizzard to either fix the skill OR the tooltip though, it would be quite warranted as one is clearly in error.
And for those who still want to do damage with passive companions - I suggest focusing on ‘+companion damage’ equipment, and even more so, items that increase your companions’ rank as it’s being double-multiplied (somewhere around rank 80 you should be rolling).