It's all the same. The only thing that isn't counter-scaled by another stat is weapon speed. Thing is, you can't e.g. nerf archery by increasing the weapon speed of melee weapons across the board. It's not going to work. Melee weapon speed can't help against ranged. Just as much as, for example, shield speed can't help shielded cavalry protect their
horse (not themselves).
Actualy infinte buffing is possible, but infinite nerfing has a limit.
If the weapons become so powerfull they one hit plate, buff armour or HP. If bows do too much damage buff soak (which is what happened right? They buffed body soak and it killed ranged???)
Anyway, numbers can grow larger but what happens if you have negative armour or swords that do negative damage, thats a world gone topsy tervy! PURE MADNESS!
Nerfs and buffs are multiplicative. You'll never end up with negative damage or negative armor. Even though that could actually work, because a hit forces damage calculation, and negative armor could hurt you more than the amount of HP you win by being struck by a negative damage weapon, another cool feature is that it could introduce medic stuff like a healing "weapon" to use on teammates xD. Anyway, as their are multiplicative, nerfing shit means numbers are less and less accurate because they are forced to remain integers. If we continued on nerfing, pretty much every stat of every item would end up being 1.
Honestly, I don't think worrying about this is really necessary, as each nerf comes with a good batch of stealth stat buffs/nerfs. We only see the nerfs because people complain about them, but there are plenty of buffs too. As I said, it's exactly the same thing, except from a psychological point of view, so why bother spending ages trying to tinker the whole mod each time you want to nerf one weapon.
