Yes I agree bulbark is broken compared to watermal or anything else, should be only def, it doesnt make sense that it already isnt but watermal should still work imo. Also watermal should only be like 75% of mdef converted into dmg bc having a defensive stat turned into offense is always a dangerous route in all rpgs.
Idk how the coding works or who the person is that does the coding, but isnt it possible to straight up make the final basic attack damage be the one that gets calculated to scale instead of stat based scaling? So wulfricks basic attack x whatever scaling currently is. Since there is nothing that adds flat damage to attacks rn this would be the same as having atk scaling but make it possible to use watermal at least. This can also open up +flat weapon damage type of build designs possibly for future builds if it were to work like that (fucko is an example with items that give extra atk on crit).
I already assumed this was the case but since we cant see any scalings in the game at all for some reason I needed to test it and thought it was a bug. Wish he adds scalings in descriptions.