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Question about Buffing Skills with their attributesI've asked this before myself and never really got a definitive answer.
It seems that if the skill is designed to buff or debuff a "State" (that is, Physique, Morale, and/or Concentration) and the skill's description lists a specific rank of change, then increasing the skill's attribute does not increase the power of the buff or debuff. For example, the Warrior Archetype Skill, "Charge", says that it gives your character the "Vigor" buff effect which increases your Physique rank by 3. The same skill makes it so that all of your attacks become "Burst" attacks that cause you to gain +1 Physique on a successful hit and lose -1 Physique on a miss. This skill, and those like it, will apparently not gain any benefit from increasing the associated Attribute, Body, to a higher level.
Other skills cause a debuff, such as the "Daze" effect from the "Headbutt" skill, which causes the target to lose Concentration when they move. It is not clear how much concentration they lose at any one time, or how far they have to move to lose it, but there does seem to be a cap of no more than -5 max from the effect. Skills such as that *might* improve with increased Attributes, but it isn't clear right now whether or not they *do*.
Your experience with Shell Shock dealing -2 Morale instead of -1 would suggest that the above is actually incorrect. That being said, it is possible that Shell Shock and others are supposed to increase in power at particularly high Attribute levels, but it is also possible that Shell Shock is bugged and is incorrectly causing a -2 Morale loss when it should be dealing only -1. I would suggest posting to the bugs forum and/or contacting Acclaim directly and hope that someone official could answer that (I wouldn't expect to hear from them though, they suck at stuff like that).
Additionally, it is not clear at this time whether or not there is any kind of opposed check that would allow a character or mob to resist an effect. If such an opposed check does exist, then it would seem to make sense that the check would be based on the attacker's Attribute for the skill vs. the defender's Affinity. So in the case of a skill such as Headbutt it would be a check of the attacker's Body Attribute vs. the defender's Rune Affinity.
Damage does increase when you increase the associated Attribute for a skill. For example, if you increase the Body Attribute, then any skill that is linked to Body and deals damage will deal more damage than it did before you increased the Attribute. That is definite and clear, although it is *not* clear how much of an increase you gain.
Much testing needs to be done, and generally speaking most people around here just want to play and aren't really concerned about testing such things (I try to do a little testing, but not much, and with the PvE server being down all the time I don't even play right now). We could also use some more input from Acclaim on the subject, but they don't seem too interested in answering questions like that. If you do any testing yourself, please post any information and conclusions you can in the future, as it could be helpful for others, especially for planning Attribute distributions for their characters. In particular, if you could post screenshots of your Shell Shock dealing -2, especially if it *always* deals -2, that would be great... try it against a number of different critters of varying levels and see if you can get consistent results. If you do get consistent results, then it is probably supposed to improve with high Mind. If you do *not* get consistent results, then it is more likely to be a bug.