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It's just some ideas I've had or things that need to be tweaked:

1) Separate elemental defense from base defense in the status screen:

The battle results tab shows the correct values for damage and defenses but the status page does not.

Soul stone damage is always added to the attack unless it’s absorbed, but elemental defenses only apply if they match the damage type of your opponent’s soul stones.

So keeping them merged is misleading since the base defense is the only value that will always be relevant and the elemental defenses from amulets, are a conditional bonus IF your opponent has a matching soul stone element.

2) Fix accuracy and parrying formulas:

Accuracy and parrying formulas are so out-of-whack that there’s a lot of entropy to the point where there’s outliers and outcomes in battles that simply shouldn’t be possible or are outright ridiculous. In other words, it’s excessive luck for your opponent and bad luck for you to the point of absurdity, EVEN when you dominate in most stats; it’s as if they have your higher stats and you have their lower ones.

The binary nature of accuracy and parrying is partly to blame. To fix this you can introduce a formula that can diminish bad luck (in other words, an anti-entropic formula) with a persistence bonus that gradually increases accuracy with each miss or reduces accuracy with each hit, based on the gap between your parrying and fighting ability, and those of your opponent.

The more it happens in a row, especially when there's a big gap, the better the bonus becomes. These persistence bonuses can then reset when a parry or a hit is successful. Just something you can try out to make battles feel a litlte smoother. Good luck is obviously fine, it's the extreme cases that need to be smoothed out. You just have to find the right balance.

3) Soul stone pricing is off:

From +3 to +4, it seems like it’s supposed to be a +1000 increment but it jumps to +3000 and then goes back to +1000 which is weird. I don’t know about other levels but if the wiki prices are correct, then there’s some really strange pricing going on at higher levels too.

+1 >> 350 Gold >> OK
+2 >> 1350 Gold (+1000) >> OK
+3 >> 2350 Gold (+1000) >> OK
+4 >> 5350 Gold (+3000) >> Should be 3350 Gold
+5 >> 6350 Gold (+1000) >> Should be 4350 Gold
+6 >> 7350 Gold (+1000) >> Should be 5350 Gold

4) Give two-handers a strength penalty instead of dexterity:

Two-hander Berserker is very popular because it’s very effective and easy to build and they can ignore Dexterity. And the penalty they receive means nothing because they don’t use armor.

One-handers have a Dexterity penalty on their shields to weaken their strong point, but two-handers don’t have their strong point weakened and they can also get extra sockets faster AND they gain a bigger bonus from critical hits (50% more damage from their high base damage).

This change could help balance things out even at lower levels and make it so that if you go Berserker you’ll have to build more strength to offset the penalties received from stronger weapons.

UPDATE 07/07/24

Here are some of the other ideas I've had most of which were brought up on the CRATR.games discord to positive reception. If you have anything to add or comment on, you can do so here or on discord!

5) Alignment and XP growth curves are completely misaligned:

Because of the Battleground (BG) and the high amount of XP you can get from it, your alignment falls behind because you level up way faster than was originally intended, and you don’t gain any alignment on the BG.

This means that equipment and soulstones get outleveled and become obsolete, and you can’t gain alignment fast enough on home worlds to make up for it.

The solution would be to gain alignment on the BG based on BP/XP earned at the end of a session. On discord, the main idea we settled on as a start, was to tie it to fights carried out during sessions based on the side or alignment you choose to fight for, before starting a session.

However, different BP tiers can bloat the XP payout at the end, so the alignment received could also receive a boost depending on BP earned, similar to the way missions award alignment. (which is XP/2 but rounded up)

0-2 BP = 1 Alignment Point
3-4 BP = 2 Alignment Points
5-6 BP = 3 Alignment Points

With this change, alignment items should become more acquirable and usable, instead of being left in the dust due to overlevelling and no easy way to increase your alignment to make up for it.

6) Make stamina a little more useful and less binary:

Stamina as a stat has a lot of “dead” points; that is, points that have no effect and are essentially useless, and the only thing that matters is the milestone point in stamina where you gain an extra round.

With this suggestion, every point before a milestone would grant a chance to fight a little longer and gain an extra round; a second wind so to speak. And when the next milestone is reached by your current stamina after all the bonuses/penalties, that round becomes permanent like it already does.

Here’s an example with a 4 point gap that has 3 “dead” points where each point would add a 20% chance (as an example), to gain that extra round:

30 - 11 rounds are guaranteed.
31 - 11 rounds and a 20% Chance to gain an extra round.
32 - 11 rounds and a 40% Chance to gain an extra round.
33 - 11 rounds and a 60% Chance to gain an extra round.
34 - 12 rounds are guaranteed.

With this change, the stat is more granular and every point is useful instead of worrying about reaching or losing milestones by a single point for example.

7) Add a new function to the Blacksmith:

Berserkers already have an overwhelming advantage at lower levels, and that’s made worse by how quickly they can gain sockets as well.

With this extra function, the blacksmith would be able to ADD sockets to weapons after certain levels/milestones are reached, which correspond to each new socket you can potentially gain.

This way, Berserkers won't have this extra advantage simply by pouring everything in 2H Weapons. They still get the perk of more sockets for higher skill weapons by not having to add them in at the blacksmith, but other players will be able to add more sockets if they're at the right level.

8) Make attacks for non-premium 10 minutes:

I often play with premium, but 15 minutes for non-premium attacks is excessive and it makes attacks feel rigid and slow. 10 minutes would at least make attacks feel better and could increase fights and engagement between players on home worlds.

The 5 minutes per attack with premium is still a nice bonus, but having the alternative be 15 feels too sluggish.

Basically, it should be similar to how it is on the Battleground where it’s 10 minutes per battle for normal sessions, and 5 minutes for the jewel ones.

So keeping them merged is misleading since the base defense is the only value that will always be relevant and the elemental defenses from amulets, are a conditional bonus IF your opponent has a matching soul stone element.

Would Total possible damage: instead of Total damage: make things less misleading for you? Or even separate Total damage (with elemental bonuses): and Total damage (without elemental bonuses)?

Accuracy and parrying formulas are so out-of-whack that there’s a lot of entropy to the point where there’s outliers and outcomes in battles that simply shouldn’t be possible or are outright ridiculous.

The main contributing factor here is that the FA/PA balance calculation is done based on the linear absolute values, so the higher the FA/PA values the more difference you need to mitigate entropy.

The binary nature of accuracy and parrying is partly to blame. To fix this you can introduce a formula that can diminish bad luck (in other words, an anti-entropic formula) with a persistence bonus that gradually increases accuracy with each miss or reduces accuracy with each hit, based on the gap between your parrying and fighting ability, and those of your opponent.

This is actually a good idea and we had something similar (albeit based on a Markov model) in an attempt to refactor the fight system.

Unfortunately I have to emphasise had, because at some point we needed to put that Git branch on hold since it resulted in game-breaking issues.

The original goal of that branch was to refactor the NPC generation algorithm on the Battleground and since NPCs are generated based on BE, we had to change the BE algorithm and since the BE algorithm is tied to the fight system we also needed to refactor the latter.

(Btw. the current fight system already is a refactored version of the old fight system, but currently it's bug-for-bug identical because the first goal was to actually untangle it from our old spaghetti code and make it not only deterministic but also without side-effects)

+1 >> 350 Gold >> OK
+2 >> 1350 Gold (+1000) >> OK
+3 >> 2350 Gold (+1000) >> OK
+4 >> 5350 Gold (+3000) >> Should be 3350 Gold
+5 >> 6350 Gold (+1000) >> Should be 4350 Gold
+6 >> 7350 Gold (+1000) >> Should be 5350 Gold

That's certainly odd and the jump from 2350 to 5350 doesn't make sense, thanks for pointing that out.

Two-hander Berserker is very popular because it’s very effective and easy to build and they can ignore Dexterity. And the penalty they receive means nothing because they don’t use armor.

They only get a damage penalty and crits are diminished whenever the attacker has eight times more max damage than the max defense value of the defender.

However, you're right that currently this is not enough and we either need to nerf berserkers or buff one-handers.

Hey aszlig, let me clarify.

What I meant in the OP, was that it should be the way it is in battle reports or something similar to that. Battle Report Example.

Dragon and Ice damage bonuses are included in the numbers shown, but they also have a footnote that informs players of the elemental portion of that number.

The defense value though, only shows the base defense which is 0-0, but it also shows a protection of 4 against holy damage as a footnote, in case your opponent is dealing holy damage.

That’s basically what I meant by separating the elemental defense from the total.

Soul Stone damage is always used in calculations, so it doesn't matter if it's absorbed by armor, amulet protection or a combination of both.

But elemental defenses are conditional, so they should be noted rather than added to the total defense number, to avoid showing misleading or inaccurate values.

For the FA/PA problem, more FA/PA is of course one way to mitigate entropy like you said, but the number of rounds (or dice rolls if you like), also helps keep that in check.

But even so, I’ve still gotten some really bad cases of bad luck on the Battleground, despite having a lot of rounds and equal/comparable FA/PA values.

This is why I think an active or dynamic formula like I described, could help keep the extreme cases in check.

The Soul Stone pricing is definitely weird, but it also trickles down, so there’s probably some messed up values all the way to the higher levels.

I didn't know about the eight times penalty mechanic, but I don’t think it matters much at such high values, since the damage is going to be incredibly overwhelming either way.

I was going to analyse the balance issues a little more, but I wanted to keep this post short.

What it boils down to, is that Berskerkers have better raw stats (combined damage and defense from equipment) and they only need to scale their weapon damage with a single stat, rather than two (so much less gold needed).

Another problem on top of that, is that Strength receives no penalty from items, whereas Dexterity does. And one-handers also have the armor penalty on top of all that. So yeah, it's pretty messy.

Small side note though, I do have a suggestion that can help with the early socket advantage that Berserkers have. I can add it to the OP if you like.

I'm not saying that Zerkers don't have an advantage - because they do - but at "end game" (current 2H equipment 601 skillpoints in the wiki); if you look at gold costs and equipment - ignoring rings/amulets and FA/PA. there's not so massive a difference it's appalling

when I last did some examination it was about 300 damage vs combined dam/def in favour of Zerkers, with 2500 for the zerkers (145M spent on STR/DEX& a nominal STA amount).

I went up to lvl ~250 with the zerkers getting slowly more armoured, and the gap flips the other way - with an assumption no extra gold spent on DEX (which is silly, but I wanted to check it) - as soon as you put a nominal 200 into dex for the zerker, the same gold spent for the 1h is around 150 less combined.
One might be able to play with the equipemtn/skill point allocation to get things more favourable, but I just wanted to do some quick testing, so not exhaustive.

The main issue as I see it, is that the zerkers get access to the higher damage levels so much faster than the combined 1H.

armoured 2H if they go a blanced route - as I did originally - get shafted the whole way. (now ~11:2 ratio 2H to armour)

Outspending an opposition will still help the cause regardless of the build, but that can mean different things depending on home world / BG activity levels. (and player levels etc)

That's why a revamp or a rebalance is needed I'd say. And 2H Armored can still be formidable against 1H, but Armor upgrades have many long gaps between them, and 2H builds also get a Dexterity penalty from their weapons.

So it's better to focus on 2H weapons which give better stats, and because Strength doesn't get any penalties whatsoever. So if you're 2H Armored, you'll have to play a more offensive build to be effective.

As for Berserkers, it's like you said, the problem is that they get access to higher damage faster than 1H and their stats combined.

There's an update in the first post, if anyone wants to check out four more suggestions I've made.