Since it seems like people need to hear my suggestions again. I tried to put together most of my suggestions I've made together here in this thread for you. I'm sorry but its going to be absurdly long.
Game Mechanics:
1) Redo the tutorial to make it where it runs as a permanent tourney and when a new player starts they start with a tutorial character that will be auto retired after 2 weeks. At any time they can choose to end the tutorial and start with their real character with full knowledge that it is a nub character and all that entails. If they do finish all the parts of the tutorial they should start out with 100k or something as a reward for completing it. This ties in with another suggestion I have.
2) Fix up the interface with the game to make it look much more pleasing. This also includes making it so that players can use different looks as well. I believe we still have the option to do so, but no one has made any for it ever since part of it changed.
3) Continue to improve upon the tournament system. Namely allow for there to be multiple tourneys running at 1 time. This will allow for the tutorial tourney, and also a year long tourney that people are interested in. For now we obviously don't have a high enough player population for many tourneys to be run at once, but I think that if we got enough of them we could start adding chosen players who are capable of starting new tournaments and running them.
4) As a second part after allowing for multiple tourneys simultaneously I think it would be a good idea to allow players to buy more character slots. Something like $5 per character slot would probably help quite a bit and I am sure people would find this very useful especially if they wanted to enter into as many tournaments as possible.
5) Change the ba regen system. Right now there is only 1 set amount that people can get and that is entirely dependent on size of their character. For a lot of people it seems to be a little counter intuitive to make it so that the game becomes easier to work with once you reach a higher size. The basis that you have invested in it and are getting your reward for your work is understandable but I think a system that rewards continual hard work would be better. What you do is add a difficulty bonus that you can set in the Settings page. Arbitrarily I am going to use 0-20% as the bonus option. At 0% difficulty you will regen 5 ba per 20 minutes and it will cap at 250. This is a very lenient amount of time for casual players. For the more hardcore difficulty at 20% you would regen 10 ba per 20 minutes and cap at 150.
To avoid abuse from changing it all the time. There are a couple options. One is that you can have it switch only once a week at cache flush on sunday or something. Another solution is to have it reset ba back to 0 at cache flush when it switches this way you could switch it every day if it suited you. Also one way to make it not worth switching to a lower regen for the exp times is to only have the it only change the BA regen amounts rather than both the regen and BA cap.
The incentive to play at the higher difficulties is that you will be getting that bonus to your rewards. Now this would also likely come with a reward drop overall so that people aren't just growing faster no matter what. Probably about a 10% drop in rewards for both $ and exp.
In answer to the problem of CP generation you can have it scaled to match your BA regen. The current bases are 2, 4, and 6 instead you could multiply these by an amount based on the ba regen to accommodate for it.
6) Reduce the negative challenge bonus exemption for the characters with 60% of the top MPR or more. Instead of it being a clearcut exemption it should be a slowly ramping one based on how close you are to the top. This would have to be based on PR rather than MPR but the base requirement is to have 60% of the top character's MPR. For those teams just barely in the exemption it should likely only be around 5% and ramping up to around 30% maybe higher for the very highest ones.
7) Combining the drop system and the black market into just 1 thing with a bit of addition. You get black market coins in drops maybe. The one additional thing that should be added in, is the ability to purchase a free retrain. The coins are non trade-able so you have to fight in order to get enough to get a retrain. This will also have the affect of making drops happen more often. The amount of coins for each item and the free retrain can be modified depending on the number of people who are choosing it and the general market price of the items.
Gameplay Balance Suggestions:
1) Remove the ranged penalty for FB and return the friendly fire to what it was originally. Fireball is a little underpowered as it is right now. It is a ranged focus spell so it is only right that its main power comes while in ranged.
2) Put UC onto a linear damage model. Basically make it so that a specific amount of levels of UC gives an increase of 1 x. To balance this since it would make the damage from UC increase by a large amount remove the 1.2x multiplier to the PTH. So then the pth is the UC effect. I believe that this probably also affects the halidon familiar though I am not so sure about that one.
3) The ex/axbow should be modified so that as x approaches infinity it approaches 100% drain on the % side. This is for the base amount unmodified by hp. In the early stages the curve should be very friendly so that a small exbow is still useful. The larger it gets the less increase in % drained per hit. So an x100 exbow should be able to drain around 30-40% in a hit and an x5000 exbow should be able to drain like 70-80% in a hit. In addition to this the direct drain should be based upon current str rather than the base str. This means that it should include GS granted str and also take into account a weaker str after a few hits. Lastly with these changes the way that PL absorbs the ex/axbow drain should be changed so that it doesn't lead to an invincibility. Instead of taking the drain and working off of the PL minion's stats what should happen instead is that while the PL user will still drain off each hit entirely while it still has positive str it should absorb the str damage just like hp damage. The tank would effectively lose say 2 mil str from the hit so the PL wall absorbs that at a 90% efficiency and loses 1.8 mil str. If at the next hit the PL wall's str is 0 or less then he doesn't absorb any str drain at all.
4) The PR of weapons should be fixed. There should be a base amount of x that will add no PR but afterwards will start giving a PR weight. In addition the PR weight should be based upon the minion rather than the character just like the way that armor works. Overall this should result in a reduction of PR from weapons on most teams.
5) The amount of GA needed to reach the cap should be increased slightly to account for the reductions in damage that occurred a while ago.
6) I think evasion should have the dex penalty removed. After removing defensive dex and bottoming the cth at bth evasion should at least be slightly better in a straight cross over compared with DB.
7) The ToE should have SS work the way regular SS works, it could be either non dispellable or dispellable depending on how powerful you want/think it should be but either way it would be a fully viable tattoo at that point.
New Spells/skill suggestions:
1) Weapon Mastery. What this would do is increase the bth of melee weapons when trained at a portion of str. Likely this would be around 1/5 of str and grant an additional 40 bth. This way 1h weapons would have 100 bth and 2h weapons would be able to reach 80 bth. This does not work the same as BL at all. BL is a straight increase to damage. This skill would not increase your damage near as much, but it would make it far more effective to fight without pth and be better for fighting against high dex/high evasion targets.
2) Weakness or Cause Fear (whatever you would like to call it). This is an EO. It reduces your opponents enc. There is 2 ways this could be worked. This should probably reduce a flat amount of enc at the same as UC grants enc, which is about 16 enc per level. Another way to work this spell would be to have it work like AS and be dependent on the minion count.
3) Backstab. This will work with both weapons and spells. Trained at a portion of the str if a weapon is the offense or a portion of the DD if a DD is trained this will reverse the normal targeting order. This will not affect spread fire spells or special targeting weapons. When this is trained at less than full effect it works at a % chance per round. So if you have it at .5 effect you have a 50% chance of targeting normally and a 50% chance of targeting reversely. This will not override an AoI.
4) Death Frenzy. This skill will make it so that after the minion reaches death it will continue fighting for 1 additional round. This should probably have to be trained at a portion of HP.
5) Twin Cast. This skill is trained at a portion of DD. The DD functions at the effect of this skill and will cast twice each round. The skill is capped at .75. This would probably be either 1/4 or 1/3 of the DD level.
6) Purify: Cast DM upon yourself same effectiveness uses ED slot.
Supporter Item Suggestions:
1) Beserker Helm. Grants No AC. When the wearer is damaged it gives 1% per + of the damage back as str. The upgrade curve would be about the same as an HoE. How this works with PL is that if the PL minion is the wearer whenever it absorbs damage it would increase in str. If another minion has PL and the wearer is hit but the damage is absorbed then the wearer's str will not increase at all.
2) Amulet of the Blood Mage. Grants no AC. Each + increases DD by 2% and will cause the mage to lose life at .25% of the raw DD level each time it is casted.
3) Tattoo of Weaponry: It reworks whatever weapon is equipped to have 1/3 of the tattoo NW in pth and 2/3 of the NW of the tat in x. This is meant to be used in conjunction with base weapons larger weapons will receive no benefits. This works with both ranged and melee weapons so it is meant for use with both. This also works with UC changing the UC level to the tat level this is a net level so isn't increased or penalized.
4) Rune of Arcane Focus: Grants 80% of the tat level to DD.
