Since the only thing affecting additional damage is gear enhancement level, and add. damage is almost always the deciding factor on damage output, the game is basically rewarding players with better luck or more enhancement attempts (rich, for rune protection) than those who value skills (or just have bad luck all the time). Sure you can out DPS someone with 4000 additional damage with 2000 add. dmg gears, but only if following conditions are met:
1. The 4000 add. dmg player is not playing the game at all (not skilled or not in the mood to play)
2. Certain class just deals with certain bosses (much) better
3. The player with 2000+ add. damage is very skilled
People hate p2w, and now vindi certainly seems like it. But I don't mean it should become only skill-based, as many people do come here for casual fun and hate skill-based games too. So what if we find a balance between these two?
I suggest implementing a no hit additional damage multiplier buff for all classes. It basically works like this: for example the player has 3000 add. dmg. At the start of the game, the multiplier is 0, giving the player no add. dmg. at all. After let's say 5 seconds of not being hit, it becomes 0.2, giving the player 600 add. dmg, for another 5 seconds it increases to 0.4. So the longer you don't get hit, the longer you have access to 100% of your add. dmg. But once you get hit, the multiplier drops by 0.4 percent (more than each increment at least).
This way not only players with high enhancement levels are rewarded with additional damage, but skilled unlucky players also won't be left behind by a great margin. If you happen to be very skilled with top gears, then you'll stay OP of course.
Let's be honest, now the games gives free 2650 add. dmg, (+13 lvl90 weapon with +10 armor set from level up), but many people just won't ever make 3000+ add. dmg. how ever many times they try. Sure, long enough everyone can buy their gears from others to bypass their own bad luck, but it won't take that long for some players to quit the game. Besides, with lvl 90 raids, farms and specials being the only things people still do in vindi, it's just not fun to face tank those bosses knowing getting hit won't make much difference.
With the no-hit additional damage multiplier buff, if you want to clear those runs faster, then stay on your toes and don't get hit. This doesn't only balance skilled/p2w players but also give them old overrun raids and dungeons a more risky and exciting feel. Better yet, add something similar for defense or critical resistance, the more you attack, the less dmg you take when being hit. If you do not land an attack every 5 seconds, your critical res./def drops by 10% (with 50% being the limit). This encourages players to dodge every attack and be aggressive at the same time.
Comments
My main is a Sylas, which has something similar already, for 30 sec of not being hit he gets att boost buff, and for every hit he takes he loses all the shard surrounding him, which if not lost make up quite a big percentage of his DPS. That's why imo Sylas is so handicapped in special raids when there are two fast spd bosses and everyone try to face tank them, making a no hit special raid out of the question but who cares, we've got such high defenses. So Sylas can't even utilize his shards at all fighting like that. His shard losing handicap works pretty well, forcing me to dodge every attack, but that no-hit 600 att boost is quite useless since I'm att capped already.
So my suggestion was meant for all chars to be fun and challenging. And the buff can be used to rebalance each class based on which boss it is. Dunno which char is currently the lowest on DPS with same stats, let's say char A on Braha, and char E is the most OP on Braha, then give char A a faster growth rate of this add. dmg multiplier and char E a slower growing one, but only on Braha. Do it differently on different bosses, so Nexon can finally do something useful with those statistics they never bother to share with us. I mean come on, the Chinese servers publish interesting stuffs like which char solos Arcarna the most, which char dies the most... And here we get nothing.
Granted I'm probably one of the few that would love to see the additional damage stat removed from the game but oh well.