If you haven't read this yet, don't bother with this topic.
See also: http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Defence
The current function for defence is
max(player defence, 100)
and that's kind of problematic. It can obsolete some UVs and requires you to not mix defence types too much or you lose what you should get.
So, before we can even write a suggestion on this, we need to come up with a new function, right? I have yet to come up with one myself so I figured I'd post this topic. A few options one can discuss are:
defence = player defence
- this option is the same as in PvE, as far as I know but it would for one obsolete the Recon Death Mark in some cases and having 0 defence against things would make stuff pretty imbalanced as powerful weapons would get even more powerful if the opponent does not use the correct defensive gear, which is pretty impossible since one can carry, say, both a Divine Avenger and an Acheron.defence = 100 + player defence / 2
- this would in opinion be better than the current system but it also comes with a problem. Investing in defence over offense would simple be less rewarding than it is now as the difference between say, Ironmight Plate set and Skolver set would become smaller.defence = 100 + player defence
- this would cause problems as well. Defence would be easy to get to pretty big values and reaching threshold values. That would in fact probably happen for all heavy hitting swords.
So who has ideas?
The main problem is nobody knows how does the damage calculation actually work. The results referenced are only empirical observations. Most likely the actual algorithm involves a lot of integer division and floating point truncation.
We also don't know how weapon power is actually stored in the system, merely assuming the max possible damage is the base power. Most likely weapon power values are all "convenient" numbers that are then sent through an algorithm to determine damage (taking into account parameters like UV, defense, type of swing, etc.). I infer this from the large amount of weapons that have similar damage stats. If base powers could be assigned to any value, you would expect more variety.
That being said, we can't really suggest a viable replacement since we don't know what we are actually replacing. Besides, I don' think this game was designed for hard-core analytic gamers. If people can play the game and have fun, the devs wouldn't bother with changing damage mechanics.