Well you can go all out in damage, it's not like it's a 100% drop off. After a while, having high damage just doesn't cut it. Try out damage from around 100-150, you'll notice you're hitting less, then try out a good 300-380 build (can't remember exact stat for high 300 build) and you'll notice you'll be hitting a bit harder. Now, if you sacrifice all of your defense for that extra damage and go into a match you'll notice yourself getting hit harder but the damage you put into the stat really doesn't help.
The same can be said about defense. I put on a bunch of defense armor, with a glad hat and a barb hammer. I went into a match just to test it out and it didn't help me survive like at all. My normal defense is around 205 and my defense was at 430 at the time, and I was hardly taking any more damage than I would have with 205 armor if at all.
You CAN be a glass cannon (high damage, virtually no defense) but realistically in a game like this it's completely nonsensical. You NEED defense in order to survive because the raw damage alone won't be enough to save you from anything. Especially if everyone else is better than you. Say you run into an ares wit good defense and good offense, like the 405/205 build. They'll be able to take more damage than you while putting out almost the same exact damage. Or if you run into a Zeus, he'll have decent melee damage and then spells that'll shred you to pieces.
How stats work is unknown. It could work in either 2 ways.
1. Stats drop off. After a while, the higher your strength is the lower the actual damage it gives you. For example, in an MMO I played 25 SPR gave you 5% crit. After that, it lowered the amount of crit it gave you because you could built a character with HUGE amounts of crit and have crit gear to be nearly unbeatable. Before 25, each point gave .2 after 25, I believe each point gave you .01 crit. Maybe even less.
This COULD be happening with this game, but hopefully isn't very likely. Say around 200 to 300 you're getting so much extra damage and to prevent characters from feeling too OP, they drop the stat gain after that so that while you're gaining more and more stats you're not just gaining all of that in raw power and destroying everyone.
2. More likely, but stats require huge amounts in order for them to show any sort of advantage. Say an Ares attack does 10 damage. You'd need to have 50 p attack to deal 1 extra damage. So, you have 400 attack that adds another 8 attack, so the damage is up to 18 which is pretty high. But, you're now getting rid of a huge amount of defense which is probably stacked the same way. For HIGHER defense, you could easily sacrifice 20-30 damage and get a huge amount of defense back. You'll still be hitting 17 to 17.5 damage with that one hit, but you'll be able to take a few more hits or a few more points of damage with that extra armor.
The point of alignments is a "class" system. So far, Ares is a DD and Zeus is a mage. I assume out of the two gods we have yet to try, one is a tank and the other is a mage counter.
What's weird though, is that since Zeus is a spell caster...he isn't your typical spell caster. Yeah he has godly magic, but he also has some pretty high standard defense (85 if I recall correctly) and hit items/relics are just plain old better...his relics provide Zeus's bread and butter while his items work MUCH better than Ares because it does what t's supposed to... it gets you OUT of conflict. Every other item in this game puts you back into the conflict but with a higher stat which doesn't really make much sense because the whole reason you want to use the item is to get out of conflict..
Just because balance works better than going pure one stat doesn't mean the alignments are useless. They're still special even though Zeus seems to have the upper hand in almost every area.
