Some suggestions

[Snardbuckett]

Up front i want to say i love your game, absolute 10/10 for a smaller lesser known developer to pop out such a Gem. That being said i have some suggestions i hope you will consider:
------Section 1 -------- Progression
#1 most annoying thing for me is the inability to pursue the weapon / armor builds i want and rank them up.

Starcrom is a very rare resource i completed almost all the season objectives ran most of the dungeons on all modes, and completed the raid content. After all that i had a couple neat orange weapons and a frost build .... not an unpgraded blueprint for any of them.
then i switch to a hard server and i can rebuy some stuff from the blueprint shop but not everything some of which i needed upgrades for my main build, i have done most of the objectives up until the third phase unlock and its beginning to look an awful lot like its going to take every resource i have just to 5 star my build.

I think what you should do here is make blueprints more upgradeable maybe make them require more fragments than they do now but allow players to farm more or potentially unlimited shards of purples and blues and greens so they can put effort towards upgrading thier gear. Instead at present you have a mad rush mob at the start of a season phase then everyone vacates the game until starcrom is available again. You should always be able to apply yourself towards making progress how you want to make progress,

Inside this there are a few Caviats with specific equipment that need looking at:
Weapons: Bounce basically necessitates a large base damage by its mechanics and most bounce weapons are on the light damage high rof side of thier weapon category, you also need a mechanic within the game to allow bounce to be effective on solo boss encounters if you want people to use it at all. I suggest a deviant that makes a fake clone of the monster in your crosshairs than has lower defense by some amount that is fair (% Vulnerability) that gives the damage it recieves to its target bounce can then bounce off of in a boss encounter.

Grenade like weapons: What even is the grenade launcher ..... where do i even start, it seems to do about 1% of its printed damage, it causes light stagger, its ammo is some of the craziest in the game to make requiring double dipping into acid. you should probably change from its reticle to the line used by deployable turrets to show how its going to travel. The tooltip says you can alter the grenade sin your backpack .... you cannot it is completely unclear in game how to obtain the orange grenade recipe. Its bonus to building damage does abolutely nothing in a PVE server maybe replace this stat block on a PVE server ? or the gun entirely with a better grenade launcher that actually functions ?

Crossbow is a great starter weapon but falls off hard, i think you could probably fix this with a new tier of arrows that have attached grenades, poisons, maybe acid. a good bouncing crossbow with the changes above could be neat.

Bow: in 99% of cases the crossbow is just better

Shotguns: They are performing pretty bad, if you want them to be as short range as they are (I would recommend against this) they should interact with more effects and cause more effects that heal you or prevent damage/generate shields. Instead i would recommend you make the shotgun more like it really is in real life by providing it with slug ammo in addition to spray ammo, and have slug ammo provide greater range and focused damage.

All guns should dial down the spread and dial up the recoil, its far more fair to players to mitigate rounds on target by recoil.

over the shoulder should be an aestetic or comfort choice, have the stat accuracy bring the rounds in closer to the reticle, and have stability resist recoil. you should not have greater damage in scoped in it forces people to scope in at point blank range and loose all vision.

-----Section 2 ---- level up talents
Man theres a lot of cool talents in the game for making better facilities, turrets, more efficient resource gathering, regenerating structures etc. but i noticed a GLARING couple of weak spots.

Osmosis filters, Synthesis benches, pumps, barrels, crop plots, irrigators, refrigerator, grow lights, deviant storage, Barrels specifically seem like a very obnoxious bottleneck since there are super refineries, barrels can hold 100 corn but can only process 12-15 ale before it all spoils ?
It would be nice if you could feed a pipe to the top and middle row of the barrels/refineries so you can automate Acid/oil production.

----Section 3 ---- General game mechanics

Burn: im only guessing because i know burn stacks are supposedly heavily lagging the server and in prime wars molotovs are player banned (not actually banned but players will kick you for using them). I suggest when a monster is struck by burn it records the highest strength burn, if a new burn source hits the same target it simply checks to see if that burn modifier is higher and if not it adds a stack of burn, if it is higher it replaces the new "Top" modifier on it and manages the burn damage that way. It will cause way less server checks to multiple players for thier current burn strength and calculate many different DoT's at the same time. Also it means people with lower quality burn builds can still be very helpful in a prime war without causing tremendously large lag.

Frost Vortex: Same idea, making 3-4 frost vortexes and releasing your Jellyfish has a similar effect, it would be better most likely to have additional procs of your frost vortex to just add stacks that check highest modifier and instead of proccing additional vortexes just enhance the one vortex you have by refreshing its duration and increasing damage by the same amount multiple vortexes would have increased it, this way the server does not have to calculate the physics, and multiple quality simultanious vortexes, each player can attach one vortex to one enemy and anyone else with frost shooting it will just enhance it till max strength.

Claymores: most of the time when i plant a Claymore it instantly goes off in my face, even if there arent enemis nearby maybe require a second step to activate it when you are out of range.

Grenades: Why are High-explosive grenades objectively better than High-explosive Shrapnel grenades ... they are the same tier and they have the Same materials cost. change The high explosive grenade to be the higher damage but smaller blast radius (elite killer), and the shrapnel to have a much higher blast radius to make it good at thinning hordes. why is the thermite grenade so bad its a single target grenade that does less damage than the high explosive grenade.

Melee weapons: they really seem inviable and totally useless in late game content, particularly on hard mode servers. better melee weapons, and high level/boss encounters where you actually would want to use them instead of ranged even if just for short phases.

Armor: almost all armors on the same tier have the same core stats, you should be able to equip to be a much tankier player, a more dps oriented player, or a helpful support character. players should be able to specialize in max hp/resistance, damage/rof/elemental, or healing and deploying barriers tacticals. Meaning some armor should have higher defensive stats, some have higher psi ratings, maybe add a stat that effects healing to each armor.