Elementals, to my mind, are simply poorly balanced. I'm on NG+7 or 8, so my perspective is definitely skewed a bit, but the elementals that mainly do damage are pathetically weak. I'm talking about he fire/ether/darkness etc aspects. Basically all of them except wood, metal and air; these ones can only be summoned once per battle and do maybe 200-300 damage. Compared to PC damage of 6-8k, with either normal attacks or spells -- both of which can be used more than once There's a fundamental design flaw here. Every other damage skill can be spammed or at least used more than once per battle, but these ones can't. Why not? None are strong enough as is to play some kind of 'ace-in-the-hole' role. What I feel should be added to their capabilities is the ability to reinforce the power of spells of their element and also the damage of elemental attackers if they match. Like summoning the dark elemental would boost dark spells 10%, then 20% then 30% etc. (per tier) and also the damage of normal attacks if the dark elemental is equipped a a helper. That way they wouldn't be so niche. If they're going to be one and done casts, then they should at least be that strong. But even then I'd recommend that that feature of theirs be rethought.
Another aspect of elementals that makes them unappealing is the phys stat penalty; it's a bad idea period. I can't even unlock the 8th tier summons because of my fatigue stat has been crippled (**). Negative stats should not be a thing at all -- a minimum stat cap of around 100 needs to be implemented if you want races and classes to come with stat penalties; with that much at least you can function at a basic level and be able to unlock perks to raise the caps. A limit of 1 (or negative) is simply too low.
Lastly, even without its stacking with racial penalties the elemental drawback is extremely harsh just by itself. Unacceptably so. Putting aside the fact that elementals are currently nowhere near powerful enough to justify penalties of any sort, such a thing needs to be reconsidered. The only real upside to the elemental build is when they're equipped as attackers in place of the standard attack. I'll grant that in that capacity, and only there, are they powerful and can scale into Xianxia and high NGs. Even with my like ~140 STR could I hit for 40-80k with a tier 8 ether elemental equipped.
(**) I ate the rainbow rock from the Hidden Dungeon to rescue my STR cap and bought STR-cap boosting perks to fix the fatigue; tier 8 elementals are weak.
There's actually a very similar issue for golems, though much more serious. Golems usually do about 500 damage against 6-10k HP. Which would be fine if 1) normal spells didn't easily outdps that and 2) it didn't require that materials be farmed for each cast. It's a disproportionate effort for virtually no reward -- and that's being generous to the point of telling lies. Their return on investment -- even if killing golems for cores isn't much of an effort as you progress in the game -- is assuredly negative. The damage for a golem is
way worse than elementals. And this is when elementals do 20k once per fight compared to the spammable 600k+ from spells. None of this is scaling well into NG+++etc and Xianxia mode.
P.S: The idea of receiving stat points each time you sleep over the static 5 per level was good move. The problem (though this could be NG+ again) is that 15 points right off the bat breaks the game. It was my understanding going in that it would be for those that wanted a snowballin kind of power gain. If you're level one, every day you only get one point. So if you're going to just spam sleep and hope for the best, well, it would take some time to achieve takeoff. With 15 per level, and more still later, though...just press shift + wait. Even if you're playing in good-faith, it's effectively easy-mode. And it doesn't necessarily need to be that way as I can see.
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