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I got to play Starfinder when it was released at Gencon 2 years ago and I loved the experience. The pregen characters seemed to make sense and be reasonably balanced, the rules changes were a little odd to get used to after playing Pathfinder for so long, but they made sense and seemed to work. Now I am finally getting an opportunity to play in an extended campaign and looking over the rule book in depth and I have become utterly mystified by the math inherent in the game.
The main issue I have is that the damage progression curve varies WILDLY from aspect to another. The weapons table shows gear based damage increases by level with the first major uptick around 7th, and then again around 11th, and then jumping quite a bit from there on out. It is a rather odd progression, but it seems consistent among the weapon types with price, critical effect, and energy type to balance out the bumps along the curve.
However my objection is to the damage bonuses you get from class features which completely fail to follow that curve and ultimately seem to be practically meaningless because of it. Why do I care about +2 to damage when I am dealing 5d10+my level in damage?
For example soldiers get their first gear boost at 3rd level when they can choose (among other things) a damage bonus with projectile weapons that works out to basically a quarter of your level rounded down plus 1. After crunching the numbers this damage bonus works out to a ~21-24% damage bonus at its peak (4th level) and then steadily drops down to a paltry ~7-8% bonus at 20th level. Similarly melee striker adding half of your Strength to melee attacks is a ~16% boost at 3rd level, but drops to ~5% by 20th.
What really made me take note of all of this however is the options for DR in the game. Mechanics who choose a combat drone get DR for their drones from 1st level. Other drones can choose it as a mod starting at 11th level. It grants DR 1 for levels 1-6, DR for 7-12, DR 3 for 13-15, DR 4 for 16-18, and DR 5 for 19+. At 1st level that is ~22% damage reduction on average, but at 20th it is a measly 7%.
The PC option of the dermal plating cybernetic upgrade is much more consistent. It gives you DR 1 @ 5th up to DR 7 @ 19th. It ranges between ~10%-12% damage reduction with an outlier of ~16% at 9th.
So am I missing something, or did the class designers not talk to the weapon designers?