Why PoE doesn't need floating combat text

I'm sure most people have played pokemon when they were a kid.
In pokemon, when you fight another trainer, you do not know the following:

-The damage formula
-How SpD, SpA, Atk, Def, and Spe function/effect battles specifically, all you may know, is a vague sense that +speed makes you faster, +spd makes you more resistant to special attacks, et cetera
-Your opponent pokemon's HP
-Your opponent pokemon's moves
-Your opponent's pokemon team
-How much your attacks do, after you do them, in terms of a specific number

Pokemon obfuscates all of its game mechanics from its players. Although people have done the math and determined how the game functions at a low level, and these formulas are used when advanced players map out their team - it's still impossible, even in this circumstance to know your opponent's HP, or any real idea how much damage your attack will do to a pokemon until you use it.

In-fact, the damage formula in pokemon is partially random. If flamethrower does 51% of an enemy's life in turn 1, it may do only 48% of their life in turn 2, leaving them with 1~ hp. So while you can estimate how much damage an attack will do, it's still not going to be enough sometimes.

Where am I going with all this? Well, imagine if pokemon had scrolling combat text.

"You did 11 damage!"
"You took 8 damage!"

That still doesn't really help anything, does it? The important mechanics are still obfuscated. In PoE, we don't know how much life our opponent has, and do we even want to know it? Need to know it? These numbers really have no context, so what if my attack did 10 damage, are you expecting me to use that fact to do some calculations in my head to determine my opponent's maximum HP? (If your attack does 10 damage and shaves off 10~% of their life, they have approximately 100 hp) That might work in pokemon actually, because pokemone can't have more than 999 hp, but in Path of Exile, such a mechanic rapidly becomes useless. You as a player might have 4000 or more health. Monsters, I'm sure, can have upwards to double or triple that. Imagine parties of six vs Brutus, who might have thousands and thousands of life? Imagine a few years from now, when we're Diablo 3 is at, players having 50k health and enemies have health in the millions. Can you do such calculations in your head? Should you be expected to? Is that fun? Is that adding meaning to anything?

Pokemon obfuscates its mechanics from its players and so, floating combat text is pretty meaningless. I know if I use flamethrower on Squirtle, it's not going to do much damage. I know that from playing the game. Just like, you know fireball is pretty crappy against Skeleton monsters. We know what's effective relative to a monster's HP bar.

Floating combat text just clutters the screen. It's not necessary to know you did 100000 damage on an attack, because chances are, you're going to attack 10 more times in the next two seconds and get 10 other numbers. You can't do mental math in your head to determine whether that's meaningful or not. You have more important things to worry about. The only thing floating combat text does is clutter the screen, and maybe give you the silly satsifaction that you made high numbers appear on screen.

Not having floating combat text simplifies the game and makes it more approachable. Children as young as 3 and 4 can figure out how to play Pokemon. Children who can scarcely read. They also enjoy the game, so it's not an unappealing mechanic, to have obfuscated conveyance.

The only thing Path of Exile needs, technically, is a "battle log" - some kind of text file that captures and stores your battle data. This should be purely for debugging purposes, so you can make sure that things are adding up correctly and there aren't any bugs with the game.

But otherwise, floating combat text is entirely meaningless, at least in terms of damage done.

Having floating combat text for "miss!" "dodge!" "evade!" "block!" and so on, might be more meaningful and valuable, because sometimes, knowing that you successfully made one of these defensive rolls is hard to determine in combat. But having these things float as combat text is going to be annoying since in fast-paced combat, these words will be all over the place and their context might be lost. Floating combat text for these combat rolls isn't justified, if GGG can make more distinctive or add distinctive animations (or sounds?) for these mechanics.

I think Path of Exile right now is very immersive, despite being isometric and having a chat window. There's no reason to fill the screen up with words and numbers as they serve no practical purpose and may even be toxic to the game (as naturally, players will gravitate to wanting to make higher numbers, or higher DPS, instead of making balanced decisions about defense and offense).

Silly comparison between a fast playing ARPG and a turnbased strategy game.

And for the most people, damage numbers are satisfying because they reflect your character progress during gameplay.

Ofc it isn't as immersive, but thats no problem because when GGG implements FCT, you can manually disable it. It's a win-win situation for everyone.

The numbers are arbitrary, though...

Blizzard did a great job of implementing the FCT into the colorful smooth gameplay.

However, d3 isn't poe so GGG will find an appropiate solution for their game.

I like to see when i hit something. It gives you the feel of success and it's what makes the game addictive. Right now the enemies just flinch a little maybe, and you can't always notice it.

Added blood splatter could work, but imo showing damage would be also fine.

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mikkihiiri wrote:

I like to see when i hit something. It gives you the feel of success and it's what makes the game addictive. Right now the enemies just flinch a little maybe, and you can't always notice it.

Added blood splatter could work, but imo showing damage would be also fine.

Yep, it's also a nice way of seeing crits, and seeing damage you take.

I think this comparison is pretty stupid, you are comparing two games of completely different genres with completely different audiences. The audience for pokemon is children, those kind of numbers and stats are useless for them lol, they're more concerned with the aesthetics of the pokemon then whose better or worse.

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mikkihiiri wrote:

I like to see when i hit something. It gives you the feel of success and it's what makes the game addictive. Right now the enemies just flinch a little maybe, and you can't always notice it.

Added blood splatter could work, but imo showing damage would be also fine.

What i would do is not adding fct, its for MMORetardPG
I would add blood splats, make em flinch more, make sounds, make the touched ennemy just enlightened for a sec and make element damage been seen( cold can be seen without being freezed, poison gets a greenish enemy, phys get blood and pain sounds, lightning gets enemy enlightened, fire burn, it tarnished the enemy)

not quality but got my points http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMN9-ezyN9s&feature=endscreen&NR=1

you do realize people like me who would like to see FCT don't care about any of that. I am not concerned about your idea of immersion or this ridiculous idea that it could somehow be detrimental to the game when I believe it would be quite the opposite. If its implemented it will be as an option so there's no reason to worry.

Whole buncha long winded opinion.

I want floating combat text please.