Why PoE doesn't need floating combat text

All this topic really says is that floating text is not necessary... so the obvious response to that is that it should be an option for everyone that wants it.. just like d3.

It helps for many attacks to know if you connected(by having damage numbers or enemy health bars) and also helps theory crafting.

There is a good reason not to implement FCT: the people who think they want it would be worse off having it than they actually are without it.

Having a shower of random numbers all over the screen is not useful. There are many more effective ways to solve the problems that FCT aims to solve.

The first thing that FCT is supposed to do is allow you to know exactly how much damage you're doing. However, in practice, you tend to get a spray of numbers all over the screen which nobody could actually read, and which might as well be glyphs in some mystical language, because nobody actually reads them, and even if they do read them, it's probably more misleading than useful, because what matters is not the individual numbers, but their sum, and more important than that, their sum relative to the targets' total health. As it happens, you can get a lot of feedback on that simply by pointing at the mobs, and looking at the top of your screen where you'll see a health bar (gasp!) dropping as you attack.

For more detail, a much better solution would be a tool to graph damage dealt by type and damage per second averages over time viewable in a side pane. This would allow those numbers to be summarised into something actually meaningful and potentially useful for analysis. You could have an optional overlay at the top of the screen display organised totals of the exact damage done by type since you last started attacking. There are so many better and more useful ways to display this information than spraying incomprehensible numbers all over the game art.

The second thing that FCT does is to let you know when you're hitting things and when you're not, and alert you to status afflictions and things like that.

This is better solved by animation and sound effects which make these kinds of things apparent. If you can't tell whether you're hitting an enemy or not, there's probably something a bit off about the visuals and sound when you hit vs. when you miss. Personally, I haven't had a problem with this in general (with the possible exception of certain stuns and the state of being bear trapped). While some of the sound effects could perhaps stand out a little more, it's usually pretty obvious when things are hit versus the absence of the sound and effects. I can also tell just by looking when I'm shocking the mobs, chilling them, freezing them, burning them, or any combination of those. Critical attacks are usually quite apparent and very satisfying, at least with most of the skills I've used. There are some skills which could perhaps use some work on effects, but I'm sure Russell is doing the best he can as he gets time and tech is added to support the effects he'd like to do. In any case, if there are problems with this, it should be a job solved by the sound and effects people, not by lazily slapping distracting text all over the screen. It's possible that some subtle "whiff" type sounds could help reinforce that an enemy was targeted correctly but the attack missed.

For things of a statistical nature about accuracy that you might want to know -- like how often you're actually missing while firing chain split arrows into a pack of a certain type of mobs -- this is better served by graphs and separate summaries again, which can be viewed separately from the combat. Even if the game did display "miss!" whenever you missed, how many people could reliably count the number of occurrences of "miss!" vs. an arbitrary number? This is especially hard when this text occurs in a cloud of typographical flatulence.

It's much easier for the game to take care of this sort of bean counting for you if people want it enough. There are already some statistics related to how frequently you'll miss in your character panel, but these are computed generally using some rough assumptions about the enemies at your level, rather than measured against the enemies you've actually been fighting.

tl;dr pokemon

What I learned today from the good ole POE forums.


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