For me, a large part of my enjoyment in any rpg is theorycrafting, figuring out how things work and applying that as I look for and find upgrades. The feeling of finding an item, comparing it you currently have and knowing its an upgrade(or downgrade!) is awesome. With spell tooltips still being a work in progress(we don’t yet have traditional tooltips that state the output of the given spell, that references all of your gear and passives, ie: “Disintegrate does 345-415 damage per second”), it’s essential that we can at least clearly test our item swaps to verify our hunches. Godbless the fact that we have dummies to beat up! Unfortunately, sometimes the scrolling combat text is a little less clear than could be possible.
-
Placement!
All hits, crits and dots are placed in the exact same location, covering each other. This is not only bad for visibility, but the merged creation point leaves us to intuit which is which based on the value(other than crits, of course, as they are large and yellow). Spell procs also fall in this category, asking us to intuit the source without confirmation. Consider making dots a smaller text size and having them originate slightly below the initial creation point. Less visual clutter. -
Empasis!
Currently crits are emphasized as being yellow and much larger. Unfortunately they also are placed directly on top of all of the other interactions and scroll away into the same direction as the others(either bottom left or bottom right). Consider having them having a slightly higher creation point and/or scroll upwards rather than downward. I would also suggest having the scrolling text fade to alternating sides(L, R, L, R,…) rather than random sides(L, L, L, R, L, …), to better avoid overlap and create more visibility. We could also emphasize dots or procs with different colors, to clear confusion. Light grey for dots and procs? -
Duration!
I would really like to see the numbers linger for more than a quarter of a second. I understand this would create more overlap in live-gameplay applications but it would improve testing situations immensely(where you are casting one spell at a time) and the above suggestions would also help mitigate some of this new overlap. -
Custom Elements!
In many games I’ve played in the past(mostly referencing MMOs), scrolling/floating combat text’s damage numbers would often be accompanied by either an image of the spell causing the damage or text naming the spell. This of course would be visualized to the sides of the damage number, as to not create more overlap on a singular target. I know this is an ambitious suggestion, and very “qol” but it would help with those edge cases where you’re forced to intuit the source(dots or spell procs mixed with and cluttering your “hit” values).
My goal here is to hopefully have a more visually coherent experience when testing spells on the dummy. Granted, this will very much be a minor detail once we have to-the-number accurate damage value tooltips on spells, but I digress. Thank you for listening 