Official: Floating Damage Text Feedback Thread

terramak

Hey there folks!

During some discussions and experimentation with the floating damage numbers, we identified a few key areas that we wanted to improve upon, and tweaked them with tech that we already had available.

Our ultimate goal with these changes were to improve combat text readability. In order to do so, we made the following changes:

• We changed the font to the one we use for most text in the game (a sans-serif font), instead of the one we use for headers (a serif font).
  
• We lowered the font size for damage numbers by about 23% to 50%, depending on the situation.
  
• We tightened outgoing damage to the upper-right quadrant of an enemy's location, instead of the entire top 180°.
  
• We moved incoming damage to the lower-right quadrant of the player character, instead of also occupying the top 180°.
  
• We moved incoming healing and shields to the lower-left quadrant of the player character, instead of the entire lower 180°.

We think that the above changes improve readability in the following ways:

• The sans-serif font has less visual noise.
  
• The smaller text size is still readable, but now covers less of the gameplay space.
  
• The text size still increases when players deal more damage, retaining a sense of excitement / celebration when dealing bigger hits.
  
• The tighter grouping of outgoing damage helps better keep track of which target the numbers came from, while retaining some spread to the text helps keep the number spray feeling cool.
  
• The logical grouping of outgoing damage vs. incoming damage vs. incoming healing helps a player separate these values on the fly, and better identify threats.

Getting more into the weeds

Since this feature's impact on the play experience is more subtle than most, we don't really expect super duper precise feedback. In case folks do want to get into specifics, though, here's the stuff that can be changed without introducing new tech or significantly increasing risk:

• The angle at which the text flies out. (As of this posting, each quadrant has 70° of active text space, with a 10° "dead zone" buffer on either side, making it a flat 90°.)
  
• The categories by which we sort text angles / sizes, with some limits. Current categories:
  • "You" (player character) vs. "Not you"
    
  • Player vs. NPC
    
  • Damage dealt vs. damage healed
    
  • If not a player (you or someone else), what enemy rank (e.g. how many pips do they have above their health bar)
    
  • Does the text show the power name when applied (e.g. certain debuffs)
• The size of the text.
  
• The color of the text.
  
• Whether we use the serif font or the sans-serif font.

There are other levers we can pull, but these are the lowest-risk ones to handle. (Example: Right now, outgoing healing also uses the top-right quadrant of a target player. I believe--but haven't yet tried, so take this with a grain of salt--that if players wanted to see outgoing healing go to the lower-right of the target player instead, we could make that change without extra tech.)

Because it's a question I expect to see: Unfortunately, exposing these controls to players is not as simple as it might seem, so we are not currently planning to make these controls customizable.

How You Can Help

We appreciate any thoughts that you have on the updated floating combat text. We want to gauge general mood around the change, so even high-level, low-detail stuff like "This is better (or worse) than before but I can't express why," or "This is more readable, but combat feels less fun now and I think it's because of the text," are useful--even "I didn't notice it changed until you said something about it" is valuable information. Still, if you have a hypothesis as to why you feel the way you do, that's also helpful!

Formatting Your Feedback and Bugs

For posting feedback and bugs, please follow the following format to ensure your feedback and bugs are seen clearly and processed promptly, thank you!

Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)

If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use CYAN. If you are replying to another user's post, or just engaging in general discussion, please do not color your posts, general discussion is welcome and we will read all of it, regardless of color!

You can use BBCode to color your text:
<font color=cyan>This text will display in cyan.</font>
<font color=red>This text will display in red.</font>

Examples:
Bug: When I deal more than a 4-pip monster's maximum health in a single attack, the text covers the entire screen.
Feedback: The direction that healing and shield numbers pop out of me feels unintuitive. It would make more sense to me if it popped above me like damage numbers.


Image Examples
Please note that these screenshots are taken in a test area, with test enemies, etc.

Damage floater areas before the change:


Damage floater areas after the change:


An example of our header (serif) font, the one we changed it from, vs. our body (sans serif) font, the one we changed it to. (These aren't their actual font names, just a way of categorizing them. Please excuse my mouse penmanship!)

thewretched1982

Feedback

Please put commas. Much easier to read 2,000,000 than 2000000.

Being a tank I love the changed look of heal on one side and damage on the other but both below. This will look clean.

demenoss

thewretched1982#9721 said:

Feedback

Please put commas. Much easier to read 2,000,000 than 2000000.

Being a tank I love the changed look of heal on one side and damage on the other but both below. This will look clean.

Totally agree!

terramak

Thanks! Gonna give that a try--it looks like we have tech to do that, but I haven't seen it exercised so I don't know for sure how it's gonna look in practice. (If the tech wasn't designed with localization in mind, I'll probably have to revert it though; separators are different per locale.)

I'll also check whether tech we have for abbreviations (e.g. 20m instead of 20,000,000) works appropriately for damage numbers. If it rounds 2,499,999 to 2m, I won't use it, but if it shows at least two (preferably three) significant digits, I'll try to get it in the next viable build and seek feedback.

(I doubt I'll be able to get the change onto Preview this week, so expect a little bit of turnaround time!)

blackmagid

Whilst the team are looking at floaters - would it be possible to turn back on the proc text so we can actually see which powers have procced, eg Blood Lust or any of the Master Boons.

Thank you
BlackMagi

lahcara

as for the battle logs, I would like to see more statistics on how much damage was done at the end of the dungeon, meaning to see how much damage was done by a encounter powers or item, it would be more convenient to make builds with more information, this applies to consoles, on the PC there is still such an opportunity but even then with the help of third-party programs, but it is
waiting for your answer, thanks for making the game better

mintmark

terramak said:

I'll also check whether tech we have for abbreviations (e.g. 20m instead of 20,000,000) works appropriately for damage numbers. If it rounds 2,499,999 to 2m, I won't use it, but if it shows at least two (preferably three) significant digits, I'll try to get it in the next viable build and seek feedback.

If I saw 20m I'd think "Oh dear, just 20 milli points of damage ". But if I saw 20M I'd think "Wow, that was unexpected!" :-)
I guess the abbreviations would make the strings shorter and reduce the amount of text, but would add a parsing overhead for the player... but probably no worse than "was that a five digit number or a six digit number just then?"

Will we keep the same symbols for critical hits and deflects etc?

It's probably outside the scope this, but maybe something could happen with sound to indicate a really good hit? I think I'd only want it for exceptional events though. Perhaps not a new sound, maybe a way of emphasising the normal sound, a bit louder or something.

dazdranagon88

Hello. It would be nice to be able to change the color of the digits of each group.

chisca17

blackmagid said:

Whilst the team are looking at floaters - would it be possible to turn back on the proc text so we can actually see which powers have procced, eg Blood Lust or any of the Master Boons.

Thank you
BlackMagi

Turning on this option will show the proc text on screen, for powers. On PC at least.

blackmagid

Turning on this option will show the proc text on screen, for powers. On PC at least.


Unfortunately that option doesn't show to me powers like Blood Lust proccing during combat. To be fair though, it's not actually a player triggered power like say mounts... hmm, not seeing them either - passing back to the devs.

Thanks anyway

quetzal437

Visually, the damage floaters the way they are do not bother most players, and they can be turned off if they become irritating. If I were to make a visual QoL change I'd recommend 4th wall transparency for the camera.. Or at least the option, with a slider for the level of transparency.

For me, there is nothing more visually irritating than getting pinballed into a corner by an enemy (or leading it/them there deliberately to give the dps and healer in the group the best possible field of view) and all you see on the entire screen is the inside surface of your character's head... and damage floaters... usually the ones I'm taking since I can no longer see the tells on the ground, or the thing putting them there, or even the ground itself since I need to tilt the camera up to repaint the enemy after it goes invisible, due to the camera riding the near wall's surface instead of looking through it...

zaprobo

I'd love to see the command /SetHudShowDamageFloaters get an update to provide a bit more clarity and control for turning on and off floater features (for situations where you want to unclutter/restore things to your view).

Also, move the power name text floaters to the now unused upper left quadrant so we can watch for triggers.

terramak

All righty, some quick answers and updates to what was asked / discussed here. Thanks for all your feedback so far!

@blackmagid - The text prompted by procs is handled on a per-power basis, if I understand correctly, so that's out of the realm of these specific changes. (The intent, as far as I remember, was to lower the amount of spam, but if that's useful to you I'll see how the Systems designers feel about reenabling it on Blood Lust, the Master Boons, etc.).

@lahcara - Sorry, this feature is limited just to the numbers that float up on screen; the combat log and the post-queue scoreboards are different things that I'm not touching in this pass. Thank you very much for the feedback though!

@mintmark - Legit. Looks like in the English locale, the thousands are indicated by capital K, millions capital M, billions capital B.
Regarding crit / deflect: We don't plan to change the symbols. If we get some extra UI Art time, we might be able to squeeze in some combo symbols for when multiple effects trigger at the same time (e.g. deflected crit), but we haven't fully experimented with that and may not end up being able to ship it.
Regarding sound: Yeah, sadly that's outside the scope of this pass. It's a cool idea but I definitely would need the audio team's help.

@dazdranagon88#4986 - Regarding coloring digits of each group: Definitely a neat idea. I don't think I can manage it with my current tech though.

@chisca17 - Thank you for pointing out the proc test option!

@quetzal437#6171 - Agreed that that situation is frustrating when it happens; definitely a drawback of mouse-bound third person perspective gaming. Whether the camera can clip through an object is handled by the environment team, and outside my ability to change in this pass--but thank you for your feedback on the current floaters not being bothersome.

@zaprobo - Huh. I personally wasn't even aware of the command. I'll try to see whether anyone can tweak the command help to be more useful.
I like the suggestion to move the power name text floaters to the upper-left quadrant. I'll try to experiment with that soon.



Back to the topic of thousands separators or abbreviations
Unfortunately, my current attempt with this turned out pretty jank:


The things I (and some other team members) think are janky:

• The decimal place *and* the millions marker (M) in combination don't feel quite right. We'd rather show integers there.
  
• I personally feel weird about the millions marker (M) having the same treatments as the number. That might be resolved if I just put a space in between the number and the marker, or find some other unobtrusive separator.

The tech I was hoping to use, couldn't quite be used in the context I was looking for, and the closest approximation I can make with my knowledge of the system doesn't quite hit the mark I'd like. I'm going to follow up with others to see how difficult it might be to extend the tech.

I don't currently have the info I need to experiment with, say, locale-based thousands separators like "10,000" or "10,000,000" so I'm stalled on that.

liadan1984

quetzal437#6171 said:

Visually, the damage floaters the way they are do not bother most players, and they can be turned off if they become irritating. If I were to make a visual QoL change I'd recommend 4th wall transparency for the camera.. Or at least the option, with a slider for the level of transparency.

For me, there is nothing more visually irritating than getting pinballed into a corner by an enemy (or leading it/them there deliberately to give the dps and healer in the group the best possible field of view) and all you see on the entire screen is the inside surface of your character's head... and damage floaters... usually the ones I'm taking since I can no longer see the tells on the ground, or the thing putting them there, or even the ground itself since I need to tilt the camera up to repaint the enemy after it goes invisible, due to the camera riding the near wall's surface instead of looking through it...

I main a cleric, usually run as heals in party content. I have damage floaters turned off, because they obstruct my view of the party/health bars, and as a result, there were deaths when there shouldn't have been.

So far, from what I've seen on preview, this change will mean that I should be able to turn them back on. I do prefer to have damage floaters on. So this change to reduce the obstruction to my view is a GOOD QOL change.

aster

Halu @terramak it's possible to slightly reduce the damage floaters coming from DoT?
As you can see in the screen below, as wizard I've hard time in see other players (what they are doing/ how mechanics are going) when I used my powers with a lot of DoT (and I guess it's the same situation for other classes)

plasticbat

--

aster#8001 said:

Halu @terramak it's possible to slightly reduce the damage coming from DoT?

Noooo! Don't reduce the damage but the damage floaters.
Just kidding. Can't resist.

aster

plasticbat said:

--

aster#8001 said:

Halu @terramak it's possible to slightly reduce the damage coming from DoT?

Noooo! Don't reduce the damage but the damage floaters.
Just kidding. Can't resist.

OH TRUE AHAHHAHA

quetzal437

liadan1984#8734, I run an 82k Paladin healer as well as a tank. I also have floaters turned off when healing to have a clear view of the party's health, but I see your point. As a pally, I can generally gauge my healing effectiveness by the blue overshield magnitudes alone and really have no need to see floaters in combat.. I can see where a Warlock or a Cleric could make good use of them to track magnitudes for tuning.

As a tank loadout, I'm more or less quiet until I see a big green number hit the screen from the healer and then the compliment goes out to the healer for the clutch save. Good point.

Terramak, thank you for the reply!

liadan1984

Overall, I like the changes. It's neat and clean. I've turned MY floaters on on preview, and find that they do not obstruct my view (DPS POV), with the new font, the size difference isn't detrimental, its much easier to view. The floaters move away from combat, rather than just hovering above, moving away from the Field of View, on live the floaters hang around and obstruct the Field of View.

As a healer, I have the following feedback, I understand if the below suggestions are not possible:
Currently, "show party damage floaters"

I don't want to see the OUTGOING damage of my party members, because it's just going to fill my screen, I really just want to see their INCOMING damage.
Can we split the above to:
"Show Party OUTGOING Damage Floaters" and;
"Show Party INCOMING Damage Floaters" and;
"Show Party OUTGOING Healing Floaters" and
"Show Party INCOMING Healing Floaters"

And, again

Can we split this to incoming, outgoing, healing, and damage? As a healer, I really don't need to see my outgoing damage, but I do want to be able to see the healing I'm doing and any damage I'm taking.
"Show Player OUTGOING Damage Floaters" and;
"Show Player INCOMING Damage Floaters" and;
"Show Player OUTGOING Healing Floaters" and
"Show Player INCOMING Healing Floaters"

I would also like to see the ability to move the location of this within the HUD, even if it's just up/down. still perfectly aligned with the character in the middle of the screen (personally, I would like to bring it up just a little).
I have my buffs at the bottom of the screen, just above my power tray, for better visibility, so these floaters tend to vanish behind a little.

therealprotex

terramak said:

Back to the topic of thousands separators or abbreviations
Unfortunately, my current attempt with this turned out pretty jank:


The things I (and some other team members) think are janky:

• The decimal place *and* the millions marker (M) in combination don't feel quite right. We'd rather show integers there.
  
• I personally feel weird about the millions marker (M) having the same treatments as the number. That might be resolved if I just put a space in between the number and the marker, or find some other unobtrusive separator.

The tech I was hoping to use, couldn't quite be used in the context I was looking for, and the closest approximation I can make with my knowledge of the system doesn't quite hit the mark I'd like. I'm going to follow up with others to see how difficult it might be to extend the tech.

I don't currently have the info I need to experiment with, say, locale-based thousands separators like "10,000" or "10,000,000" so I'm stalled on that.

Easy solution: let the player decide (via "Options") if the numbers are shown as integers or as abbreviated floating point values. I mean you say it yourself, YOU feel weird about the one format. Why do you want to take the burden and decide for all players how the numbers are presented?

By the way as a german player with a bias towards shorter floating point numbers I hope that numbers in the billions (10^9) are not an issue at all, because in Germany such numbers are not called billion, but "Milliarde" (a "Billion" is 10^12 in Germany) and I am pretty sure that one-char abbreviations (k for 1000, m for 1000000, ...) will mix up million and "Milliarde".

mintmark

Well that's why we invented a set of standard prefixes (SI prefixes), to describe these magnitudes in an unambiguous way. 10^6 is M (for mega) and 10^9 would be G (for giga).

But I can see that's perhaps not suitable for localised text strings... we're not all engineers or scientists.

forumaccount

I personally like how borderlands handles damage numbers. They don't use separators and the abbreviation looks slightly different from the number depending on the game.

uliphant

I miss the days where the only floaters you had to worry about, were in the pool

micky1p00

With the lower area, the labels should collapse into one / fade faster.

Maybe on consoles it's important, but on PC if someone wants to see actual numbers, there are logs. Floaters can round up stuff, they are "fun factor" "Woohoo made big hit, me awesome" and not something that is considered as reliable, especially since multiple hits collapse into one label.

You can also split floaters if you want to solve the big number problems, lets say I've hit, 1'700'347 damage, You can split one large font 1m (abbreviated) out bold it and fade it out, and then keep counting. It make it more pronounced, X mil damage, will keep the change on screen, but remove clutter, and add to the floater purpose of making the combat more engaging.

sekosek

I was wondering if you could take a look at those icons on the right side of the damage floaters, right now we have 3 icons for Crit, Deflect and Combat Advantage; and 2 colors for Crit and Non crit. Currently possible combinations are:
No crit + No deflect + No combat advantage = Yellow color and no icon
No crit + No deflect + Combat advantage = Yellow color and Sword icon
No crit + Deflect + No combat advantage = Yellow color and Arrow icon
No crit + Deflect + Combat advantage = Yellow color and Arrow icon
Crit + No deflect + No combat advantage = Orange color and Lightning Icon
Crit + No deflect + Combat advantage = Orange color and Lightning Icon
Crit + Deflect + No combat advantage = Orange color and Arrow icon
Crit + Deflect + Combat advantage = Orange color and Arrow icon

So:
Color is only changed if its crit.
Deflect has highest priority over others, if its deflected, it shows Arrow icon.
Crit has 2nd highest priority, if its not deflected it shows Lightning icon.
Combat advantage has lowest priority, if its either crit or deflect, we cannot see the Sword icon.

I think most important icon is the Sword icon that shows whether we have Combat advantage or not. We cannot always look at targets feet to see blue circle around them because its crowded, or sometimes that circle doesn't even show up on the target. We would benefit if we could see if we had Combat advantage through damage floaters even if the hit is crit/deflect. Crit has already 2 indications, both Orange color and Lightning icon. We don't even really need Lightning icon. Maybe you could put both Arrow and Sword icons for deflected combat advantage hits, or come up with a new icon.

To sum up, basically those icons can be looked at to represent the aspect of the damage floater better, because currently some icons have priority over others, its not possible to understand the details about it.

vasile1991

I agree with the new placements of the numbers but... why touch the damn font? I really like the current font and it stands out from different games I played.

stof

quetzal437#6171 said:

Visually, the damage floaters the way they are do not bother most players, and they can be turned off if they become irritating. If I were to make a visual QoL change I'd recommend 4th wall transparency for the camera.. Or at least the option, with a slider for the level of transparency..

Agree, a transparency slider would be amazing to have.
I dont care too much about the damage numbers themselves, but i care that they give a damage feedback that i am actually hitting the target (which is extremelly important when i trying to hit from maximum range as melee player)

terramak

Thanks again for all the feedback folks!

I don't have a point-by-point response this time, but in brief:

• While options to allow players to customize damage floaters isn't in the cards for this time around, I've written up a feature request for it. No promises on it getting prioritized or handled in the near-future, but the functionality requests are recorded.
  
• Whoof, those DoTs. I'm not sure I have the tools to address it, but I will pass the information along.
  
• With the help of others on the team, we're making progress toward being able to show abbreviated numbers that get past a certain number of digits. In English, French, German, and Italian, they'd be K/M/B under current localization; I can reach out to the loc team to see if they want to review that. In Russian, they'd be " тыс." " млн." and " млрд." accordingly.
  
• Regarding the combos of crit / deflect / combat advantage: We've got a ticket in to look into ways to present these combos, but right now it doesn't look like we'll be able to get this change in time for the module launch.

Changes won't reach Preview this week either, sorry! While the changes themselves have been small, we've been focused on a variety of things.

therealprotex

terramak said:

With the help of others on the team, we're making progress toward being able to show abbreviated numbers that get past a certain number of digits. In English, French, German, and Italian, they'd be K/M/B under current localization; I can reach out to the loc team to see if they want to review that. In Russian, they'd be " тыс." " млн." and " млрд." accordingly.

Args, as I suspected the abbreviations that you plan to implement will be troublesome. "B" is confusing for us Germans, "M" is ambiguous. May I suggest that you change the abbreviations to the SI prefixes as @mintmark proposed? Instead of K/M/B it then would be k(ilo)/M(ega)/G(iga).

milehighxr

Any way we can set it up so I can only see the damage I do only? Maybe give us options of what we see on screen, and when.

plasticbat

milehighxr#1299 said:

Any way we can set it up so I can only see the damage I do only? Maybe give us options of what we see on screen, and when.

Did you check 'options'? Turn off the floaters you don't want to see.