Sunday 17 August 2014

Make Area Damage a Different Color!

As a longtime proponent for the use of Area Damage as a useful stat, I think making area damage procs more visual would do much for revealing the actual damage done by this stat.

I know D3 devs don't like adding in new menu checkboxes. We already have "Show critical hits" and "show damage" the latter of which shows both damage dealt in white numbers and damage taken in red numbers.

At any given time a player can be seeing white, red, yellow, and green (healing) numbers, which can be overwhelming. I'm just asking that AD remain in the "damage" category, but much like how both damage dealt and taken are included in this I think including area damage as a blue color would be a great addition. In addition I think the AD number needs to hang around on the screen longer than a typical white damage number. Sometimes those are so fleeting it's hard to know how much damage you just did without recording and re-watching game play in slow motion.

Part of the reason I want this is because a lot of people see AD as a stat that is like magic find; it's just hard to know when it's working and how effective it is. If the player could see the numbers I think it would make this game mechanic easier to grasp, going from the intangible to the tangible.

So, I used my legit photoshop skills to make a mock up:

Original 



Blue Text 


I apologize that I didn't use a screenshot that also used crit numbers, but the screens were SO messy that it would have been tough to edit it. I also tried my best to match the font, but it wasn't perfect.

What do you guys think?