[Request/Search] Reduce numbers?

[Jharax]

So... with Mists of Pandaria coming, and not having a squish, and A LOT of players still wanting smaller numbers, here's my request (or please reply with an addon if it already exists ).

An addon that shows 10% of total mana and hp on all frames and damage.

Let's say.. instead of our tank having 400k hp, we'd see 40k. Instead of critting 60k, we'd see our crit hit for 6k.

Thanks,

Jharax

[Phanx]

I would never write something like this, or recommend its use to anyone, because:

(1) It's deceptive. Covering up what's actually happening in the game for the sake of making something look "nicer" makes worse players, not better ones.

(2) It's pointless. The difference between "600k" and "60k" is just as visually obvious on first glance as the difference between "60k" and "6k", and at four characters, "600k" is the longest string you would ever see, since the next step up would be "6m".

(3) It would be inconsistent unless you went through the enormous effort of modifying all spell, ability, item, stat, and other tooltips that described amounts of damage. If a player has to do math in their head to calculate the "squished" damage of every spell, you're encouraging them to just stop caring about the actual power value of their abilities/stats/etc. because most players will simply not do the math (or will do it wrong), which makes them a worse player, not a better one.

(4) It would not scale well for lower levels. Consider a creature with 35 health points. Should you display that as "3" or round it up to "4"? What about a low level character hitting for 15 damage? Should you display that as "1" or "2"? Either way, it's very inaccurate, and will not match the amount of damage the player is dealing if they actually pay attention.

(5) It would not automatically work across addons. Realistically speaking you will never convince enough addon authors to offer such a "feature" to ensure that the display would be consistent across the average user's UI, so in order for such an addon to be usable, you would have to write and maintain code that hooked into and changed the inner workings of every single addon that displays health, mana, or damage (or at least all the popular ones, and just ignore people using less popular addons). Not only would this be an incredibly huge amount of work, it would not even be possible in many cases, since not all addons expose enough of their inner workings to allow such manipulation.

If you were only concerned about the Blizzard UI, it would be slightly more feasible, but I still don't see the point, and would still argue that it's deceptive and detrimental.

[semlar]

Tooltips, health and mana would be pretty easy to modify across the board.

Damage, since I don't think there's any way to hook an event like COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED, would be a lot more difficult to modify, and you can't hook the blizzard floating combat text over enemies either unless you faked it by anchoring to nameplates.

It wouldn't need to be a linear scale though, it could be logarithmic to exponentially reduce the numbers to keep them from getting too high without affecting the lower numbers too much.

If you wanted to just pick a floating combat text addon and modify that one it would cover most of the points.

I had the idea for using percentages instead of numbers, but after trying everything on the planet to hook blizzard's floating combat text over enemies I gave up on it. I'll probably end up just using something like this to fake it.

[Jharax]

That could work too actually.

[Nibelheim]

Originally Posted by semlar I had the idea for using percentages instead of numbers, but after trying everything on the planet to hook blizzard's floating combat text over enemies I gave up on it. I'll probably end up just using something like this to fake it.

Heh. That would depress me on a boss fight. Instead of seeing numbers in the thousands pouring off the boss, I'd be seeing a bunch of 0.001%.

[semlar]

God help me I made a prototype for this, although it probably shouldn't actually be used for anything..

[Jharax]

Thanks semlar! That's exactly what I was looking for! I'll post some bugs if I do find them .

[Jharax]

Holy Paladin charges always show up as 3 (even if there are no charges at all :P).

[Jharax]

Damage critical strikes aren't showing up as critical in the SCT. (Healing Crits seem to be working fine)

(Minor: mana regeneration isn't getting nerfed)

[zork]

Mega Damage = Batman Comic

Actually what would best is a formula that factors the level of the character in.

[semlar]

Originally Posted by Jharax Holy Paladin charges always show up as 3 (even if there are no charges at all :P).

Ok, that should be fixed now. I'll work on getting the stats in order and check into crits.

Right now it's just using a flat 10% modifier. If anyone has any suggestions for a decent formula I'll implement that instead.

[semlar]

I came up with a logarithmic way to scale health, but ran into an issue that is going to make the damage or healing on the tooltip wrong.

My mind might just be frazzled at this point, but if we squish health in a non-linear way, your damage and healing numbers are going to scale based on the target's health.

Let's say my heal heals for 30k normally, and that my target has 150k health.

If I squish everything by 90% we end up with an easy 3k heal on a 15k health target.

But if we squish higher healths by an exponential amount, and my target had 200k health instead of 150k, now I'm squishing their health by 90.5% and my heal also has to be squished by 90.5% to be the correct percentage of their health bar, now my heal isn't for 3k any more it's for 2850.

So now the number on the tooltip is meaningless without a target and you might as well be dealing completely in percentages.

Not that the number on the tooltip has much value in reality. I mean what does 3k healing mean anyway.

Great, now I'm questioning abstract concepts. I think It's time to let somebody else do the thinking.