duvessa wrote:Siegurt wrote:Probably I would put the effect of spellpower in the spell description, like "Maximum spellpower increases the damage done by this spell by 75%" or something, so you could say "Oh I'm at 50% of the max spellpower, and max spellpower increases the spell's damage by 75%, so I'm at +37.5% damage)
...if the relationship between power and damage is linear, which for e.g. IOOD it is not.
Showing spellpower numbers would make it easier for unspoiled players to see, to some extent, the impact of skills/intelligence/enhancers, but knowing how spell power actually helps you requires knowing a bunch of other numbers too. It's the same problem that accuracy, base damage, and enchantment have; players are shown those numbers (or just parts of them, in the case of accuracy) but you cannot
possibly correctly guess what they do. You have to source dive or be told by someone who has.
But showing accuracy, base damage, and enchantment as bars or chokos or whatever wouldn't improve that at all; it'd make it worse. When a formula is too complicated to show to players, you need to either simplify the formula, or admit that you don't actually care
that much about clarity.
Yes, I agree it wouldn't be good to put things like "max spellpower increases your damage by X%" if the relationship is not linear, spells with a sufficiently convoluted relationship to spellpower that it's misleading (or incomprehensible) to give a succinct number probably just shouldn't get one, my suggestion was to just add some text to the body of the description of some spells, if there's no useful text to add there, it probably just shouldn't be added.
As for the OP, I guess my expectation was not that you want to see "how much more spellpower you get by changing X variable" but rather that you'd want to have some kind of estimation of "how much more effective your spells are when you change variable X" which, by itself, showing spellpower numbers doesn't do.
If the actual desire is to see the numbers with no context for what they mean, then the OP would accomplish that result, but I personally don't see the point, without some correlation between spellpower and effectiveness, it really just doesn't matter how you represent it, other than letting the player know that "things are improving"
I think it'd be worthwhile to add such spellpower effectiveness descriptors even if we can't do so for all spells in a reasonable way, and some get them and some do not, and even if we don't change the way that spellpower itself is represented.