How We Describe Item Mods

But for example Kiara's Determination, a new unique item have this item mod:
Immune to Freeze, Chill, Curses and Stuns during flask effect.
While an old unique item, Dream Fragment have these mods:
Cannot be Frozen
Cannot be Chilled
Please unify the defining words!

"

The actual effect is pretty intuitive (my elemental resistances determine which elements I get to deal extra damage with and take reduced damage from), but communicating all of the nuances without it becoming a wall of text was as much a puzzle as the item itself. Even now, it's pretty wordy, but it's pretty hard to get it any shorter.

I just want to share, that I actually didn't understand the fundamental part about uncapped resists until a friend explained it. (although I thought I understood) Even then I argued about it until a post online proved me wrong.

I read "Uncapped resists" to indicate that you had to be below the resistance cap of 75/135 (or whatever your cap is if you had it raised by some means.

Resist cap has been a concept for a long time, so uncapped to me meant below cap - not "resist total not considering the cap."

In a similar way, I thought Voice of the Storm required that I was below cap resist, and did not understand that it was just looking at the raw resist number. Once I finally grasped that it was not capped resist, I then thought that it was talking about resistance over the cap number rather than the total resist value.

I say all that to say even a simple statement like "uncapped resist" can be confusing.

EDIT: In response to a friend mocking my confusion, I figured I would add clarity. When I see "Uncapped" to me that would me something is no longer capped but once was capped. As I always view it as "the challenge is reaching the cap", uncapping would then mean to go back below cap not to remove the cap. Thus my confusion on how the item worked.

What about poop, trash, and garbage?

"

As previously mentioned, having a super-wide line looks dumb. But when we split mods into two lines, it's important to ensure that, if someone were to read each line independently, they wouldn't misinterpret what it does.

Couldn't you use a visual indication to show that two lines are a single mod? Something like:

........................................Requires level 8.........................................
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.....|.During flask effect, 10% reduced damage taken of each element.|......
.....|.......for which your uncapped elemental resistance is lowest.......|......
|.During flask effect, damage penetrates 10% resistance of each element..|
|............for which your uncapped elemental resistance is highest............|

(That's meant to line up vertically. The periods should be blank space but code tags don't appear to work on the forum.)


If making the vertical lines connect requires too much work, you could further differentiate multiple cases of this by changing the color of the pipe characters.

Edited example for clarity.

So much heroic troubleshooting while, in addition to mouse-over info, you could just have opened-by-right-click-while-in-inventory item info window (like in any crpg since at least BG) which could have all mods divided by being implicit/prefix/suffix and where they could be clearly divided one from another. Also could put there additional info like affix tiers an so on.

:thinking:
So, OCD is to thank for all the lackluster uniques?
Gud2kno.
I kid, srsly though, why not devise a better system? like a slightly lighter slightly darker stripe pattern so that you don't have to worry about line breakage so much? or; Rule the beasts.. or alternate embolden, or embolden line breaks only, or something.. I know it's an aesthetic choice, but subtlety can be achieved with other methods, too. :B

Yet we still have the "Melee Damage on Full Life "Support""

"

NickK_GGG wrote:

One thing our game designers often have to consider when producing new content (such as unique items or skills) is how we communicate their effect. We try to be exact and consistent, using the same phrasing for mods that behave the same. When it comes to PoE builds, ambiguity is the enemy of creativity.

Oh man I laughed so hard at the bolded part...

You say that, but PoE has the most confusing and least understandable descriptions I have ever read in any game.

Everyone in the GGG offices might understand the terms as you use those jargon words all day every day. But for people outside the GGG confines they often make no sense at all.


For example, say you went to a thoracic surgeon convention and listened in on one of their speakers. To them everything is completely understandable and obvious. But I bet you understand only a fraction of what is being said.

"

Natalia_GGG wrote:

Some people, as it turns out, tend to read item mods like Drake (they start from the bottom).

(Read bottom-to-top, obviously.)

Magic: The Gathering, which you reference and draw from periodically, shortens lengthy descriptions to keywords all the time.

You do so frequently with such keywords as Onslaught, which carry no meaning without prior knowledge or researching the term on a wiki or elsewhere.

Those interested in meaning seek it.

Radius(40 Dex), Stuff Happens
^ Slightly, but nevertheless, more intuitive than Onslaught.

Radius(40 Dex):
Stuff happens
Also, this too
^ group items based on trigger

Or you can split mods with a partial coloured underline on the last line of each mod that doesn't take up much, if any, extra vertical space.

Or you can have slightly more vertical space between mods than between lines in the same mod, like paragraph spacing in Word (yuck -- Word, not the spacing rule).

I understand the desire to be as descriptive/consistent as possible and fully appreciate the difficulty of the task. But, if you already shorten some things, you might as well shorten everything you reasonably can, no? And perhaps fill in the knowledge gaps with alternate descriptive text?

Oh, and one other somewhat related thing.. I hate the appending of " Support" to all support gems. For not wanting long descriptors, you sure go out of your way to make them sometimes. I feel like you went the wrong way in a database normalization.. messes with my head. I hope you revert that decision at some point.

"

鬼殺し wrote:

Scraping the bottom
of the barrel

Haiku fail?
More input Stephanie..
Sad!

(Sorry.. I'll shush. lol)