QOL Request: Better Feedback Colors

General Discussion
1

Heroes of the Storm categorizes its many different effect types by giving a unique color to each effect type. For example, take this basic color palette (borrowed from Google Docs):

Many of these colors are used to represent HOTS’s various effects. From left to right, we’ve got Orange Physical Damage:

Yellow Energy:

Green Health and Health Restoration:

Light Blue Shielding:

Blue Mana and Mana Restoration:

Purple Ability Damage:

And Pink Energy:

But for some reason, despite being an effect with its own special calculations and interactions, we do not have a unique color for Percentage Damage:

When characters with special resources (Sonya, Valeera, Zarya, D.Va) get specific colorations to set them apart, it’s strangely inconsistent when Percentage Damage doesn’t get the same treatment. HOTS has three characters who rely very heavily on Percentage Damage as a core part of their kit (Malthael, Tychus, and Leoric) and a ton of talents that add it to a character’s abilities or attacks, but for some reason it doesn’t get a color of its own to reflect its special mechanics.

It’s easy to see why it’s a problem when you’re trying to gauge how impactful Talents like Total Annihilation or Corrosive Saliva are: they add Percentage Damage to an effect that already deals Ability Damage, but, because Ability Damage and Percentage Damage are both the same color, it can be very difficult to tell at a glance how much value you’re getting because it’s difficult to tell which is the Ability Damage and which is the Percentage Damage. It’s even worse for characters who have Damage Over Time effects like Lunara - it’s nearly impossible to tell how much value you’re getting from Invigorating Spores because enemies are constantly taking damage from Nature’s Toxin and the Percentage Damage gets lost in the noise.

Ultimately, there’s no reason for Percentage Damage to be the exception to the rule. It uses special calculations that other damage types don’t, there’s no shortage of Abilities and Talents that use it, and we’ve even got a spare color that isn’t currently in use for impact effects like these:

To solve these issues and better Heroes of the Storm in general, Percentage Damage effects should be given their own color of Red. It would not be a difficult change to make, taking maybe three minutes per effect total, and it would go a long way towards making many effects more readable and feel more impactful.

Edit: The lovely SamiSha hacked together a visual example:

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RED AND DANGEROUS %-BASED DAMAGE.

…

I like the suggestion.

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Here’s my poor attempt in changing the percentage colors to (somewhat) Red.

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I’m cool with this as long as you take us colorblind into account. :slight_smile:

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noob

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You aren’t good either. :sunglasses:

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I agree. :sunglasses:

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Very scary and necessary!

It’s close enough to clearly illustrate how nice it would be to have a unique color for it. Thank you!

I would certainly hope so.

i love you too

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no i meant sami not you :blush:

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WELL… I love you anyways for bumping my topic. :wink:

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Kiss me, you fool :heart_eyes:

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This seems like a very good suggestion.

Only potential issue is adding more “clutter” to the game. But I don’t think coloring % damage red would do that myself. And I don’t think many others would either.

Wonder how long to implement it would actually take. I imagine low amount of time per OP. But, uh. Sometimes things are… weird.

Anyhow, liked and commented!

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Red was a thing for crits before they decided to make orange and purple crit versions, and it wasn’t really cluttering back then tbh.

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not I’m not sure if I’m remembering playing and seeing the red… Or if my memory is molding to make itself fit to your fact. lol!

thanks for the tidbit of info.

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I’ve done some Starcraft II modding in my time (which is relevant because HOTS is built on the same engine) and it’s literally a three minute change per Ability/Talent at most.

Also, I can confirm that Physical Crits were red once upon a time.

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I cannot imagine anything done in forking would make it take longer, but it could be possible.

And there is always QA, etc. that has to go through. Even if it should be bug free.

While most serious issues are picked out before PTR (or direct to live)… There have been about 3/month more serious issues that initially slipped past in the last 16 months or so.

I don’t see how this would cause any issues. But, you never know.

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I hope so too, I also have to play with color blind mode, I’m not sure what you think, but compared to other games it’s executed quite well.

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Assuming they’ve done it sanely (which they might not have, you never know), all it’d require is copying the current Ability Damage UI template, changing the color’s RBG value, and then making sure that all Percentage Damage effects point at that instead of Ability Damage. Cloning and recoloring the UI entry would take maybe three minutes, five minutes at most. After that, it’s just a question of tracking down all of the Percentage Damage effects to ensure that they use the new entry.

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I brought up this thread during the AMA today and Blizz_JeffB had this to offer:

We might be getting fancy red numbers for our Health Shred soon!

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Finally we gone rainbows.

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