For twenty years, we've hidden a lot of battle information from players. Not maliciously - it's just that the data was stored in ways that made it nearly impossible to display. Things like weapon synergies were written as raw PHP code in the database. Curse chances, blessing values, elemental interactions - if you wanted to know how your weapon actually worked, you had to check a fan site.

I'm working on changing that 🫡

This screenshot shows what I'm building: a translation layer that reads the old system and converts it into something we can actually show you. On the left is the legacy data - damage strings and custom code 🫨 (seriously: hundreds of items with custom code). On the right is what we can now detect: this weapon (Acidtongue) has a synergy (new term) with another item (Sentinel) that boosts its stats when used together.

What I'm asking for:

1. What information do you want spelled out? What is something that is currently a place you reach for a fansite and would rather just have it available?

2. Are there particular items that are confusing or "wonky"? Weapons that behave unexpectedly, or that you've always wondered about? Those would be great test cases for the migration.

3. What would be useful in a battle simulator? If you could test two items together before committing, what would you want to see?

This is all very early - nothing's announced, I'm just migrating items one by one and building tools to understand them. But I'd rather build what you actually want than guess.

I'll freely admit I've never really totally felt like I understood the complexities of weapons. I'm more a "grab the most powerful thing I can afford and swing it until I kill the baddie" type. So all I'd really like to know is how much damage it does with what icons,how much defense, how many mod slots so I can stick my healing crystals on it, and be able to sort or compare them easily.

Wow! Just first thought: As someone, who has a memory like a sifter, I'd really love to see on the weapon info the range and sort of attack, defence and heal - just as it does now plus extras like feeze, steal, curse & blessing (the latter probably also showing their in battle icons) - wouldn't mind activation rates on top. All of this I always need to look up on Subetalodge.

Weapons and scrolls with ultimate custom coding, that just show "attack 1 Fire" and you have to know by hard, what approximately they might actually do, are a nightmare ;-) However, most of them have a wide spread action rate depending on stats and intelligence, so it will be hard to display all of that...

the legacy code hurts my eyes sm i genuinely cant imagine having to look at code i wrote 20 yrs ago on a daily basis. youre so brave LOL

definitely would love to see blessings/curses and activation percentage if that wouldn't bloat the page too much.

not sure how to solve for this one but for a weapon like it has rotating defense each turn (like the same 3 icons but diff # of each each turn), but by default it just doesn't display anything for defense. I always forget which icons it blocks bc right now it just says nothing. just throwing that in the ring as something to consider :)

Looks good. Add Stealing and Blasting to section with freezing, curses, etc. It there is a curse or a blessing, say what it does. Like: X curse 10 dark attack for 5 rounds or A blessing 50% heal and block 5 ice for 1 round.

And maybe call it Attack and Block instead of Damage and Defense . Damage and Defense are calculated based on number of icons and factors like pet's strength and defense and challenger's strength and defense. I could see it be confusing for someone with a base 10 pet using a bomb and doing less damage then the number of Damage on a weapon.

Duh..................UHHHHHH........I'll come back if I think of anything