About how "stats" are visualized

[Cesco]

There's something that bothers me, I can't even sleep at night for it.

Weapon an armor's stats, as well as encumbrance, are visualized with dots and half-dots.
The exception is the weight of the item, which is represented with a dot on a line.
I actually think that the way weight is visualized is more fitting with the game: it doesn't directly show an exact number nor an approximation of it, and this makes any comparison less easy.
Now, if this modality were applied to other stats it could prevent some of the equipement's min-maxing with dots, thus giving a bit less importance to stats and a bit more to the aesthetics and the shape/coverage.
I feel that stat differences of like, one dot, are not as meaningful and relevant as is, for example, landing a solid hit.

In short, I think the "slider-like" stat visualization is the best way to go.

 

[Bluhman]

My gut instinct was to at first disagree, but really the point about the current setup heavily reinforcing min-maxing is completely true - most so on armor in fact. I emphasize this since moreso than weapons, armor clearly follows a qualitative growth of stats as you progress, meaning there's always pressure to wear the next biggest thing you find, which detracts from a potential strong suit of the game of being able to so precisely clothe and accessorize your player, only to see and use the strongest plates of armor.

There's slightly less of a push to do this for weapons since the distinction of damage-type stats isn't usually full-on qualitative. Also in addition to weight, the length of a weapon is never explicitly shown in the stats. This is kind of a half-downside, since on one hand it encourages players to eye and try out multiple weapons or keep different arms for different situations, but on the other there's no easy way at all to tell (purely from the inventory UI) how large or small a weapon is - there's no consistency in the weapon size or scale in the UI screen: a Zweihander and a Pole-hammer look like they're the same size there, but in the game world the pole-hammer is way longer. It's also real important because length is perhaps secretly the most critical stat since that's what determines how you position yourself to deal the most damage!

So some things like weapon length could use a bit more display, but overall yes: having the stats show in a more analog/continuous scale would likely benefit the game.