I play MapleStory (SEA version, also called MapleSEA), the super ancient side-scrolling 2D MMORPG, also known as the dumb mushroom game that we love for no particular reason. Why I call it the dumb mushroom game? Because the game's icon is a mushroom, and during the very early days of the game, getting murdered by cute and comically large mushrooms slamming on your character is quite the experience for every player... even until now, mushrooms still play a role in the starting areas of the game (despite being less deadly), and we still love them. That's quite a bit about the mushrooms, but that's not the point today. We're going to talk about damage skins instead.
One amazing thing in this game is the amount of customizations it gives in terms of appearance and look. It's quite astonishing, given that the game's art style is kinda pixelated and everyone shares the same base model regardless the gender, but there are indeed thousands if not tens of thousands of combinations you can use on your character for the purpose of good look. From the clothing to the skin and hair and eye style or even custom weapon looks, you can change everything. Well, as long as the thing you want to use is available for sale... lots of them are time limited :)
And of course, there's the damage skin, too.
One of my characters in the game, I designed it around a white-ish theme. The Yuki Onna that makes me float is actually a chair... I don't know why they make chairs like this, but it looks pretty good.
Damage skins are the thing that controls how your damage numbers look when you hit stuff. We hit things all the time, so it'll be nice to let those numbers look good and fit the rest of your outfit as well. It's also one of the cosmetics that they don't usually sell for real money, so we usually only get them from game contents or events. Some good ones are also worth quite a lot in the in-game auction, so... yeah, that's the other source, if players don't mind buying with in-game money.
After playing the game for several years, I have collected and swapped quite a bit of damage skins myself. I really like some of them as well, too bad they are limited to some events and it's not really likely to see them returning. Anyway, I took a look at my damage skin inventory, and decided to show some of them here :) So here's a "showcase" of me beating some routine weekly bosses and doing some content while swapping those damage skins around.
By default, damage numbers look like this. Nothing too special, just some orange/red comical text that fits pretty well into the game's look and feel. Here it looks red, because they are all critical hits. Non-critical hits are orange, but after playing for long enough you'll have 100% crit rate, so...
The default damage skin in the game. Looks not bad, all things considered.
As you can see, as damage numbers go bigger, they become harder to read. There's no thousand separator in this game, at least not on damage numbers... but the devs came up with a better idea. Instead of separators, how about just using units?
The default skin, with units!
It doesn't really make sense if you come from a place where no one uses notations like these, but in Chinese or Korean (where the game is first developed, in Nexon Korea), we have these units in numbers that works like this. At some point in time, MapleSEA also have damage skins with Korean units, and they look really damn good. Too bad I personally don't have any, and after that particular event they don't import any Korean unit damage skins anymore, at least for usual events. Probably for consistency, because our game runs on English, but hey, it looks really good...
Most of the skins I keep now are the unit skins. They look more professional, and they are easier to read, to know if you are hitting things properly. Well, that's if you care about the numbers. I personally don't, but they look neater than the usual ones, so I prefer them.
So... here are a bunch of unit damage skins that I happen to keep.
For the green lovers?
This is called the "Forest of Endurance" skin. Not sure where the name came from, although there is an exact content in this game called the Forest of Endurance, but I'm very sure that it doesn't reward this skin, unless I'm wrong because I never got good enough to clear it. It's very consistent looking, clean, and easy to read. I got this skin from a previous event where they give you a box to choose a damage skin from, and it's in the box as an option. Seems very good for characters where your skills look green... which my character's job partially does. But it looks a little bit boring to me, maybe it's about my taste...
Looks yummy.
This is known as the "Chew Chew Festival" skin. And of course, it came from the Chew Chew Festival event. From the name, you could guess that the event is all about food, and you aren't wrong. Chew Chew Island is a place about food. Even the monsters you hunt are food in one way or another, like large walking bananas or foxes that look like apples... yeah. The skin taking on the theme is also designed to look delicious as a result, it looks like candy!
It fits really well onto the outfit set that my character is currently using. The set also uses the Chew Chew theme, but it's from a different source, a previous "compensation box" over something Nexon screwed up badly. Better not talk about the catastrophe, it brought irreversible damage, lol. Anyway, I really like the combination of this outfit set and the damage skin on this character, but I don't have the time to seriously fund it up to do more serious things yet. Quite a pity to leave it there, but I have life to handle... hah. Maybe next time.
Bubbly slimy blobs...
This is an unusual one. It's a unit skin, but instead of separating the numbers into sections like billions and millions and thousands, it uses thousand separators. Well, unusual for MapleSEA, because apparently Global MapleStory (GMS) uses this format for their unit damage skins so it's the norm there... anyway, it came from the Mochi Paradise event (known as the Slime Paradise in GMS). So, the damage skin looks pretty much like slimes, but numbers.
I'm personally not a big fan of it, since the colour theme looks too "highlighter-ish", and it's a little hard to read and distracting. But, some players really love it due to the format it uses. If your damage is high enough that every line you deal is in the billions range, it will abbreviate the damage numbers into something like "1.2B" and nothing more. It makes the representation really concise and to some players, it helps with readability and vision in boss fights. I don't really have an opinion on this, but hey, everyone has their preferences.
Big pink numbers!
One of the damage skins from the Blooming Forest event. Originally, I really had high hopes for this damage skin, as the pink looks pretty and it has that neat look that I like. But, it turns out that it's more distracting than I thought, which is something you can't really tell from the description tooltip of it... Don't get me wrong, it's still a nice skin, but it's only after trying that I found out that I prefer skins that are subtle instead of those very readable ones. But luckily, there are a few skins that I really like in this game...
The description tooltip for the Blooming Forest damage skin.
This is one of my favourites.
Personally my favourite unit skin so far.
It's called the Aurora skin, which we got from the Neo event quite some time ago. It looks artistic, mildly colourful while not being too distractive, thin cursive font with some little designs on the details keeps it from being boring, and the use of smart shading choices to boost visibility without the need of borders around the font that screams for attention. The only thing that prevents it from being the perfect unit skin ever in my opinion is that the units don't really blend into the rest of the design like the Korean version does. It didn't totally ruin it, but you might be able to sense a little bit of "eh" if you look carefully enough for the details, as the units don't really get the same design as the rest of the numbers do. But still, a very nice skin.
I use it on the other character of mine too. Since the outfit set I'm using there goes with a white-ish theme with a bit of blue, this skin fits in really perfectly. No complains.
It's hard to find a better one for this character, really.
Did I say "one of my favourites"? Yes... because there's another one that I also like a lot. That is a pretty absurd skin, though. One of its kind.
While we have damage skins that show numbers, we also have damage skins that... don't show numbers. They are more common than you might think. I have skins that replaces all your numbers with question marks, and some other skins that does something else with some other sprites, like this, a skin that I got from a Chinese New Year event... it shows Chinese zodiac animals instead of numbers.
I am hitting... wait, I don't know the numbers.
There are also skins that replaces numbers with sprites like cactuses or the Korean words "kekeke" (an April Fools skin... some players like that a lot), but I don't have them on my account. They are pretty funny to use, if you don't care about surviving in bosses, because these skins are both famous and infamous for their capability to block your entire skin with crazy long damage strings by multiplying the length of your damage numbers by multiple folds. I don't really enjoy them, since they interfere with gameplay too much and don't necessarily look good, but there's one exception...
How can you go cuter than this?
How this skin works is simple - every number gets turned into Rock Spirit. I got this from the Blooming Forest event as well, and it's a love at first sight - how can you resist the cuteness?
Flooding the screen with Rock Spirits, weeeeeee.
It's automatically one of my favourites. It looks very calming, consistent and non-distracting. Besides that, it is very cute, and it fits the green theme of my character. Sometimes, confusing as well, because you only see Rock Spirits, and things die...
I can't hear you over the gigantic pile of Rock Spirits...
One thing about this game - you actually don't need to care that much about the actual damage that shows on your screen, because the game uses an RNG to determine how much your each hit deals anyway. It justifies the use of damage skins like these for the look and cleanliness. And, for the only instance in which you need to use the damage dealt to do justifications on what to do next, the length of the damage dealt is good enough - if you see only one Rock Spirit, it means that the enemy is under damage reflection and you should not hit it. Normally, you'll look for the "1" damage lines, it's not much different here.
Everything going on properly...
Damage reflection, do not hit if you don't want to die :)
This skin works exceptionally well when you are farming mobs for long periods of time, as its design makes it very easy on the eyes. I don't farm that much, but when I do, it does make things slightly better. Easily the 10/10 skin for me.
There are at least a few hundreds more of damage skins in this game, given its long history and players' desire for more sweet looking damage skins to keep the hunting experience fresh. I don't have that much, and I don't even know more than 5% of the entire catalogue, but that means that there's a lot more to explore. Every large event will bring us one or two new and nice damage skins for us to collect as well, so there is always something new to look forward to.
Currently, we are going through the Starlight Symphony event, which also gives a unit damage skin, and it does look really damn nice. I haven't bought it myself, but I do hope that it doesn't disappoint!
Guess it's time for more farming, it's a Sunday after all, we have bonus event coin drops today... heh. Not gonna waste it.
:)