PA thinks that having access to raw damage numbers will corall players into hardcore min maxing and they want to avoid that.

Theyre pretty uninformed of course, as you can take a look at old monster hunter titles that also dont display damage numbers, and a quick google search reveals that every attack has damage values listed from players just figuring it out.

The people saying they don't want damage numbers are suffering from heavy PTSD from abuse from PA they think that retaining the current state of things is the best, going as far as parroting PA's own statements on the issues.

Damage numbers are not in the game out of one simple reason and everything else is an excuse or a blatant lie from malicious and dishonest developers and players: so that you don't see that Drakania does double/triple your damage in an instant-animation skill than your class and that WooGu both do 20-50% more damage with their 3s Cooldown Instana-cast skill than you do with your 18s Cooldown Long-Ass-Cast-Time skill.

"Damage numbers are hidden to promote player exploration and remove min-maxing" is such a dumb statement that it's surprising to me how people can still parrot it to this day. You can't explore such things properly without data. Everyone will min-max either way, you are just creating an artificial wall on how much effort is required to do it.

a lot goes into balancing and while im not saying PA are great at doing it, your average reddit posting BDO player sure as hell isnt going to do a better job by looking at big numbers popping off of their corpse.

Honestly for me personally I dont need to see numbers to know what skills are hitting hard and having a geyser of numbers popping up in my screen would make visual clarity a mess when we already have classes teleporting all over the place.

Maybe if they only added them to like a combat log