Percentages would express what the visual indicator is already expressing. The chance of the first bullet. But percentages would provide that information in a way that is quicker and easier to interpret, and that provides information more accurately.
Ok, and which bullet would it be? Depending if this is a bullet which lands within blue or orange indicator its âchance-to-hitâ may vary greatly. Unless there is set order in which bullets are organized when fire (most likely to least likely, though looking at gameplay footage that doesnât seem to be the case).
What percantage would you give to this shot?
Itâs a burst of 6 bullets, three of which will hit within orange, and three will land within blue. Which one of those bullets should be picked as a base for the âchance to hitâ stat?
If I had to I would pick one from the blue zone as seeing 100% to hit and then missing half of the bullets would feel crappy. Still seing something around 50% chance to hit, isnât representative of the odds either, making it not useful information for players who understand systems, and misleading for people who jump from games that do use rolls to calculate chances to hit.
There is no attack roll made against an enemy, and therefore itâs difficult to calculate hit or miss. The game doesnât compare your accuracy against target you want to hit and calculate hit or miss - it projects bullets in determined spread from your weapon and bullets will hit what they will hit.
Possibly what percentage there could be, is expressing how much percentage of the blue circle is covered by the enemy you are currently aiming at.
But again, with new quick-aim UI in place I see little advantage to calculating what is already clearly shown (not to mention wasted CPU power for calculations)
Three of the six will go in the orange; the rifle covers around 20% so each shot has an 80% chance to hit the soldier
The enemy fills near one quarter of the blue donut where the other three bullets will land so you have a 75% percent to put the fourth shot in the target. They arent exact values, but more than enough to know that itâs worth shooting at him with an automatic rifle, not so sure with the sniper one.
I personally would have aimed at the rifle with a good chance to put two bullets in it and disable, what hits the soldier is a bonus, once heâs disarmed i have all the time i want to finish him. If his will is low a good option is aiming at the head to try having him panic, but not from such distance, iâm not reasonably sure to put three bullets in it.
Anyway a real shooter, not a videogame one, doesnt have a percentile on his rifle targeting; if heâs a good shooter he knows how large is the spread of his bullets at the target distance and has to decide if itâs worth alerting the target shooting at him.
This system is WAY more realistic than the XCOM percentile one and, apart a few bugs, a LOT better; even Fallout VATS arent that realistic, you aim at the arm but if you miss the arm you could hit the body or the leg, the way this system works, the way a real bullet works
And what about destructible cover? Should percentage take it into account? First two bullets can destroy cover and give 99% chance for hit to last four bullets. What value will you show then?
You have proper screen with circles where you see everything, possible spread, enemy, his equipment, and cover he is behind. You donât have to think and calculate what part of that circle is filled by enemy. As in pictures posted by Wormerine and Agi you donât have to think âOh can you see it my beloved priest, there is 66% (or whatever) chance to hit because there are blue zones not covering enemy, and he has big gun protecting him from damage, his head and legs are in blue, arm partly in orange and blue, there will be bell curve so it will ring and so on :)â. You look at it and think âEnemy is filling orange circle, good start!, but blue has a lot of empty space, so there is probability that some bullets will miss.â You donât have to think if it is 40, 50, 60 or 80%. I in such case would lover aiming center for enemy stomach and press fire.
It really doesnât matter what number will show there. And that number could be misleading depending on animations of enemy (which can take place after you press fire - so then you still had previous chance, not current) and cover involved.
As above, the first one.
Show the percentage of a shot hitting for both indicators if possible, otherwise show the percentage chance for the blue indicator.
I donât know, thatâs why itâs so frustrating.
I donât think that shooting actually works like that (I asked the same question myself previously) youâve a fifty-fifty chance of the shot landing inside or outside the red circle, but itâs not a guarantee that 3 bullets will be inside the red, and 3 between the red and the blue. (Like tossing 2 dice, 6 times youâll tend towards a score of a 7, but youâre not guaranteed to get 3 results over 7 and 3 results under https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNhaf.png).
I wouldnât actually be surprised if thatâs how the bell curve is being generated, roll 2 random numbers instead of 1 and youâd get a measure of how close to the centre of your target reticule each bullet is landing.
My understanding is that the attack roll is being made constantly - Thatâs how the game already gives a predicted damage outcome.
Iâd be happy with that.
Itâs personal preference; you find that visual information clear and therefore preferable to a percentage, so you donât see an advantage in seeing the percentage. I donât, I find the visual indicator to be unclear, and in using it Iâm unable to determine how accurate my shots will be with sufficient accuracy, so Iâd rather have the percentage.
If it was a real shooter I donât think that the shooter would have bullets being distributed around a bell curve in the first place. They certainly wouldnât see many of the other numerical data that PP presents such as how much damage a weapon could do, the number of HPs that their opponent had, and that opponentâs armour valueâŚ
Thank god that itâs a video game so that we can see all that wonderful numerical data 
Iâd say no, just show the percentage of the creature that is inside your target reticule.
You might not do that, and thatâs probably why you like a visual system.
But I look at the visual data and try to resolve it into a percentage so that I know how good of a shot Iâm taking. Thatâs the frustration of it, I have to stop to do that on every single shot, rather than the game just saying itâs 40% or whatever.
Imaging trying to drive a car and when you want to check the speed your speedometer says ânooooo, while I do know how fast youâre going, Iâm not going to tell you that, no from now on you just can look at the number of flies hitting your windscreen and use their blue arses to take your best guess.â
If that can be misleading on a percentage, it will also be misleading on the visual information that youâre basing your own decisions to fire. The enemy doesnât stop animating because youâre looking at a circle rather than a number.
But at least I take a look at the animation and try not to base my chances on artificial number shown somewhere on the screen.
But well, I suppose SG could give some estimated value for those who really donât get well with visual estimation. They would need to improve that damage estimation system (as it is not precise and misleading currently).
Why you dont think that bullets behave in a different way that almost every thing in the world?
Normal distribution describes almost every thing thatâs subject to random variance and bullets are. Were not this way why olimpic rifle shooters dont but all their shots in the center?
Obviously their bell is a lot steeper than mine but even a gold medalist isnt sure to hit the center: wind, air density, the differences beetween a bullet and another just to name the most obvious, introduce randomness and the gaussian bell is what best describes that.
I suppose that recoil is the most important factor which is not reproduced in Phoenix Point. 
Lasers obviously have none, for sniper rifles and shotguns itâs irrelevant, you shot once then aim again, for assault rifles in fact the circle should more be an oval because a short burst has recoil that tends ho rise the aim every shot
Normal distributions are great for modelling true random variables in nature, (theyâre not the only distribution model, but they fit a lot of cases), but theyâre not the real world, they just try to provide a best fit.
Bullets if fired from a stationary gun are subject to random variance and would follow a bell curve Iâll grant you that, but you were initially talking about the shooter, not the bullets. When you introduce a human shooter, especially an Olympic standard one youâve now got a factor that reduces the significance of that random variance when compared to a stationary gun. Youâve still got wind and air density, but the shooter will take those factors into account and adjust their aim, (if not on the first shot, then certainly from there after), youâve also got the highest quality of projectile that will be precision manufactured, in this case Iâd argue that itâs the individual human factors such as stance, stamina, confidence, and focus that have a greater affect on precision than the random factors which affected the stationary gun.
Normal distributions are useful in a game, which PP is, as a means of a providing a realistic enough mechanic to distribute projectiles, but itâs then mathematical rng that sits behind it, and once you say that youâre in a game and that a normal distribution is okay to use, then showing a percentage is also valid.
We can discuss science philosophy for days, but at the end the model that best fits IS the world, and on it we make our calculations. Iâm an engineer not a philosophist, my job is finding the best tradeoff beetween a perfect model and something simple enough to be used for what i need.
Even human factor is a random event; does it follow a Gaussian distribution? i dont know, my educated guess is yes, itâs far more probable that an olimpic shooter hits the 9 instead of the 10 that it fires a shot in another target, even if it happened.
In a game itâs ok even casting fireballs at a dragon from your fingertips; you do that in many games and they are realistic once you put yourself in a world where it can be done and dragons exist.
The normal distribution of bullets if way more realistic than the âall or nothingâ of XCOM where the 8 bullets of a shotgun either all hit the alien or all miss it. Percentage is playable, XCOM is a good realistic game, but this one, in the shooting part, is better.
Not itâs not. For the purpose of your job itâs the best model, and that allows you to practically get on with your job, but itâs not the real world, itâs only a model of it. The reason that you have to do that and wouldnât ever make a real model is because the real world is far too complex to make that perfect model.
Genuinely sorry, I donât understand what you mean here.
The two arenât mutually exclusive. You can still show a percentage chance to hit, and then calculate the trajectory of bullets according to a normal distribution. Even if you only used percentages (which is not what Iâm advocating) you could use a percentage for each bullet, it doesnât have to be all hit or all miss.
What is the point of the discussion whenever PP system faithfully represents real-life bullet projection?Itâs a game and itâs an abstraction. Game, like movies, should feel authentic, but first and foremost should be sound mechanically. Reality can be used as an inspiration, but not as a mold.
A simple roll was too much of a simplification for my taste, but @SpiteAndMalice seemed to like it. I am still not convinced if one could contain mathematical formula of PP system into FiraXCOM system, which would be helpful, accurate or informative.
That said I am not a mathematician, and perhaps, math behind PP system could indeed be simplified to the level of XCOM. But why would it? I thought the appeal of PP was the attempt to bring more depth into the game. If I want to play something more streamlined I will play XCOM: Long War on my new DRM free GOG copy.
I do hope the devs have capped the values with min and max.
My snipers missing 100% shots was probably not due to that. It happened too frequently.
We can discuss forever. I know there are thing we dont know for many reasons, chaos in weather forecast, indetermination principle in quantum phisics, but once we have good models, refine till the point to be usable, that is the world we interact with.
At the olympic final a shooter leading the standing before last shot hit the center in the target of the one near him, scoring a zero and losing; it happened as strange at it can sound.
The first part is the obvious consideration that a professional puts almost all his shots in 5 cm at 50 metres wile i would perhaps put them in a one metre circle
So you want to see: shotgun shot, one bullet on target 15% two 25% three 50% four 70% five 50% six 30%, and this for every enemy part, head, body arm, leg, etc; better the circle.
Iâm not asking for a simplification of the projectile firing mechanics - Just a numerical indicator for the % chance to hit, which is already being displayed visually, and is already being calculated in the background by the game.
Iâm not asking for anything to be changed, Iâd just prefer to have the existing information presented to me in a way that would be easier to understand.
They are sure capped at max value or more probably the blue circle isnt 100% but something around 95%. It happened to me to hit a friend with a bullet even if i was sure he was outside the blue circle
No, I just want to see a number telling me what percentage of the target reticule is filled by the creature that Iâm aiming at.
If I know the percentage chance for 1 bullet hitting, I can work out everything else that I need to know from there.