Talk:Weapon

Comments
I'm not sure I fully understand the goal of using variables on this page. Can someone clarify? It seems like it might be being used to abbreviate links to specific subsections on another article, but (1) it doesn't really seem like the target articles or the link's usage in these tables really beg for such targeted links in the first place, and (2) the continued use of these variables in the AoC tables mean that these targeted links are going to the wrong section of the target article. If it's really, really necessary to have targeted links, I'd suggest a simpler, more general-purpose code like http://digimon.wikia.com/wiki/Template:C, where you could just type, without having to rely on what is kind of opaque code for newer editors. But honestly looking at the target articles, I think readers would be perfectly happy with just Sheikah Gear, if we even need to have these in the table at all.

Also:
 * is there a way to replace "Exp" with some sort of centralized refnote, which could be displayed with a tooltip (like how wikipedia does it)? It seems like a lot of redundant code for little benefit.
 * Can we split the master mode compendium numbers into their own column? For what use sortability does have on this table, including the master mode number in the same column handicaps that, and you're left with what looks like a clickable link to the reader for little benefit.
 * Having the description text in a single column makes the table itself almost unreadable, and the description itself is wholly unreadable. Moving it so that the image is rowspan 2 and the description is colspan max-1 would make the page much more readable, admittedly at the expense of sortability.
 * "can use a shield" seems completely superfluous to the category -- one-handed weapons let you use a shield, nothing else does.
 * For AoC, the shield used seems like it could be combined with the category, something like " One-handed weapon Shield: Steel Lizal ". There's too many rows that just say "none" to really justify a separate column when space is already at a premium. Revali and Teba's weapon lists certainly seem to indicate that BotW's "archetype" system, as much as it ever was meaningful, has been discarded in this game.
 * The "Archetype" column seems like it takes up a lot of room for what could be a quick bulleted list, something like "royal Guard's Series: weapons with high offense or defense but low durability". In AoC, it gets even more confusing -- a lot of the archetypes seem to have no bearing on gameplay, and some (like Zelda's bows being "Royal Gear") don't seem to have official basis.
 * For BotW, sortability really only seems functional for the name, compendium no., attack, and durability. While this isn't nothing, I'm struggling to see the use cases where keeping this sortability would be more useful than being able to just read the table in the first place. For name and compendium no., at least, ctrl+f is going to handle most use cases by readers, since those contexts would be more about searching for a specific weapon. For attack and durability...comparing those honestly seems like more of a curiosity for discussing trivia, rather than something that would occur in normal gameplay. Even if you were for some reason trying to compare durability in-game, you'd be doing that between weapons you have, which would be a ctrl+f situation and would be very unlikely to be adjacent on a sorted table.
 * If sortability must be maintained, I'd suggest at least a compromise -- most of the columns here are numerical or contain very thin text entries. If the headers are abbreviated and fontsize reduced, we could keep the description in its own column with much less textwrap (see the attack tables on khwiki.com/Game:Eraqus, for example). If the headers have to be abbreviated two much, you could have a short explanation of column meanings at the start of the table. For example, instead of a header with "Compendium no.", you just have "No." or "#", and then a bulleted list before the table saying "No.: The number of the weapon in the Hyrule compendium". Honestly, this is good table design to begin with and should be done by default for all but the most obvious tables. It's a common thing to see in Japanese Ultimanias, as well, since they have a premium on how much space the stat tables take up. For the "Category" column, that could also be abbreviated if some sort of icon is used for one-hande,d two-handed, and spear weapons -- I believe BotW or AoC has icons for weapon classes, but I may be wrong.
 * For AoC, sortability again seems only functional for name, min attack, and max attack. As with BotW, I'm struggling to think of reasonable use cases.
 * For AoC, I'm not sure there's a ton of use for min base attack stats. I can see the point of lv1 stats -- it's helpful to know whether you've gotten the best base version of the weapon that you can get (and as a sidenote, it would be very helpful to document whatever equation is used for leveling up attack, so that you can tell whether a leveled weapon is fundamentally stronger than the new one you just got), but I really can't think of a case in which a player would be searching for the weakest version of a weapon available. Honestly, if they are? I think we can safely put that information on the weapon's specific article. A full overview page like this should focus on the most relevant, useful information needed to get a useful comparison of the items in it, and I think we need to be willing to cut certain stats from this page if they take up more space than their usefulness justifies.
 * I can't find any explanation of what "tier" means for AoC on this page. There's an explanation in the HW section, but it's unclear if it applies to AoC. Whatever it is, it seems to be cross-matriced enough across categories that it actually could justify having its own (thin) column.

I've made a draft of what just moving the description would look like at User:KrytenKoro/AoC. I can incorporate the other suggestions I've made for further illustration if desired. 19:26, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay, as some followup I changed my appearance settings to no siderail, expanded view, and the wrapping problem is a lot more tolerable. Still an issue, but I can see how this passed initial review now. Since that's not the default view for readers, I would still advise some reorganization. 21:04, 2 March 2022 (UTC)