PvE Job Tooltips- NIN/RPR

In both the reaper and ninja tooltips for Shadow of Death and Trick attack respectively, it states "increasing damage you deal target by 10%", which is grammatically quite confusing and incorrect I think with the omission of too many articles in the text.

There are many things this could be changed to- but "increasing your damage dealt to the target by 10%" makes the most sense to me. Anything involving adding "to the target" instead of "target" would make a lot more sense in general though, and stop it from feeling strange to a lot of native speakers.

Thanks for reading!

It makes sense to me. There are a lot of things that native speakers write which exclude fluff such as "the" or "to the", especially when they don't want to sound like a robot.

They also have to work with the limited space of the tooltip and keeping it short and simple is probably better.

This might sound awkward to someone who is unfamiliar with the nuances of which prepositions are optional when; however there's nothing wrong with it grammatically.

• If I deal you two cards, two cards have I dealt you.
• The dealer should deal her a card.
• I dealt them two damage.
• The damage I dealt them was fatal.

The target of a deal--as in a distribution--need not involve an explicit "to". In some cases it actually sounds even more awkward or verbose to include the "to":

• If I deal to you two cards, two cards have I dealt to you.
• The dealer should deal to her a card.
• I dealt to them two damage.

In the last case,

• The damage I dealt to them was fatal.

adding "to" doesn't make it much more awkward but the first is still grammatically acceptable.

This is because the verb "to deal" can take both a direct object and an indirect object. When specifying an indirect object, you do not need to include "to". Consider the verb "to pass" as in a ball:

She passed him the ball.
She(subj) passed(v) him(io) the ball(do).

which could be rearranged into the clause "...the ball she passed him..." if someone were interested in the question, "which ball?"

In the same way,

You deal target* damage
You(subj) deal(v) target(io) damage(do)

can be rearranged to form the clause "...damage you deal target..." if someone were interested in the question, "which damage?"

*In this case you might be going, "AHA! But 'target' by itself is ungrammatical! It should be 'the target'!" Well, yes, it would be outside the specific context of the game. In the specialized vocabulary we use in the course of playing the game, "target" is not the same word; it is an identifier equivalent in use to a name. Anything you're targeting is designated "target", so "target" by itself is fine. They need not be referred to as "the target".