Have you thought of looking into using projectiles to display damage numbers, with them emitting from the damaged enemy/character? I've been playing with this in my own game and so far I can make it display based on a set "power level" variable. By increasing this number, you can simulate getting a better weapon, stronger attack, etc.
Interesting! I might play around with that but it would be very heavy on sprite usage and I'm pretty much at the cap already. A big problem i have is because the player attack proj is dynamic based on class, main skill selected + modifiers all those sprits have to be loaded in so if I can find a way to redesign that so only the active skill is actually loaded and instead the projectile tiles take up x amount of ram space and just swap in/out . That'd be a huge undertaking though.