Reduce target's X resistance by 10% (All dps classes)

"Reduce target's X resistance by 10%"

Can anyone elaborate on the meaning of the above statement.

I hear a lot of people on this and other forums are saying, "Debuff X is a 10% increase to damage". I don't believe it to be the case and I believe this is a popular misconception.

To me, from the way the description is written, I understand that it would reduce the amount of damage mitigated by that resistance.

Example, Boss mob has a 20% blunt/pierce/slash/elemental resistance (Hypothetical - no idea what the average resistance of a mob is; assumed lower). Player reduces its resistances by 10% (2% resistance). If one would normally hit for 100 damage, and 20 damage is mitigated by resistance, a 10% reduction in the mitigation would be a 2 damage increase. In this case, damage is increased by 2.5% {(1-0.18)/(1-.20)} for that specific damage type (blunt) for all players in the party/raid.

Does anyone else agree that this is the case or am I wrong in my understanding?

Thanks

No, the wording on the tooltip is just weird. It's a flat 10% damage boost for attacks of that type.

For example, Dragon Kick gives you 10% to all direct damage dealt as Monk, including skills like Impulse Drive (comes from Lancer) and the initial damage on Fracture (from Marauder.)

However, these effects do NOT boost DoT effects, at least not the physical ones (I never did get around to testing Requiem and Summoner DoTs...) Thus Demolish, Touch of Death and Fracture's DoT effects do not benefit from Dragon Kick. Still, it's a very valuable debuff.

Haven't done extensive parsing or anything, but Foe's Requiem (-10% elemental resistance) is definitely not a 10% damage increase to a bard's elemental damage abilities. Testing it out on target dummies I'd say it's no more than a 1-2 damage per tick increase for Flaming Arrow and Windbite, if that (really, it wasn't noticeable at all over the normal damage variation per tick and the max damage per tick didn't seem to increase at all). Of course, it's possible that target dummies have no elemental resistance, in which case this form of testing would be flawed.

If the dummy has 0 resistance, and you reduce that 0 by 10%, you should be gaining zero net damage and that would reinforce the theory rather than it being flawed...

Dragon kick giving an additional 10% flat damage to all monk (and non monk) abilities sound completely absurd. It is a debuff on a buff mob that can get overwritten by other monks, not a self buff like twin snakes. Not to mention impulse drive sounds like a piercing damage ability type and fracture sounds like a slashing damage type.

To add to my initial post, everyone has resistances. In your character page, you have 100 base slash/pierce/blunt resist under physical resistances. That amount can be raised with equipment (check the odin/bahamut vendor for that ring). You can stack elemental resist - Wind materia IV for example (for Twintania, regardless if it helps or not). It would make perfect sense that mobs would have the same attributes and that can be reduced for us to do more damage.

But honestly I think that resistances are a non-issue in this game. How often does one hear, don't cast fire on Ifrit because its resistant to fire.

Which ultimately makes me think as a theorycrafter, should we reconsider the importance (or lack thereof) of debuffs in our rotation...

Requiem adds a lot of damage to my Fester as a Summoner.

my test on the dummy as a lancer showed it around an 11% damage increase, easymodeX will likely pop in soon, last i heard he was gaining around 16% damage on bosses (primals?) with disembowl. Not a stretch to say different mobs may have different amounts of resist.

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Originally Posted by Bard

Haven't done extensive parsing or anything, but Foe's Requiem (-10% elemental resistance) is definitely not a 10% damage increase to a bard's elemental damage abilities. Testing it out on target dummies I'd say it's no more than a 1-2 damage per tick increase for Flaming Arrow and Windbite, if that (really, it wasn't noticeable at all over the normal damage variation per tick and the max damage per tick didn't seem to increase at all). Of course, it's possible that target dummies have no elemental resistance, in which case this form of testing would be flawed.

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Requiem decreases magical resistance, not elemental. As such, it does absolutely nothing for our (bard) skills like flame arrow and windbite - those are considered to be physical skills despite dealing elemental damage. Requiem does however buff all (even non-elemental) magical attacks - i.e. SMN and BLM benefit from it.

Physical resistance is different from magic resistance, just go check your character it will clearly state that your resistance to blunt/pierce/slash is 100 (aka a factor of 1) meaning you take "normal" damage from these weapon types, debuffing someone 10% would lead to that target now only having 90% resistance to that damage type (meaning that damage type will do 10% more damage), same if you add 1 piercing/slash/blunt resistance you would now take 1% less damage from that damage type (because they now have 101 instead of 100 resistance to that damage type

This is apart from a targets armor (certain mobs will take less damage from physical, gargoyle type mobs in AK is a prime example of this.

Magic resistance on the other hand is a % reduction (note that you will have several hundred resistance towards each element), as an example let's say that 500 resistance to fire equals 25% damage resistance to fire, lowering this by 10% (bard song) will only increase the fire damage that target takes by 2.5%

So spell resistance debuffs are weaker on paper (unless we get immune type mobs!) however more people tend to use magic based attacks then there is people in a raid that can take advantage of a physical debuff (monk's crush debuff only works for them as an example) so the overall raid benefit of the resistance debuffs are pretty equal (unless you stack 3 bards and a lancer...;)

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Originally Posted by Furon

Magic resistance on the other hand is a % reduction (note that you will have several hundred resistance towards each element), as an example let's say that 500 resistance to fire equals 25% damage resistance to fire, lowering this by 10% (bard song) will only increase the fire damage that target takes by 2.5%

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This is not how it works in practice. Foe Requiem is more than a 10% damage increase for casters.

The old testing I did was pretty casual on a few mobs while leveling up.

Recently I spent most of an AK run doing a much more precise test and the result (on those mobs at least) was a ~10.5% increase in damage, which supports the notion of "mobs have effectively 0 resist, with the debuff applying an additive -10% resist".

I'd give a nod to someone else's observation/suggestion that the detailed resistance mechanics are a holdover from vanilla FF14 and have mostly been removed/normalized in ARR.

I haven't done any testing or detailed testing on any primal or coil target since I tend to just go pew pew on them.


If anyone really cares, it's not complicated to test:

1. Find a high damage spammable attack with no random requirements (position, stance). E.g. True Thrust.

2. Make sure no one else can debuff/enhance that damage type.

3. Spam it. Record the MIN and MAX damage numbers you get (for crits divide by 1.5; alternatively, you can ignore crits if there's any suspicion of a crit damage variance).

4. Now apply the debuff and spam it. Compare the ratio of damage for both minimums and both maximums.


Note: the point is that using the minimum and maximum only will mitigate the effect of RNG and the illusion of "average". You can get pretty reliable numbers using a min-min and max-max comparison way the hell faster than comparing averages.