Its been a long time for Resistance!

There's all sorts of 0's on all of our character profiles. Resistances. All of them at 0 almost 100% of the time, no matter what we are wearing. Sometimes glamor gear changes the average from 100 to 103, but lets be honest, it doesn't do anything.

Monsters? We all think about intuitive battle... Why am i casting bliz 3 on shiva? why am i casting fire 3 on ifrit? "Balance" is preventing us from having cool resistances!

Who doesn't want resistance to Heavy or Sleep? Gone Hunting Lately? How about Resistance to Petrification? Remember the Ribbon item from previous editions? Immunity and Resistance to Status Ailments and Elements is one of the Pillars of Final Fantasy.

You could slowly work it in. 5% at first, then 15%, then eventually people wouldn't notice when it became 25% and 30% and 50%. Eventually after a half dozen updates of slowly making resistances (and their opposite, weaknesses) part of gear, spells, and monsters, it would again be in its rightful intuitive place.

I thought that was all for PvP.

In order to implement that, you'd have to rework every class that used elemental magic. BLM would be hurting big time for Ifrit and Shiva (Either no big damage fire spells against Ifrit, so their dps is severely limited, or their dps drops to nil during Shiva while they waste time slinging useless blizzards to get their mp back up).

Then again, why shouldn't Ifrit get damaged by fire? I've never once heard 'I'm made of meat and bones, so your punches won't hurt me!'

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Originally Posted by shintashi

"Balance" is preventing us from having cool resistances!

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The point you need to make is why cool resistances are more important than game balance. There is a very strong desire from the playerbase to use the classes they favor in any given type of content. There's also a need to keep skillsets reasonably compact, so you can't just layer on increasingly more spells with similar workings.

In earlier final fantasy games this was less of an issue because you could freely switch to the proper element and spam that attack. In this game certain attacks are meant to weave together in certain ways. Black mages for example rotate between ice and fire phases to manage their MP. You would have to break those mechanics apart entirely, substitute for them, or tell people they can't play their preferred job for certain encounters.

I personally don't really want to see them implement this but there is something people are ignoring. Why is everyone just focusing on the "loss" of damage? Ifrit, if strong to fire, would probably be weak to ice or water, or both. To balance it out he would probably be weak to ice, so a THM/BLK would, instead of rotating between fire and icce, could spam ice spells that are like... 1.5x or 2x stronger. This may increase over all DPS, or lower it slightly.

And Shiva? If Ice spells became useless, fire spells with a 1.5x or 2x damage increase would massively increase the DPS a BLK would do, or balance it out just fine.

For status resistances, I believe they are active outside of PvP, but the materia that grant bonuses to them are not. The Coeurl's eye is so far as I know the only piece of gear that has status resistance on it, but given it's low level, it's almost totally out of the question for any type of endgame use. Petrification, sleep, stun, and paralysis would be useful for tanks at least, though the abilities that inflict these are often dodge-able so the resistances could provide a reduced penalty for failure to dodge them as opposed to a guaranteed reduction in the duration of a debuff.

I would like to see these, but Yoshida has said the team doesn't want to have specific pieces of gear be deemed "necessary" by the playerbase for specific pieces of content. So if any more of these show up (and endgame relevant), they are likely to be across the board for a given slot, easily obtainable, or some other such solution.

In regards to elemental resistances, I will agree that for an MMO setting and with the goal of not having one specific job be left out or be absolutely required for specific content, enemies should not have elemental resistances. Mostly because with what we have right now, it would mostly only effect BLM. Other classes do have "elemental" damage too, but for the most part it would just be simply "don't do that one skill" or ignore the resistance altogether at some loss.

However, for player resistances this doesn't hold up as well. There is the same argument as with the status resistances that the dev team doesn't want a single piece of gear be "The One" for a class in a slot, but if the bonuses were balanced right, I'm sure it could be worked out. First, elemental resistances would again largely be relevant for tanks. Everyone takes raid damage, but tanks are the ones primarily concerned with damage reduction. It can already be said that in encounters with primarily (or purely) magic damage, parry is useless, so Det, Crit, and (maybe) SkS are therefore better for that individual encounter. Comparing with elemental resistances, some encounters have a distinct lack of elemental damage and others have an abundance. Not only this, but they could add an elemental resistance bonus to all at once. They just have to balance how much a point of a different secondary stat is worth compared to an elemental resistance point.

In addition to status and elemental resistances, we also have physical resistances for blunt, piercing, and slashing. For which we again have about one item, in the entire game that uses them, the Ring of lasting shelter (Also the pixie earring, forgot about it). And this one is alright if you just hit lv50, somehow have behemoth horns and your master gladiator/marauder ring to get you into beginning lv50 content. But, 375 tomes later, or a lucky drop in any dungeon i60 or above either. Or you could just opt for buying a crafted one. Point being, it is one of the weakest tanking rings you can get at lv50, because it is only ilv50. So, the physical resistances are also largely not used in endgame. The only more complicated thing here is that it may be more difficult to determine what type of physical damage is being done. Phlegethon is using a big-ass sword, obviously slashing; Twintania attacking with a bite, or claws, or wings, not as obvious.

Of course "balance" is the big word here, if they put resistances on gear, the encounter team would have to account for it and adjust for it to be appropriately useful. I would love to suggest they add long-term buff items, something like a sanction in duration, that could give +10 blunt/slash/element resist, but you can only have one active at a time. But, this would generally fall into the category of "then encounters would 'require' people to get this/these and we don't want players to be dependent on consumable items for battle." I would suggest something like this so that players don't have to trade another stat for these resistances, like they would for standard gear. Then again, if they decided all lv60 gear would have a third secondary stat which would always be a resistance of some sort, that could also work.

TL;DR
I'm for players having use of the resistance stats.
Enemies won't get resistances, as has been stated by the devs on several occasions previously.
With appropriate/skillful balancing, useful resistances could be given to players to the game without severe changes to the system.

It is true that virtually no class/job is wholly elementally aligned so badly that they cannot make an alternative choice in battle for opposite, or at least neutral effect. BLM? Fire/Ice, third wheel Lit. WHM? Earth/Air, third wheel Water. Dragoon has Dragon fire but a long cool down, so it isn't necessary.

By implementing Resistances (and Matching Weaknesses) The use of materia melds, and Crafted primal weapons would serve a special place in the game. You could still use your Coil/Atma/Heavensward Elementally Neutral Gear, but you might have a primal gear set that is say, 20% more effective vs. a specific type of enemy. BLM dmg would be good vs. Ifrit, Levi, and Shiva, WHM would be good vs. Titan, Garuda, and Ramuh.