What is the nature of the current endgame's White Mage offensive spells?

This is regarding Dia, Glare, and Afflatus Misery spells, which deal unaspected damage, as per their descriptions.This is mostly for roleplaying purposes but I'm curious to see if there's established lore on it.

Their animations involve a lot of pretty lights but I can't ascertain the nature of their damage. Although this is magic we're talking about, the nature of the damage sustained is often pretty intuitive/self-evident when it comes to other spells. For example, when a spell is very clearly a fire spell, you can be very sure it's going to burn something. When it's an earth-based spell and you're flinging rocks at people, you could be causing trauma due to impact. An aero spell could be seen as compressed air bursts that cause lacerations or some such high-flow injury.

Dia, glare, etc...-type of spells, though? Are not so clear to me, so I wonder. Is there something in the lore that explains how exactly they damage the target? As far back as 2.0, there were times when certain skills were woven into the class and/or job quests, which was pretty neat because they often hinted (if not outright mentioned) what the skill did. Nowadays, the devs don't integrate skills quite as much, if at all, due to the fact that some skills are simply just... rotated out. This is an understandable situation. I wish it weren't so, but I get it.

They're light elemental. Remember, there are 8 elements in this game, Fire, Ice, Lightning, Water, Earth, Wind, Darkness, and Light. in terms of how they damage the target, I would assume they cause an element overload of the enemy's aether. Too much of any kind of element can mess things up good.

Light and Dark aren't elements, though - they're aspects or charges that can be applied to elemental aether.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Light and Dark aren't elements, though - they're aspects or charges that can be applied to elemental aether.

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I thought that was Umbral and Astral, which were different.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

I thought that was Umbral and Astral, which were different.

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They're different terms for the same thing: the active and passive charges that elements can have.

The Source uses the term "astral" for the active state and "umbral" for the passive.

The First uses "dark" for active and "light" for passive. (I can't remember if they get capitals for this precise use.)

It seems to be coincidental that the charges actually are represented by primordial Dark and Light forces.

Holy is described as just being an concentrated explosion of aether in the lorebook, so you don't necessarily need an elemental aspect attached to something for it to be harmful; presumably just a high enough density of aether.

Interesting.

What does an explosion of aether do to the body? Does it deform it? Does it rearrange the body's own aether?

Considering that we've seen unaspected spells like Ruin bowl people over in cutscenes, I'd assume that they can generate physical force akin to a more conventional explosion..

Ah.

That sounds like the target might experience something akin to a blast injury, the effect of over-pressurization waves with body surfaces. In that case... The affected structures would most likely be gas-filled structures: lungs, GI tract, middle ear, etc... Might see pulmonary barotrauma, tympanic membrane rupture and middle ear damage, abdominal hemorrhage and perforation, eye rupture... Maybe even a concussion.

If that's how it works, of course.

There is also damage to ones aether to consider. Even if there is no physical side effect from the magic, the damage it deals to your aether would have much the same effect as a physical one.