(LL Discussion) Physical and Magical not distinguishable? UI can't implement it? Why?

Okay so at the time of writing this, Live Letter LX is not yet over, but i wanted to pose this discussion to everyone here.
During the Q&A Between Yoship and the the UI Designer, Kei Odagiri the following was talked about -

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M "I think it would be very sweet if we could see whether an attack is physical or magical in a little pop up window"

O "Ohhh yea, that would probably be very handy hehe"

O "With the current system, as how the packet transfer works, as a UI team we can't do anything about this"

Y "If we wanted.... we could probably do it"

Y "There are actions that work against physical or magical damage, so I understand that it would be more useful if you understand and can instantly see where to use it"

Y "But there is a reason on why we haven't implemented it.... We always work on the battle changes until a few days before a patch and we often had to implement final changes"

Y "If we added more features that rely on this information, it would delay development a lot"

O "It would probably overwhelm the quality assurance team"

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This was from the live unofficial translation done by the ffxiv subreddit team, so keep in mind that the translation might be a little rough and may well be incorrect in some manner, keep that in mind.



I have a lot of respect for the work done on the UI by the team but....Still...Im confused by this.

Why can't Physical and magical be two seperate text colours?

Why is it so difficult? The game already knows if an attack is going to be phyiscal or magical when you're actually playing the game, why not implement a system where the text colour changes depending on if its phyiscal or magical? You dont have to colour every single attack flying text individually.

We already have additional, contextual damage popups for Parrys and Blocks etc....Why cant those resources be used in a similar way?

Infact, i was talking with a friend about this a few minutes ago which prompted me to post this on the forums....But apparently, she tells me that some third party tools ALREADY DO THIS. They display physical and magical damage taken as two seperate colours. So why cant the UI team do it if its clearly possible just from reading whats already there?

When direct hits were added, Direct Critical hits were also added as a result. This is a clear example of the flying text being changed at a fundamental level for contextual damage. Why can't Physical/Magical be done in a similar vein if all it would require is a change in colour or similar to how parrys/blocks are done?



Does anyone have the answers to these questions?

I think they were meaning more along the lines of, if a casting attack is going to deal physical or magical damage then it will look different. Which would be a more major UI change and if the damage isn't fixed to one type until days before the patch goes live, then I can see that being an issue.
They mention a 'pop up window' even, so what was being asked was quite a change to the current system.

What you mean is changing the colour of the floating text after the damage has been applied, to signify that it's magical/physical. It's after the fact, but allows you to learn without additional steps.
This is probably easier to implement, but it doesn't seem like that's what they understood as the question.

I have to agree that it's odd they say it can't be done. Any given ability must clearly have some kind of data flag in it which defines whether it does magical or physical damage, since that's necessary for it do actually do the correct damage type when playing. Why can't the client simply read this information and apply some sort of simple UI change to indicate an attack's damage type? I don't see why it needs to be some kind of "extra" thing added on to attack data that will somehow cause problems when they need to make last minute changes. Just let us read what's already there.

It doesn't need to be a fancy popup or anything, just changing the text colour of the flying text or cast bar is enough. Hell, even if all that happened was that the attack had (magical) or (physical) after its damage value in the battle log, this would still be miles more helpful than the current arrangement where it's literally a complete mystery, nothing in the game will tell you what type of damage you're receiving. Instead the only way to know if an attack is magical or physical is to either use third party addons (and the fact that these addons can read the properties of an attack and display its damage type should be more than enough evidence to prove that its possible in the actual game), or to simply run experiments to see if the damage is affected by magic-only or physical-only defense buffs.

Seraphor already covered most of it, but the other point about "But 3rd Party Apps!" is related to the data actually being used to generate the display. All a 3rd party app has to do is read the output with no real QA or technical requirements. In other words, they're basically just reading a text file already output by the game. An in game solution would require reading both the input and output data flow, and would have to actually be tried and tested in QA to ensure basically 100% accuracy. There's a lot more going on there that 3rd party apps don't have to deal with.

Would it be possible? Yeah. Is it considered worth doing? It seems not.

Better Translation: It requires effort even though it's probably really easy.

I've submitted game breaking bugs both in-game and on the forums and they get thrown in the pile of "works as intended" when it involves some form of work. I don't really understand it, they accept mundane camera "bugs" but won't accept complete character lock such as when you donate at the enclave then try to take your stuff back under certain conditions it will lock your HUD and make you unable to exit. Or when you can't chat anymore because your crafting macro ended on a controller but not on keyboard etc etc... It is what it is, they will fix what they feel like fixing. Not trying to troll, this is just my thoughts on it, not like it matters to anyone.

They already bothered giving some physical attacks a slight distinction in that the combat log says "readies" instead of "begins casting", so I don't see why they couldn't at least make that universal.

This was one of many disappointing answers we got during the live letter. I think the only question that got a positive response was the one about any new UI skins. Everything else was no, no, no, no, no and more no. And the reasons were usually the same: "it requires work", "it requires work", "it requires work". Meanwhile here we're reworking gathering collectables, with a new interface and all, something that was already working well enough and nobody asked to change.

I don't understand it. They already gave interruptable skills a different cast bar, why is it so hard to do the same for magical attacks?

Well AoE attacks are most often magical because of DD and healer defense balance, a physical AoE would hit healers a lot harder than melees. But for tankbusters it's a guessing game, especially without any 3rd party tools. And having DRK balanced with a magical only cooldown in mind is just bad design, when a large portion of the playerbase will never be able to use it properly.

Either rework the cast bar or Dark Mind I would say o.ô

Especially when they are making a lot of things "more accessible" (Fishing? for real? Don't get me wrong, Fish Eyes is a horrible skill and a rework is appreciated, but dumbing down fishing will not lead to more people suddenly like fishing, they have long quit before they even reach the point to use that skill...), but then they leave a crucial mechanic in a state where the average player just have no idea what is going on.

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Originally Posted by Tint

I don't understand it. They already gave interruptable skills a different cast bar, why is it so hard to do the same for magical attacks?

Well AoE attacks are most often magical because of DD and healer defense balance, a physical AoE would hit healers a lot harder than melees. But for tankbusters it's a guessing game, especially without any 3rd party tools. And having DRK balanced with a magical only cooldown in mind is just bad design, when a large portion of the playerbase will never be able to use it properly.

Either rework the cast bar or Dark Mind I would say o.ô

Especially when they are making a lot of things "more accessible" (Fishing? for real? Don't get me wrong, Fish Eyes is a horrible skill and a rework is appreciated, but dumbing down fishing will not lead to more people suddenly like fishing, they have long quit before they even reach the point to use that skill...), but then they leave a crucial mechanic in a state where the average player just have no idea what is going on.

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DRK shouldn't have to use Dark Mind for tank busters, and neither does GNB need to use Camouflage (parry so physical only).
They have enough tools between their 30% mitigation, their on demand shield, and Rampart/Reprisal to take anything in their stride if used correctly.

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

DRK shouldn't have to use Dark Mind for tank busters, and neither does GNB need to use Camouflage (parry so physical only).
They have enough tools between their 30% mitigation, their on demand shield, and Rampart/Reprisal to take anything in their stride if used correctly.

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

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Point is you can't have skills that specifically reduce a school of attack and then not be able to determine the type of attack coming easily.

That's ridiculous.

Other games don't have this issue and FFXIV shouldn't either. There are ways around it but they refuse to implement them. The whole "readies attack" vs "begins casting attack" would be the easiest solution. But they can't even be arsed to do that and it's extremely frustrating.

Everything in this game is completely scripted, to the point where you can write out a spreadsheet with the exact timestamps at which every boss ability occurs and plan out all your cooldown uses in advance. Just get the playerbase to submit a list of boss abilities, their timestamps, and their respective damage types, and tell the dev team to get out their crayons and colour them in.

It's not that they can't do it. It's because they either don't want to or can't be bothered to.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Everything in this game is completely scripted, to the point where you can write out a spreadsheet with the exact timestamps at which every boss ability occurs and plan out all your cooldown uses in advance. Just get the playerbase to submit a list of boss abilities, their timestamps, and their respective damage types, and tell the dev team to get out their crayons and colour them in.

It's not that they can't do it. It's because they either don't want to or can't be bothered to.

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I totally agree with you but i definitely feel like the translation of the question submitted may have been off. I remember one suggestion like "i just want to know what is magic damage and what isnt". I dont remember anyone asking for a pop-up window lol. The question seemed bizarre to me to be totally honest. We have green damage numbers for health regeneration, they could do something like yellow or purple for magic damage recieved.

I still do think for abilities with cast bars, they could change the color depending on whether it's phys or magic. Presumably can't be that hard to implement. Of course abilities without cast bars you still gotta figure out the old fashioned way, but it would be a big step forward.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

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Camouflage, yes, but Dark Mind is not a usefull tool against trash pulls. Magic auto attacks are pretty rare and with only 10 seconds duration it's not even that good against magic attacking trash packs. Dark Mind always was best against tank busters, making DRK the most defensive tank in savage raids, where magic busters are not uncommon.

And Camouflage by the way has a 10% damage mitigation against all types of damage, and when you parry an attack you can be sure it's physical.

I don't want to take away the flavour of DRK and I don't want to nerf his awesome extra button against magic busters, but I want to know when I can actually use it. Otherwise it's just a useless button.

But when they really can't give us a clue if an attack is magical, then maybe give Dark Mind also a 10% damage mitigation against all types of damage on top of the magical mitigation. Or bring back Dark Dance and let it share the cooldown with Dark Mind, so at least there is an actual fluff mitiagtion tool (not that DRK really needs it - while DRK is lacking a fluff mitigation tool, TBN is just that powerfull... but Dark Dance wasn't that strong anyway, so I don't see a problem with adding it back).


However, it has to be saved somewhere if an attack does magical or physical damage. Is it really that difficult to let every cast look that up and do something like "if physical use that normal castbar" and "if magical use that other castbar". Then they can switch between magical and physical back and forth and the game automatically uses the correct castbar o.ô

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Originally Posted by Tint

And Camouflage by the way has a 10% damage mitigation against all types of damage, and when you parry an attack you can be sure it's physical.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

DRK shouldn't have to use Dark Mind for tank busters, and neither does GNB need to use Camouflage (parry so physical only).
They have enough tools between their 30% mitigation, their on demand shield, and Rampart/Reprisal to take anything in their stride if used correctly.

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

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Just wanted to correct you here.

Magical attacks of all types are now parryable/blockable, they changed that some time in stormblood i believe, to make PLD more viable in raids with the use of sheltron and Bulwark. So you can't even tell if something is physical anymore based on if you can parry it.

Honestly its stupid. Anyone done E4S? The attack where he smashes the arena with his hand over and over? That's magical. Yes, Magical. He slams the ground with his massive fist, and its magical, it boggles the mind. There really needs to be a way to tell what damage type is what because even things that LOOK physical arent, even things that look magical, arent. The Auto attacks from Shiva in E8S For example? She blasts magic out of her hand, you'd assume its magical but last time i checked, it was physical and yet in E2S, where magic is also blasted out of the bosses hand, that IS magical, so its not like magical auto attacks are uncommon.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

DRK shouldn't have to use Dark Mind for tank busters, and neither does GNB need to use Camouflage (parry so physical only).
They have enough tools between their 30% mitigation, their on demand shield, and Rampart/Reprisal to take anything in their stride if used correctly.

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

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Homogenize in this case would work better. Add a 10% physical damage mitigation to Dark Mind, and then it can actually be used as a cooldown instead of being absolutely worthless 90% of the time.

The amount of technical debt they managed to get themselves into with this game is pretty amazing. I mean, I sort of get it, 2.0 was a rush job and no way they expected the level of success they are seeing nearly 10 years later.

Well, hopefully 6.0 is the last expansion for this game because it's becoming painfully obvious how long in the tooth this game is getting to be. I am sure YoshiP is feeling the same way and would love to be able to start again fresh and be able to design a game that isn't so bound by technical limitations and memory constrains that apparently can't be worked around without reworking everything.

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Originally Posted by PangTong

I have to agree that it's odd they say it can't be done. Any given ability must clearly have some kind of data flag in it which defines whether it does magical or physical damage, since that's necessary for it do actually do the correct damage type when playing. Why can't the client simply read this information and apply some sort of simple UI change to indicate an attack's damage type?

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I suspect the client doesn't have the information, and that's probably the core issue. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the client doesn't have a concept of 'damage type' at all; all damage calculations are almost certainly handled by the server. So the client tells the server "I executed this ability" (where the ability happens to mitigate magic damage). The server just tells the client "you took <X> damage". The client doesn't know that the damage was magical or physical, the client just knows that the damage is <X> amount; the value of <X> as communicated by the server may be lower or higher depending on what mitigations the server is aware you have.

I mean, the damage processing part of that is fairly standard for MMOs (and really, any server-based game). The thing is, I can't see anywhere in that where the client ever needed to know the damage type, which means the client probably has no provision for that information to be conveyed from the server in the first place. So either the client would need to have every single possible enemy attack added to a table that lists whether it's physical or magical, or the actual client/server protocol would need to be changed to contain additional combat information in the packets.

Moreover, consider that the server architecture originally supported elemental-aspected damage types, and almost certainly supported combinations of them depending on certain things. So I'm guessing that behind the scenes the server does the calculation of total damage done and just hands that back. Think of Dungeons & Dragons, when you have a holy sword and the attack does <X> amount of slashing damage but also <Y> amount of radiant damage; the DM will take into account any mitigations the target has (i.e., takes half damage from radiant damage, for instance), and then just subtract the total resulting damage from the target.

Even without the old elemental-aspected damage, if there are any attacks which do both physical and magical damage—and it wouldn't surprise me if there are some—that means the server would calculate the mitigations separately and then just hand back a total damage, rather than handing back a "you take <X> physical damage and also <Y> magical damage". So at that point, communicating whether damage is physical or magical would require splitting any such attacks up into two separate attacks and sending the damage results separately.

And that is not only a non-minor change, but also would have implications for some abilities; think of Third Eye, where it reduces damage taken from the next attack by 10%. If you have an ability that does both physical and magical damage, if the resulting damage is sent as a single attack, Third Eye will mitigate the entire attack. If you split it into two separate attacks, now Third Eye would only mitigate the first. So for things like that to work, you'd need to actually change it so that all damage was bundled into 'attack' envelopes and then the physical and magical damage would share an 'envelope' to make them a single attack, while displaying the damage amounts separately...

I mean, I don't know for sure that's how any of their server architecture works; that's all just hypothesis and guesswork (albeit guesswork based on personal experience both as a software dev in general and a former game dev in specific). But from personal experience, things like that are 100% how you end up with spaghetti code/"that would be a lot of work to change" scenarios that make a given feature request a massive ask, when the request seems on the surface to be utterly reasonable and fairly straightforward.

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Originally Posted by VenKitsune

Just wanted to correct you here.

Magical attacks of all types are now parryable/blockable, they changed that some time in stormblood i believe, to make PLD more viable in raids with the use of sheltron and Bulwark. So you can't even tell if something is physical anymore based on if you can parry it.

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Nope, you can't parry magical attacks. But yes, you can block them now.

The change to parry (and block) was that you can parry (and block) attacks without facing towards the enemy now.

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Originally Posted by Tint

Nope, you can't parry magical attacks. But yes, you can block them now.

The change to parry (and block) was that you can parry (and block) attacks without facing towards the enemy now.

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Really? I'm almost certain i've been parrying magic attacks on GNB after the 99 kills (Read: Slog) through Seat of Sacrifice for the totems, namely the LB1 and earthshakers but i could be wrong, those could be physical for all i know or i could of been seeing things, i havent bothered to check. Just another problem with the current system, heh.
Funny thing too, there is no way to GUARANTEE a parry these days, only ways to guarantee a block so you could chalk it up to being "well i didnt parry it, must be magical" when its IS physical, you just have horrible luck on parry chances. Ironically, this might of been the only good use for the old parry substat...Testing their game for systems they dont want to implement because they're too busy adding umbrellas to the game.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

I suspect the client doesn't have the information, and that's probably the core issue.

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Naming no names and discussing no specific forbidden third party things, but from researching the thingy the OP implied existed, the client absolutely receives this information as part of incoming damage network info. In fact, it also natively has the ability to change the color of damage text but they haven't made use of it. While edge cases may abound, there's a third party *cough* nonexistent *cough* tool that does this on a basic level with a relatively simple script.

Small indie company, please understand.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Naming no names and discussing no specific forbidden third party things, but from researching the thingy the OP implied existed, the client absolutely receives this information as part of incoming damage network info. In fact, it also natively has the ability to change the color of damage text but they haven't made use of it. While edge cases may abound, there's a third party *cough* nonexistent *cough* tool that does this on a basic level with a relatively simple script.

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Naming no names and discussing no specific forbidden third party things, my—admittedly presently sleep-deprived—understanding is that the third-party tool in question bases it on whether the combat log is told to say "X uses Y" or "X casts Y", which indeed a very simple script. However, my understanding is also that the 'casts/uses' message is not actually based on whether the damage is magical or physical, but whether the originating ability is handled as a weaponskill or a spell.

But whether it's a weaponskill or a spell isn't guaranteed to be tied to the type of damage, but rather how it's handled in other parts of the combat system. RDM's Enchanted Moulinet, for instance, is a weaponskill (...I think?) but does unaspected magical damage, while the non-enchanted Moulinet—also a weaponskill—does physical. Because it is a weaponskill, you should still be able to use Enchanted Moulinet when silenced (provided you had enough black/white mana before getting silenced, anyway), but it will still do magical damage.

Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me if the three mobs with the obnoxious AoE paralyze in Puppets' Bunker are using a spell (since it's a cast-bar that can be interrupted), but that the attack which paralyzes might well do physical damage. (Mind you, it wouldn't surprise me if it does magical damage either, because rational definitions of magical and physical do not always apply in this combat system.)

Though whether the originating attack is a spell or weaponskill will probably get you like 95% of the way there, admittedly.

And I certainly may be wrong; I haven't bothered to try to slice open the FFXIV network protocol to know whether or not it actually does include the type of damage rather than just the indicator of whether the source is a spell or a weaponskill, nor is the source code for the totally hypothetical unnamed tool available that I know of to take a quick look at it.

However, my larger point is just that from (somewhat painful) personal experience, I know how design decisions made early in a game's life that made sense at the time can come around to bite you several years later when players want a seemingly-entirely-reasonable feature that has you tearing your hair out to try to figure out a sane way to implement without having to gut chunks of established systems to do it.

It's certainly conceivable that for some reasons Square-Enix is just making excuses and the client has all the information needed, and they could do five minutes of work to make it happen. But it's also possible that Square-Enix made some decisions years ago which became part of the scaffolding of current systems, and trying to take out and replace a piece is like trying to remove one of the bottom sticks in a Jenga tower: sure, it's possible, but you're going to live in fear of the Jenga tower falling over.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

But whether it's a weaponskill or a spell isn't guaranteed to be tied to the type of damage, but rather how it's handled in other parts of the combat system. RDM's Enchanted Moulinet, for instance, is a weaponskill (...I think?) but does unaspected magical damage, while the non-enchanted Moulinet—also a weaponskill—does physical. Because it is a weaponskill, you should still be able to use Enchanted Moulinet when silenced (provided you had enough black/white mana before getting silenced, anyway), but it will still do magical damage.

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Pretty sure the RDM does magic damage because his weapon is set for magic damage(of course auto attacks might be different, but skills that are meant to scale with x damage type wont scale with the wrong damage type). Same reason why PLD had to get Clemency because his cross class Cure spell didnt scale with his weapon damage at all. As cheeky as it is, i am totally not surprised that RDM anything does "magic damage" because his weapon has the magic damage tag. As far as people complaining client side this client side that. If the "information" wasn't there to tell whether you got hit by physical or magical damage, then physical/magical cooldowns are either text flavored, or they work specifically and its not true, and/or they dont work at all and theyre just there as fluff skills on tanks

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Originally Posted by ADVSS

Pretty sure the RDM does magic damage because his weapon is set for magic damage(of course auto attacks might be different, but skills that are meant to scale with x damage type wont scale with the wrong damage type). Same reason why PLD had to get Clemency because his cross class Cure spell didnt scale with his weapon damage at all. As cheeky as it is, i am totally not surprised that RDM anything does "magic damage" because his weapon has the magic damage tag. As far as people complaining client side this client side that. If the "information" wasn't there to tell whether you got hit by physical or magical damage, then physical/magical cooldowns are either text flavored, or they work specifically and its not true, and/or they dont work at all and theyre just there as fluff skills on tanks

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No, the resulting damage isn't tied to the stats that empower it.
Like he said, Unenchanted melee attacks are still physical damage, but they do more than 40 damage per hit.
Likewise, Paladins magic abilities, while determined by Strength and Vitality, still deal magical damage.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

No, the resulting damage isn't tied to the stats that empower it.
Like he said, Unenchanted melee attacks are still physical damage, but they do more than 40 damage per hit.
Likewise, Paladins magic abilities, while determined by Strength and Vitality, still deal magical damage.

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Ah then the parameters are more convoluted then they seem. This is actually good news then if they ever decide to make a healer that isnt limited to magic damage

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Originally Posted by ADVSS

This is actually good news then if they ever decide to make a healer that isnt limited to magic damage

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Hey, so far as I know, all healers are technically not limited to magic damage; I think if a scholar smacks someone with their book for the auto-attack, it's counted as physical for purposes of damage calculation. ;)

More seriously, yes, the parameters are—so far as I can tell—somewhat convoluted. Weaponskills can situationally deal magical damage, as we know from Red Mage, and I suspect that spells can situationally deal physical damage; though I cannot think of a concrete example of the latter, it would make sense for it to be possible in the system given that we know the former is.

And based on how the combat system used to work with regards to aspected damage, I strongly suspect that it's possible for things to deal both physical and magical in the same attack, architecturally, whether or not that's presently used. Which would mean that the final damage communicated to the client not only wouldn't show whether it was magical or physical, but you actually couldn't say either way.

To use the example I gave earlier, think of a D&D campaign. Say the party's paladin has a longsword+3; that gives a +3 modifier to the normal sword damage (as well as to the attack roll, but that's not relevant here), so the sword does 1d8+3 slashing damage on a successful attack. Now let's say the paladin has a holy rite that lets them empower the weapon for 3 rounds of combat provided they land a hit each of those three rounds; failing to attack or failing to land a blow instantly ends the blessing. During that time, the weapon also does 1d6 radiant damage.

Let's say the paladin lands a blow. But the thing they're fighting is evil and has vulnerability to radiant damage, so takes double radiant damage. The paladin rolls 1d8 for the slashing damage of the sword and gets a 4; since it's a +3 longsword they do 7 damage. Then they roll 1d6 for the extra radiant damage, and roll a 4. Since the creature is vulnerable to radiant damage, they take 8. That's a total of 15 damage.

But the thing is, the DM calculates the resistance or vulnerability to damage types—handles mitigation, as it were—and then just subtracts 15 from the creature's hitpoints. The DM doesn't separately write down that it was 7 slashing and 8 radiant damage.

Or in other words, the damage is presented to the thing shown to the players (if the DM has hitpoint bars on enemies on Roll20/Fantasy Grounds/whatever) as "You did (1d8+3)+(1d6*2) damage to the creature", instead of "you did 1d8+3 slashing damage to the creature, and also 1d6*2 radiant damage".

And my strong suspicion is that whether or not the FFXIV combat system currently supports a single action causing more than one damage type, the fact that at one point it probably did means that the server probably only communicates to the client "<Actor> does <Z> damage to <target> from <action>", rather than "<Actor> does {<X> physical damage, <Y> magical damage} to <target> from <action>". Especially since if I remember right from waaaay back in the beginning, I think magical damage was not only aspected (hence the 'unaspected damage' we still have in tooltips), but also physical damage was internally aspected (slashing, piercing, etc.); that'd be a lot of potential damage types.

But also I'm running on "before you speak to me, if you value your life you will bring an offering of coffee" levels of sleep deprivation (and I don't even like coffee), so I'll grant my off-the-cuff recollection of 2.0 may not be perfect; I'm not 100% certain I can remember last week at the moment.

Not sure if it's any clearer, but from the digest:

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Q: I think it’d be convenient if the flying text for damage dealt by enemy attacks could indicate whether the damage is physical or magical, are there any plans for something like that in the future? It’d affect content difficulty, so I understand that it may be difficult to do so...

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A: If we’re strictly speaking about whether it’d be possible or not, it’s possible. However, the data relayed to the damage displaying UI doesn’t contain an indication of whether the damage is physical or magical. Implementing this feature would likely make the packets of data larger, so it’s hard for the UI team to determine whether it’d be possible or not.

Yoshida: Even if the packet sizes were increased, it would still be considered possible from a technical standpoint. However, there are other reasons why this sort of feature hasn’t been implemented. For high difficulty content, we’re constantly making balance adjustments up till patch release, and one aspect of that is determining whether each enemy attack will deal physical or magical damage. From time to time, we’ve had cases where a method that allowed you to ignore mechanics was discovered right before the deadline for patch release.

This is sometimes resolved by changing physical damage to magical and vice-versa, and reflecting this sort of change in the flying text would require another several days of QA testing. This would in turn affect the patch schedule, so we’ve intentionally refrained from implementing such a feature in favor of securing a more stable schedule for patch releases.

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Originally Posted by ADVSS

If the "information" wasn't there to tell whether you got hit by physical or magical damage, then physical/magical cooldowns are either text flavored, or they work specifically and its not true, and/or they dont work at all and theyre just there as fluff skills on tanks

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Forth option all damage calculations are done server side so that the server knows which actions are physical/magical/shadow and applies all appropriate buffs and debuffs but never sends our clients that actual information. The only reason we know various actions deal various damage types is due to seeing how various buffs and debuffs change the damage displayed over multiple occurrences of that action.

It is not that physical and magical damage do not exist; it is that information on the damage type of actions is not sent client side.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

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Based on a nonexistent thing's lack of support for TEA, I believe you're correct. It likely relies on a set of known data for things like Darkness damage (which I don't recall off the top of my head whether it has a tip-off phrase in the combat log). Like you said before, relying on the text indicator is going to get you almost everything you need, but those few scenarios where it doesn't, that's the part that'll get Square if they tried to implement it officially.

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Originally Posted by linayar

Not sure if it's any clearer, but from the digest:

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In other words: We think we could, but we haven't tried and don't have any intention at this time despite players asking for years

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

yoshi-p's statement there really isn't a justifiable reason, the display of attack types would make it easier on the QA team to find these fixes, it would still output the same amount of data in practice (either a 1 or a 0)

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

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There's the issue. The client doesn't get X. The damage calculation is done server side. The client gets a ton of information: whether the hit was a heal or a damage amount, what combination of a critical, direct, neither, or both it was, who used it, whether relevant positionals were hit, etc. But not what the type of damage was. We can make educated guesses; the combat log says "readies" vs "begins casting" in nearly all cases, but the gotcha there is "nearly".

Also there is a third type of damage enemies can use, called Darkness. I don't believe there's a specific indicator that an upcoming hit will be Darkness. You just have to figure it out as they come. Darkness is different in that it's totally unaffected by the target's defense stats or debuffs like Feint or Addle. Only shields and percent reductions like Sacred Soil work.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

In other words: We think we could, but we haven't tried and don't have any intention at this time despite players asking for years

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

yoshi-p's statement there really isn't a justifiable reason, the display of attack types would make it easier on the QA team to find these fixes, it would still output the same amount of data in practice (either a 1 or a 0)

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I think there are 3 types of damage(please correct if I'm wrong) , physical, magical, and dark(true), so a 0/1 system cannot work, honestly I think they don't want to do it because they would feel obligated to get colorblind mode to work for it which would increase QA time as you would need to check everything is coming out the same colour as colorblind mode has configured on top of the base colours so 2x current amount of running stuff to make sure all systems are good.

Also would there be 4 or 5 colours going around?(physical damage, magical damage, magical heal, physical heal-honestly unsure if this is a thing but potions don't seem magical so unsure, dark) that may start to get a bit of a cluster with player damage numbers/colours on top at least during 1st time and prog much less so on farm.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Forth option all damage calculations are done server side so that the server knows which actions are physical/magical/shadow and applies all appropriate buffs and debuffs but never sends our clients that actual information.

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Oh, I guarantee you that all damage calculations are done server-side. Any online game that doesn't do damage calculations server-side would be immediately exploited, since relying on the client to tell you how much damage the player took would be a short path to someone making a hacked tool that tells the server you never took any damage. (I used to write online games, so had to actually think about this stuff for my day job.)