No point to magic only mitigation

I don't see why magic only mitigation still exists when magic damage rarely happens in content, especially trash packs of dungeons where mitigation is most needed. Magic only mitigation just means there's one less mitigation in the long run and makes people forget about it entirely. They should be changed to mitigate all damage or be allowed to also mitigate a bit of physical damage.

Isn’t magic damage the most commonly used for a large amount of bosses? As a Scholar I can find tons of opportunities to give Fey Illumination’s magic defense boost to the party.

…it doesn’t really do anything (5% lol), but I still feel like there’s tons of stuff that does magic damage. Though I couldn’t say whether that applied to certain things like tankbusters (they could mostly be physical maybe idk)

I'm pretty sure a good 80%, maybe more, of ranged enemies in this game are magic damage. I don't pay too much attention to bosses but I'm pretty sure most stacks are also magic damage.

I can see a game where having some abilities that mitigate physical damage and some that mitigate magical damage could be interesting. But in my experience playing Dark Knight, it does just feel like the other tanks got consistent abilities while I got the ability that doesn't work sometimes. If some had phys and some had magic, it would probably feel better. But right now it just feels like magic mitigation means you got the short end of the stick.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I can see a game where having some abilities that mitigate physical damage and some that mitigate magical damage could be interesting. But in my experience playing Dark Knight, it does just feel like the other tanks got consistent abilities while I got the ability that doesn't work sometimes. If some had phys and some had magic, it would probably feel better. But right now it just feels like magic mitigation means you got the short end of the stick.

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I honestly can’t remember which expansion it was, maybe Heavensward or Stormblood, but I think at one point they wanted to carve out a niche for DRK as ‘the magic defense tank’. Like, they wanted it to be a ‘specialist’ for taking magic damage. Obviously, that didn’t work and people just got annoyed because they could go Paladin and mitigate either kinds of damage (i don’t remember what warrior did at that point lol). So they kinda dropped that whole angle for Dark Knight, but certain older skills like Dark Mind were never updated properly to reflect that and exist as ‘hold-overs’ from that idea.

I guess they could have properly gone down the route of DRK having separate but stronger physical and magical mits but that'd be either short changing them on mits or adding button bloat to the job. It would also require DRK players to pay attention to what does what damage but that's a slightly different topic.

Have you ever done any raids like at all? Aside from fringe cases like this tier where Black cat and Brute bomber are very physical based, as well as one raidwide from P11S, and some tankbusters, almost everything else is magic damage..

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

I guess they could have properly gone down the route of DRK having separate but stronger physical and magical mits but that'd be either short changing them on mits or adding button bloat to the job. It would also require DRK players to pay attention to what does what damage but that's a slightly different topic.

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DRK players already have to pay attention to damage types because of Dark Mind and Dark Missionary. At least in Dawntrail dungeons, they added a few trash packs that do heavy magic damage, which is kind of neat as far as letting good DRKs show off a bit.

I wouldn't mind if both skills got a smaller physical damage mit added to them just so they'd be useful more often.

Physical damage is only more common when it comes to auto-attacks and magic damage is the more prominent one for every other source of damage.

This savage tier specifically seems to have gone for a more even split in that regard...which kind of sucks because casters having to contend with raidwides that deal 140K+ raw physical damage on top of their lower HP pools is unpleasant.

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Originally Posted by HyonaCookie

I don't see why magic only mitigation still exists when magic damage rarely happens in content

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It happens all the time. Just look for the mage staff symbol.

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especially trash packs of dungeons where mitigation is most needed.

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A lot of them do physical attacks because the casters used to just stand still and cast, which was really annoying because tanks couldn't resposition them. The ones that do are often sprites or casters but usually you are just beating up monsters.

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Magic only mitigation just means there's one less mitigation in the long run

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While true, if it's the same as all the other mitigations then it further homogenizes everything and the community has been complaining about everything being the same. SE can't win it seems, because either way someone complains.

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makes people forget about it entirely.

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If you mean Dark Mind, it gets forgotten about but so do most other tank flavor abilities:

• Thrill on WAR is arguably not really needed for anything and may as well not exist. Yes it increases heal potency, but do we particularly need more? :D
• Camouflage is 10% plus physical parries so it's bottom of the barrel what you use when everything else is exhausted (which it won't usually).
• Bulwark while probably the best one used to not be due to RNG and only working on physical attacks - but PLD has so many tools that it's often hard-pressed to get round to needing Bulwark anyway!

Essentially, these flavor abilities are useless or used randomly to many players but are something that a skilled player can try to make use of in the right situations ie. buffed heal potency on WAR could help in a niche situation, Dark Mind can be like a bonus mitigation if actually used on magic and Camouflage can possibly be paired with certain other things. Bulwark can be timed for when it doesn't need to fight DoTs.

How I used Dark Mind back in Shadowbringers was against a DoT-buster in E1S. There were a number of tank busters in a short space of time but one of them was especially devastating, with a Damage-over-Time potency depending on your mit. So Dark Knights had an advantage because of it being magic where they could use an extra mit so that the ticks were trivial.

Dark Mind is either insanely broken or worthless. It being worthless is the price it pays for being the most busted cd in the game most of the time. It doesn't really bother me.

Missionary and Heart of Light are bigger issues.

Most raid wide attacks are magical based....and OH BOY in Dawntrail they hit my poor SMN like trucks.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I can see a game where having some abilities that mitigate physical damage and some that mitigate magical damage could be interesting. But in my experience playing Dark Knight, it does just feel like the other tanks got consistent abilities while I got the ability that doesn't work sometimes. If some had phys and some had magic, it would probably feel better. But right now it just feels like magic mitigation means you got the short end of the stick.

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Gunbreaker is in the same boat. Heart of Light is only magic. Really hurt in 10s with a DRK OT.

Magical damage is far more common which invalidates part of this comment but the idea that dark missionary and heart of light are just completely inferior to shake it off and divine veil is sorta justified

The old balance in ShB of the 4 skills was basically “magical mitigation is stronger against multiple hits while shield mitigation doesn’t have diminishing returns and affects all damage types” but ever since they buffed SIO and DV as much as they did in abyssos the only time DM and HOL win out is magical soft enrages and we haven’t had any of them since curtain call before the buff

Right now the magical mitigations are just kinda there

How to address xyz-only mitigations:

Option A: Create a polar counterpart with a shared CD and make us learn damage typing of attacks.
Example: Add Dark Dance as a 1:1 physical counterpart to Dark Mind with shared CD.
Example 2: Since WHM needs extra mit apparently - add Protect & Shell as 60s CDs for example (10% mit for the correct type) to serve as a baseline effect.

Option B: Feint/Addle treatment for those cooldowns. If an ability only mitigates magic damage, give half of its mitigation also as physical, and vice versa.
Example: Dark Mind receives 10% phys mit, Dark Missionary, Heart of Light and Magic Barrier all receive 5% phys mit as a bonus.

Option C: Drop the typing altogether and instead add additional effects to make the action more unique in its own right.
Example(s): Dark Missionary 10% pure mit and 10% recovery boost. Heart of Light 10% pure mit + takes Brutal Shell, doubles it and spreads it to all allies.

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Originally Posted by Connor

I honestly can’t remember which expansion it was, maybe Heavensward or Stormblood, but I think at one point they wanted to carve out a niche for DRK as ‘the magic defense tank’. Like, they wanted it to be a ‘specialist’ for taking magic damage. Obviously, that didn’t work and people just got annoyed because they could go Paladin and mitigate either kinds of damage (i don’t remember what warrior did at that point lol). So they kinda dropped that whole angle for Dark Knight, but certain older skills like Dark Mind were never updated properly to reflect that and exist as ‘hold-overs’ from that idea.

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Eden 5 Ramuh was auto with magic damage, that's where Dark Mind actually useful. I don't believe we have another one like that tho XD

Magic damage is overwhelmingly used by Trial and Raid bosses... Which in itself is kind of a bad design, as they probably should kind of use a variety of both physical and magical, as only having one type of damage gives more mitigation to some Jobs over others...