Elemental vs. Non-elemental?

[Sines]

So, I'm curious as to what unaspected damage means. I know that enemies don't really have fire resistance or ice resistance, just 'elemental' resistance. But what does this mean for non-elemental damage?

The primary reason I'm asking is in regards to my THM, who has both Aero and Scathe as options for moving and casting, or allowing extra ability usage without interupting the GCD flow. Even though Aero will go away with BLM, I'm still curious about the relative use now. With enhanced Scathe, it does 144 damage instantly, compared to Aeros 200 damage over 18 seconds. Does Scathe being non-elemental cause it to ignore some (or all) elemental resistance, and only be affected by general magic defense, thus causing it to do proportionately more damage?

[Powercow]

No, as it stands right now a spell doing fire, wind, ice, unaspected, lightning or earth damage is just for flavor text. Even the Bard's Requiem song, which boosts "elemental" damage, benefits all magic from a Black Mage or Summoner, even though nearly every summoner spell is unaspected. Likewise a Bard's own Windbite, which does Wind elemental damage, does not benefit from Requiem. If this seems silly and poorly-worded, that's because it is.

You can blast Ifrit with Fire and it'll hurt him just as bad as blasting any other enemy would. Many of us are still hoping they decide to do something interesting with elements in the future, but the last official word on the matter was a general "no."

[Shamirah]

Well Powercow, if Ifrit was immune to fire... BLM would be effin' useless.

[Powercow]

Well Powercow, if Ifrit was immune to fire... BLM would be effin' useless.

I know. It's still boring and pointless. If they aren't going to do anything with it, they should simply remove the entire Elemental system from the game. There's no reason to keep it in the game if all it's doing is confusing people.

[Darkstride]

Well Powercow, if Ifrit was immune to fire... BLM would be effin' useless.

Yeah it never really posed a problem in 1.0 since Thunder/Thundara/Thundaga was the main DPS spell-combo. Fire was only used for AoE. Having Elemental weakness/resistance now would only work if it was balanced across classes more.

[Kalandros]

Back in early WoW days, where immunities to elements existed, mages were forced to "frost spec" for raiding, fire mages were not capable of doing raid content. Onyxia(?), Molten Core and Blackwing Lair - Fire was a no-go.
It was a bad design choice.

But I agree that its a bit silly since such elemental shenanigans were always part of FF games - fire would heal ifrit, not do 0 dmg.
But it seems they couldnt find a way to do it properly and just sort of dropped the mechanics but kept the nomenclature~

[Sines]

Yah, if all damage is either physical or magical, and you can't even rely on "Wind Damage" to always be magical... drop the freaking names. I don't really think anyone is going to be angry that Fire does magic damage instead of fire damage. I think we can use our imaginations to realize that the kind of magical damage done by fire is somewhat related to heat.

It's especially bad because it compounds the confusion for newbies. While less informed players will always spam Ice on Ifrit, fewer of them will do so if all magic damage is just labeled 'magic' damage, as that'll be the first clue that elements aren't actually a thing in this game. The big issue is character elemental resistance. It seems a bad idea to have players use a different system for magic damage than enemies, but that's already what they've done, might as well get the nomenclature to match.

Anyway, thanks for the answer, I'll be leaving Aero on my bar until I adopt Black Magery.