Black Mage Questions

[NeruMew]

There is no obvious method of telling boss attacks apart in term of magical or physical. A prime example would be ADS High Voltage, you would think it is Thunder magic attack but it is physical. Some attacks are easier to tell a part from others, some are not.

Here is my own personal observation:

If the spell/skill meant to wipe the party if they failed to dodge/silence/stun it is most likely a physical attack regardless of the animation or the name. This observation is not universal and can be argued against or with. However, when you come across High Voltage in DL/Crafted/AK gear High Voltage will most likely wipe the party. An amazing healer can keep the party up but in general High Voltage as example is meant to be a severe punishment. Yet this rule does not apply to Twisters for example. There is also the matter of personal opinions, so yeah really there is no logical method of determining if the attack is physical or magical.

Magical attacks on the other hands tend to be strong but not a one shot mechanic, I can't really say for sure if any boss in Coil uses magical attacks but the rest of the game does and you would easily notice that Mana Ward did effect how much you got hit for.

Last note about Mana Wall/Ward, as amazing as they seem to be, they are really only saving one person that matters the least, the BLM. When the party for example get hit by Twintania Dive, it does not matter much if the BLM still standing, unlike for example a SMN who can effectively raise someone. So yeah both spells are amazing at covering our ***** when it comes to human errors but it won't save the raid from a wipe in most cases.

Very true! On the last note :P But I also like to see it for example, aside as an ohshitimabouttodie button! It can also help in the way that by mitigating damage, you save your healer the trouble of having to cast extra heals on you, or emergency ones just not to lose you to odd chances. Either way having a DD die in an encu¡ounter always palys against the party anyway, since it means mana used by the healers (that didn't have to be accounted for), time lost, a precious swiftcast lost (though it's best use is combined with Rez usually) then it chains into possible issues keeping the dead DD up due to lower HP, depending on how long it took to bring you back up it chains into a DPS loss and if you're running tight on the check it might not be nice etc etc. So it's always amazing to be able to save yourself <3 Afterall, in reality we black mages are the utmost important role in a party, of course.

Very interesting observation, and yes, it's sad how the attack type is kinda just random, and animations don't strictly respect this neither. I mean seriously, a thunder-charge is not strictly physical, though I guess you could turn it around that way, the obvious answer, for most of us I would like to believe, is magical dmg, specially since OUR blm spell thunder deals magic dmg, telling us that the thunder aspect deals magical damage and not physical xD.

[Waliel]

Manawall is for when you pull aggro, and for certain specials. Notable ones that get stopped are ADS's High Voltage and Twintania's Divebombs.

There is no obvious method of telling boss attacks apart in term of magical or physical. A prime example would be ADS High Voltage, you would think it is Thunder magic attack but it is physical. Some attacks are easier to tell a part from others, some are not.

High Voltage is magic damage at least on turn 2; I managed to test this yesterday. Manawall did nothing against it and Manaward absorbed the damage almost fully, resulting in a 400 hit or so.