Something needs to be done about elements

[Raestloz]

So you see a Bomb, and to defeat it, you use...

Fire?

Come now, SE, this is Final Fantasy. You use Blizzard to kill bombs, not Fire. Fire heals bombs, and yet in this game, elements (or "aspect", as the tooltip calls it) means abso-freaking-lutely nothing. Thunder? Earth? Wind? Don't care. Potency is where it's at.

What's the point in elements? Just to justify the elemental materias and reduce the likelihood to get vitality and critical materia?

[Jinrya-Geki]

Some final fantasy games, bombs are x2 weak against fire, I do know what you are saying though. Ifrit would be a better example.

But it's all to make it balanced so this way blm doesn't have all these spells when the jobs/class can only have 15 abilities each cause the servers can't handle it.

[EveAlexandra]

I would love to see my benediction immediately kill undead enemies.

[Kitru]

But it's all to make it balanced so this way blm

That's basically it. BLM is built around the waxing (Umbral Ice) and waning (Astral Fire) of their mp based upon specific elements. If Ifrit were immune to fire, BLM would pretty much only be able to spam Blizzard and keep up Thunder, which means they'd be doing absolutely terrible damage. It's the price we pay for not having all of the spells just be clones of each other with different elemental attributes.

doesn't have all these spells when the jobs/class can only have 15 abilities each cause the servers can't handle it.

As I said before, it's not limited based upon the spell list but rather upon the chosen playstyle for BLM. On top of that, the number of abilities that each class gets isn't 15 (each 17 for each, except for Arcanist which gets 18) nor is it absolutely set in stone. On top of that, I find it hilarious that you think that the servers couldn't handle an increased number of abilities. That would be like saying that we couldn't get any more gear because the server couldn't handle it. Abilities are just database calls that trigger the effect labelled in the database, and it doesn't really matter how many abilities you've got because a larger data doesn't put appreciably more strain on a server unless you've got a *obscenely* large unsorted database or attempting to get a list based upon given attributes so that it has to iterate through everything; calling to a specific address doesn't care about database size.
That's laughably untrue on all 3 counts.

[Exstal]

Just have Blizzard do 6 times more damage against Ifrit. Would be legit.

Then troll your group by casting fire spells to heal Ifrit.

[ServerCollaps]

at 14.1 it was possible to heal ifrit with using fire

[Cabalabob]

The reason elements don't do anything is cause in 1.0 people would take Tankx1 WHMx1 and then BLMx6 to basically everything cause they could exploit elemental weaknesses, all other jobs were basically obsolete. So for 2.0 they took out any form of elemental weaknesses and just made magic damage equal to physical.

Not saying I agree with this design choice, just telling you that's the way it is.

[XanderOlivieri]

Kinda makes Elemental Resistance obsolete then too. What is the point of the Materia and items that add Ele. Resist when they are pretty useless?

[CrashingWaves]

Kinda makes Elemental Resistance obsolete then too. What is the point of the Materia and items that add Ele. Resist when they are pretty useless?

*coughs* Primal hard/extreme mode runs will see a significant advantage with properly resistant gear. <.<

[Kitru]

*coughs* Primal hard/extreme mode runs will see a significant advantage with properly resistant gear. <.<

This doesn't really work for 2 reasons: first, the weapons that currently provide resistance provide it as a free bonus so the itemization is obviously seen as entirely dismissable by the dev team and, second, melding resistances onto crafted gear comes at the direct cost of other stats, which are the only advantage to crafted gear (pentamelding gives you a metric crapton of stats compared to a "normal" i70).

If the devs really wanted us to find resistances useful, they'd put it on gear that didn't have to be crafted. Either that, or they should allow existing blue gear to get melded so that you can add resistances if you so choose (restrict it to 2 slots max for balance purposes) so that you can get resistance on everything you're wearing (so that you can tailor your gear to the damage type of the content you want to focus upon) but the fact that you can get a lot *more* resistance from crafted gear still provides an explicit benefit.

The problem with elemental resistances/weaknesses/attacks in so very many games is that, because they're so specific, they're useless itemization in all but a minority of content. Even if it's amazingly useful, unless they *require* a certain amount of a given resistance (which WoW did in Vanilla), there's no real reason to use it because it only applies to a small amount of content (would you really want gear that's basically i100 for Ifrit but i60 for everything else?). If they try to provide global resistances so that resistance stacking is actually useful, there's no point in having specific resistances otherwise. The only real way you make it useful but not crippling/annoying (gearing up for fire resist was a friggin' *chore* that was worse than the already onerous attunement quests) is by having it exist as an non-required bonus with a reasonable opportunity cost, such that it's a benefit that is noticeable but not required for those people willing to spend a bit more.