Should shield blocking be effective against magic damage?

[Jukebox12]

ooooooh just let me fight a wizard with a sword and shield. Wizard Cast Fireball. I tried to block it The SHIELD MELTS. Wizard cast thunderbolt. I AM DEAD you cannot block magic it really impossible. unless your a troll please contact the troll police at 1-800-876-6500.

[Fernosaur]

and how much is battle with magic damage tank buster? i dont think that many

A good amount of bosses have magical tank busters, actually. Most of Alexander Gordias was magical. A good part of Midas was magical too, though they did a much better job of including both physical and magical busters in that tier. In Creator, it looks like it's well balanced between the two as well, though SophiaEX seems to be purely magical, as well as A12 having purely magic-based tank busters which repeat quite often and can become quite unrelenting.

Paladin had a good run with Thordan and Sephirot, and Nidhogg was 50/50 for both physical and magical. But there are a lot of magical bosses in the game, and have been for a while too.

[Windi]

Blocking magical attacks with a shield didn't seem to work well for Haurchefant...

[Fernosaur]

Blocking magical attacks with a shield didn't seem to work well for Haurchefant...

Still too soon Q_Q

[Starkbeaumont]

if sheltron would be able to block magic, drk would need to get a reliable low CD ability for physical attacks though (or have shadow wall's recast reduced). balance is everything after all

[Februs]

For the most part, I'm fine with the way blocking works right now. The only thing that makes me question it are fights that are heavy on magical dmg, because they renders Pld shields almost useless. Abilities like Bulwark, Shelltron, and Shield Swipe fall by the wayside, which is frustrating because it's a decent loss of defense, offense, and enmity all in one. Magical fights like that are pretty rare, so it's not a big deal or anything. It's just annoying, especially losing that shield swipe proc.

Losing a bit of defense is one thing, but reducing the dps of the weakest tank in the game is pretty horrible, and not just to the Pld. The whole party suffers as a result.

[Februs]

if sheltron would be able to block magic, drk would need to get a reliable low CD ability for physical attacks though (or have shadow wall's recast reduced). balance is everything after all

What's wrong with Dark Dance? Parry might be RNG based, but that's a pretty hefty physical mitigation and it's accessible once a minute. Between that and Dark Mind, Drk's don't really have much to complain about.

[Reynhart]

PLD has rampart + sentinel its all reduce damage
war have vengeance + inner beast (thrill of battle if u count that too)
so the other tank have 0 magical? huh?

At what point did you miss that we talked about niche mitigation skills ?

if sheltron would be able to block magic, drk would need to get a reliable low CD ability for physical attacks though (or have shadow wall's recast reduced). balance is everything after all

Dark Arts + Dark Dance should increase parry rate more instead of giving an Evasion boost.

[Martin_Arcainess]

ooooooh just let me fight a wizard with a sword and shield. Wizard Cast Fireball. I tried to block it The SHIELD MELTS. Wizard cast thunderbolt. I AM DEAD you cannot block magic it really impossible. unless your a troll please contact the troll police at 1-800-876-6500.

Your throwing logic into this? into a Fantasy game?

The fireball has be to a certain tempt to melt our shield but even then we have shields and Weapons with a living soul inside of them which we stuff with sand and crystal and then a few pings of a hammer it's a whole new weapon.

Thunder strikes, we are warrior of lights, we get hit by mountains, thunders, explosions, wind, shards of ice or metal, earthquaks, rise up to the air and swords being flung at us.

If you want to put in logic like that we should have all died ages ago.

[Lyth]

It's a bit difficult to follow the reasoning of this discussion because of phrases like "niche mitigation skills". Which specific cooldowns are you comparing, and what warrants comparing these abilities in isolation instead of looking at the kit as a whole?

To the best of my knowledge, every tankbuster set in the game can be mitigated between you and your cotank, regardless of the jobs that you pick. The difference is that in certain fights, a tank job will occasionally have access to additional cooldowns that may make healing easier, or that allow you to drop stance more comfortably to push your dps while tanking.

Your core mitigation set is still Rampart/Sentinel/Hallowed. Every job has equivalents to these (some are better than others in certain situations). I suspect that the mitigation moves introduced with HW were part of a broader move to balance out IB, which is probably the most versatile cooldown in the game. It's still quite powerful in HW, but you're now rewarded for not being overly dependent on it. This was a sensible course of action: if you have access to a short recast cooldown that can be used for both physical and magical attacks, you're just going to mitigate everything with it, which defeats the purpose of designing a cooldown rotation.