(LL Discussion) Physical and Magical not distinguishable? UI can't implement it? Why?

[VenKitsune]

Okay so at the time of writing this, Live Letter LX is not yet over, but i wanted to pose this discussion to everyone here.
During the Q&A Between Yoship and the the UI Designer, Kei Odagiri the following was talked about -

M "I think it would be very sweet if we could see whether an attack is physical or magical in a little pop up window"

O "Ohhh yea, that would probably be very handy hehe"

O "With the current system, as how the packet transfer works, as a UI team we can't do anything about this"

Y "If we wanted.... we could probably do it"

Y "There are actions that work against physical or magical damage, so I understand that it would be more useful if you understand and can instantly see where to use it"

Y "But there is a reason on why we haven't implemented it.... We always work on the battle changes until a few days before a patch and we often had to implement final changes"

Y "If we added more features that rely on this information, it would delay development a lot"

O "It would probably overwhelm the quality assurance team"

This was from the live unofficial translation done by the ffxiv subreddit team, so keep in mind that the translation might be a little rough and may well be incorrect in some manner, keep that in mind.



I have a lot of respect for the work done on the UI by the team but....Still...Im confused by this.

Why can't Physical and magical be two seperate text colours?

Why is it so difficult? The game already knows if an attack is going to be phyiscal or magical when you're actually playing the game, why not implement a system where the text colour changes depending on if its phyiscal or magical? You dont have to colour every single attack flying text individually.

We already have additional, contextual damage popups for Parrys and Blocks etc....Why cant those resources be used in a similar way?

Infact, i was talking with a friend about this a few minutes ago which prompted me to post this on the forums....But apparently, she tells me that some third party tools ALREADY DO THIS. They display physical and magical damage taken as two seperate colours. So why cant the UI team do it if its clearly possible just from reading whats already there?

When direct hits were added, Direct Critical hits were also added as a result. This is a clear example of the flying text being changed at a fundamental level for contextual damage. Why can't Physical/Magical be done in a similar vein if all it would require is a change in colour or similar to how parrys/blocks are done?



Does anyone have the answers to these questions?