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

[Lyth]

Everything in this game is completely scripted, to the point where you can write out a spreadsheet with the exact timestamps at which every boss ability occurs and plan out all your cooldown uses in advance. Just get the playerbase to submit a list of boss abilities, their timestamps, and their respective damage types, and tell the dev team to get out their crayons and colour them in.

It's not that they can't do it. It's because they either don't want to or can't be bothered to.

[ADVSS]

Everything in this game is completely scripted, to the point where you can write out a spreadsheet with the exact timestamps at which every boss ability occurs and plan out all your cooldown uses in advance. Just get the playerbase to submit a list of boss abilities, their timestamps, and their respective damage types, and tell the dev team to get out their crayons and colour them in.

It's not that they can't do it. It's because they either don't want to or can't be bothered to.

I totally agree with you but i definitely feel like the translation of the question submitted may have been off. I remember one suggestion like "i just want to know what is magic damage and what isnt". I dont remember anyone asking for a pop-up window lol. The question seemed bizarre to me to be totally honest. We have green damage numbers for health regeneration, they could do something like yellow or purple for magic damage recieved.

[Stepjam]

I still do think for abilities with cast bars, they could change the color depending on whether it's phys or magic. Presumably can't be that hard to implement. Of course abilities without cast bars you still gotta figure out the old fashioned way, but it would be a big step forward.

[Ladon]

The amount of technical debt they managed to get themselves into with this game is pretty amazing. I mean, I sort of get it, 2.0 was a rush job and no way they expected the level of success they are seeing nearly 10 years later.

Well, hopefully 6.0 is the last expansion for this game because it's becoming painfully obvious how long in the tooth this game is getting to be. I am sure YoshiP is feeling the same way and would love to be able to start again fresh and be able to design a game that isn't so bound by technical limitations and memory constrains that apparently can't be worked around without reworking everything.

[Videra]

Small indie company, please understand.

[linayar]

Not sure if it's any clearer, but from the digest:

Q: I think it’d be convenient if the flying text for damage dealt by enemy attacks could indicate whether the damage is physical or magical, are there any plans for something like that in the future? It’d affect content difficulty, so I understand that it may be difficult to do so...

A: If we’re strictly speaking about whether it’d be possible or not, it’s possible. However, the data relayed to the damage displaying UI doesn’t contain an indication of whether the damage is physical or magical. Implementing this feature would likely make the packets of data larger, so it’s hard for the UI team to determine whether it’d be possible or not.

Yoshida: Even if the packet sizes were increased, it would still be considered possible from a technical standpoint. However, there are other reasons why this sort of feature hasn’t been implemented. For high difficulty content, we’re constantly making balance adjustments up till patch release, and one aspect of that is determining whether each enemy attack will deal physical or magical damage. From time to time, we’ve had cases where a method that allowed you to ignore mechanics was discovered right before the deadline for patch release.

This is sometimes resolved by changing physical damage to magical and vice-versa, and reflecting this sort of change in the flying text would require another several days of QA testing. This would in turn affect the patch schedule, so we’ve intentionally refrained from implementing such a feature in favor of securing a more stable schedule for patch releases.

[Recon1o6]

Not sure if it's any clearer, but from the digest:

In other words: We think we could, but we haven't tried and don't have any intention at this time despite players asking for years

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

yoshi-p's statement there really isn't a justifiable reason, the display of attack types would make it easier on the QA team to find these fixes, it would still output the same amount of data in practice (either a 1 or a 0)

[Semirhage]

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

There's the issue. The client doesn't get X. The damage calculation is done server side. The client gets a ton of information: whether the hit was a heal or a damage amount, what combination of a critical, direct, neither, or both it was, who used it, whether relevant positionals were hit, etc. But not what the type of damage was. We can make educated guesses; the combat log says "readies" vs "begins casting" in nearly all cases, but the gotcha there is "nearly".

Also there is a third type of damage enemies can use, called Darkness. I don't believe there's a specific indicator that an upcoming hit will be Darkness. You just have to figure it out as they come. Darkness is different in that it's totally unaffected by the target's defense stats or debuffs like Feint or Addle. Only shields and percent reductions like Sacred Soil work.

[Crushnight]

In other words: We think we could, but we haven't tried and don't have any intention at this time despite players asking for years

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

yoshi-p's statement there really isn't a justifiable reason, the display of attack types would make it easier on the QA team to find these fixes, it would still output the same amount of data in practice (either a 1 or a 0)

I think there are 3 types of damage(please correct if I'm wrong) , physical, magical, and dark(true), so a 0/1 system cannot work, honestly I think they don't want to do it because they would feel obligated to get colorblind mode to work for it which would increase QA time as you would need to check everything is coming out the same colour as colorblind mode has configured on top of the base colours so 2x current amount of running stuff to make sure all systems are good.

Also would there be 4 or 5 colours going around?(physical damage, magical damage, magical heal, physical heal-honestly unsure if this is a thing but potions don't seem magical so unsure, dark) that may start to get a bit of a cluster with player damage numbers/colours on top at least during 1st time and prog much less so on farm.