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

[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.

[Packetdancer]

Forth option all damage calculations are done server side so that the server knows which actions are physical/magical/shadow and applies all appropriate buffs and debuffs but never sends our clients that actual information.

Oh, I guarantee you that all damage calculations are done server-side. Any online game that doesn't do damage calculations server-side would be immediately exploited, since relying on the client to tell you how much damage the player took would be a short path to someone making a hacked tool that tells the server you never took any damage. (I used to write online games, so had to actually think about this stuff for my day job.)