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

[Semirhage]

I suspect the client doesn't have the information, and that's probably the core issue.

Naming no names and discussing no specific forbidden third party things, but from researching the thingy the OP implied existed, the client absolutely receives this information as part of incoming damage network info. In fact, it also natively has the ability to change the color of damage text but they haven't made use of it. While edge cases may abound, there's a third party *cough* nonexistent *cough* tool that does this on a basic level with a relatively simple script.

[Videra]

Small indie company, please understand.

[Packetdancer]

Naming no names and discussing no specific forbidden third party things, but from researching the thingy the OP implied existed, the client absolutely receives this information as part of incoming damage network info. In fact, it also natively has the ability to change the color of damage text but they haven't made use of it. While edge cases may abound, there's a third party *cough* nonexistent *cough* tool that does this on a basic level with a relatively simple script.

Naming no names and discussing no specific forbidden third party things, my—admittedly presently sleep-deprived—understanding is that the third-party tool in question bases it on whether the combat log is told to say "X uses Y" or "X casts Y", which indeed a very simple script. However, my understanding is also that the 'casts/uses' message is not actually based on whether the damage is magical or physical, but whether the originating ability is handled as a weaponskill or a spell.

But whether it's a weaponskill or a spell isn't guaranteed to be tied to the type of damage, but rather how it's handled in other parts of the combat system. RDM's Enchanted Moulinet, for instance, is a weaponskill (...I think?) but does unaspected magical damage, while the non-enchanted Moulinet—also a weaponskill—does physical. Because it is a weaponskill, you should still be able to use Enchanted Moulinet when silenced (provided you had enough black/white mana before getting silenced, anyway), but it will still do magical damage.

Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me if the three mobs with the obnoxious AoE paralyze in Puppets' Bunker are using a spell (since it's a cast-bar that can be interrupted), but that the attack which paralyzes might well do physical damage. (Mind you, it wouldn't surprise me if it does magical damage either, because rational definitions of magical and physical do not always apply in this combat system.)

Though whether the originating attack is a spell or weaponskill will probably get you like 95% of the way there, admittedly.

And I certainly may be wrong; I haven't bothered to try to slice open the FFXIV network protocol to know whether or not it actually does include the type of damage rather than just the indicator of whether the source is a spell or a weaponskill, nor is the source code for the totally hypothetical unnamed tool available that I know of to take a quick look at it.

However, my larger point is just that from (somewhat painful) personal experience, I know how design decisions made early in a game's life that made sense at the time can come around to bite you several years later when players want a seemingly-entirely-reasonable feature that has you tearing your hair out to try to figure out a sane way to implement without having to gut chunks of established systems to do it.

It's certainly conceivable that for some reasons Square-Enix is just making excuses and the client has all the information needed, and they could do five minutes of work to make it happen. But it's also possible that Square-Enix made some decisions years ago which became part of the scaffolding of current systems, and trying to take out and replace a piece is like trying to remove one of the bottom sticks in a Jenga tower: sure, it's possible, but you're going to live in fear of the Jenga tower falling over.

[ADVSS]

But whether it's a weaponskill or a spell isn't guaranteed to be tied to the type of damage, but rather how it's handled in other parts of the combat system. RDM's Enchanted Moulinet, for instance, is a weaponskill (...I think?) but does unaspected magical damage, while the non-enchanted Moulinet—also a weaponskill—does physical. Because it is a weaponskill, you should still be able to use Enchanted Moulinet when silenced (provided you had enough black/white mana before getting silenced, anyway), but it will still do magical damage.

Pretty sure the RDM does magic damage because his weapon is set for magic damage(of course auto attacks might be different, but skills that are meant to scale with x damage type wont scale with the wrong damage type). Same reason why PLD had to get Clemency because his cross class Cure spell didnt scale with his weapon damage at all. As cheeky as it is, i am totally not surprised that RDM anything does "magic damage" because his weapon has the magic damage tag. As far as people complaining client side this client side that. If the "information" wasn't there to tell whether you got hit by physical or magical damage, then physical/magical cooldowns are either text flavored, or they work specifically and its not true, and/or they dont work at all and theyre just there as fluff skills on tanks

[Seraphor]

Pretty sure the RDM does magic damage because his weapon is set for magic damage(of course auto attacks might be different, but skills that are meant to scale with x damage type wont scale with the wrong damage type). Same reason why PLD had to get Clemency because his cross class Cure spell didnt scale with his weapon damage at all. As cheeky as it is, i am totally not surprised that RDM anything does "magic damage" because his weapon has the magic damage tag. As far as people complaining client side this client side that. If the "information" wasn't there to tell whether you got hit by physical or magical damage, then physical/magical cooldowns are either text flavored, or they work specifically and its not true, and/or they dont work at all and theyre just there as fluff skills on tanks

No, the resulting damage isn't tied to the stats that empower it.
Like he said, Unenchanted melee attacks are still physical damage, but they do more than 40 damage per hit.
Likewise, Paladins magic abilities, while determined by Strength and Vitality, still deal magical damage.

[ADVSS]

No, the resulting damage isn't tied to the stats that empower it.
Like he said, Unenchanted melee attacks are still physical damage, but they do more than 40 damage per hit.
Likewise, Paladins magic abilities, while determined by Strength and Vitality, still deal magical damage.

Ah then the parameters are more convoluted then they seem. This is actually good news then if they ever decide to make a healer that isnt limited to magic damage

[Packetdancer]

This is actually good news then if they ever decide to make a healer that isnt limited to magic damage

Hey, so far as I know, all healers are technically not limited to magic damage; I think if a scholar smacks someone with their book for the auto-attack, it's counted as physical for purposes of damage calculation.

More seriously, yes, the parameters are—so far as I can tell—somewhat convoluted. Weaponskills can situationally deal magical damage, as we know from Red Mage, and I suspect that spells can situationally deal physical damage; though I cannot think of a concrete example of the latter, it would make sense for it to be possible in the system given that we know the former is.

And based on how the combat system used to work with regards to aspected damage, I strongly suspect that it's possible for things to deal both physical and magical in the same attack, architecturally, whether or not that's presently used. Which would mean that the final damage communicated to the client not only wouldn't show whether it was magical or physical, but you actually couldn't say either way.

To use the example I gave earlier, think of a D&D campaign. Say the party's paladin has a longsword+3; that gives a +3 modifier to the normal sword damage (as well as to the attack roll, but that's not relevant here), so the sword does 1d8+3 slashing damage on a successful attack. Now let's say the paladin has a holy rite that lets them empower the weapon for 3 rounds of combat provided they land a hit each of those three rounds; failing to attack or failing to land a blow instantly ends the blessing. During that time, the weapon also does 1d6 radiant damage.

Let's say the paladin lands a blow. But the thing they're fighting is evil and has vulnerability to radiant damage, so takes double radiant damage. The paladin rolls 1d8 for the slashing damage of the sword and gets a 4; since it's a +3 longsword they do 7 damage. Then they roll 1d6 for the extra radiant damage, and roll a 4. Since the creature is vulnerable to radiant damage, they take 8. That's a total of 15 damage.

But the thing is, the DM calculates the resistance or vulnerability to damage types—handles mitigation, as it were—and then just subtracts 15 from the creature's hitpoints. The DM doesn't separately write down that it was 7 slashing and 8 radiant damage.

Or in other words, the damage is presented to the thing shown to the players (if the DM has hitpoint bars on enemies on Roll20/Fantasy Grounds/whatever) as "You did (1d8+3)+(1d6*2) damage to the creature", instead of "you did 1d8+3 slashing damage to the creature, and also 1d6*2 radiant damage".

And my strong suspicion is that whether or not the FFXIV combat system currently supports a single action causing more than one damage type, the fact that at one point it probably did means that the server probably only communicates to the client "<Actor> does <Z> damage to <target> from <action>", rather than "<Actor> does {<X> physical damage, <Y> magical damage} to <target> from <action>". Especially since if I remember right from waaaay back in the beginning, I think magical damage was not only aspected (hence the 'unaspected damage' we still have in tooltips), but also physical damage was internally aspected (slashing, piercing, etc.); that'd be a lot of potential damage types.

But also I'm running on "before you speak to me, if you value your life you will bring an offering of coffee" levels of sleep deprivation (and I don't even like coffee), so I'll grant my off-the-cuff recollection of 2.0 may not be perfect; I'm not 100% certain I can remember last week at the moment.

[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.

[Ultimatecalibur]

If the "information" wasn't there to tell whether you got hit by physical or magical damage, then physical/magical cooldowns are either text flavored, or they work specifically and its not true, and/or they dont work at all and theyre just there as fluff skills on tanks

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. The only reason we know various actions deal various damage types is due to seeing how various buffs and debuffs change the damage displayed over multiple occurrences of that action.

It is not that physical and magical damage do not exist; it is that information on the damage type of actions is not sent client side.

[Semirhage]

snip

Based on a nonexistent thing's lack of support for TEA, I believe you're correct. It likely relies on a set of known data for things like Darkness damage (which I don't recall off the top of my head whether it has a tip-off phrase in the combat log). Like you said before, relying on the text indicator is going to get you almost everything you need, but those few scenarios where it doesn't, that's the part that'll get Square if they tried to implement it officially.