(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.

[Tint]

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

Camouflage, yes, but Dark Mind is not a usefull tool against trash pulls. Magic auto attacks are pretty rare and with only 10 seconds duration it's not even that good against magic attacking trash packs. Dark Mind always was best against tank busters, making DRK the most defensive tank in savage raids, where magic busters are not uncommon.

And Camouflage by the way has a 10% damage mitigation against all types of damage, and when you parry an attack you can be sure it's physical.

I don't want to take away the flavour of DRK and I don't want to nerf his awesome extra button against magic busters, but I want to know when I can actually use it. Otherwise it's just a useless button.

But when they really can't give us a clue if an attack is magical, then maybe give Dark Mind also a 10% damage mitigation against all types of damage on top of the magical mitigation. Or bring back Dark Dance and let it share the cooldown with Dark Mind, so at least there is an actual fluff mitiagtion tool (not that DRK really needs it - while DRK is lacking a fluff mitigation tool, TBN is just that powerfull... but Dark Dance wasn't that strong anyway, so I don't see a problem with adding it back).


However, it has to be saved somewhere if an attack does magical or physical damage. Is it really that difficult to let every cast look that up and do something like "if physical use that normal castbar" and "if magical use that other castbar". Then they can switch between magical and physical back and forth and the game automatically uses the correct castbar o.ô

[VenKitsune]

And Camouflage by the way has a 10% damage mitigation against all types of damage, and when you parry an attack you can be sure it's physical.

DRK shouldn't have to use Dark Mind for tank busters, and neither does GNB need to use Camouflage (parry so physical only).
They have enough tools between their 30% mitigation, their on demand shield, and Rampart/Reprisal to take anything in their stride if used correctly.

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

Just wanted to correct you here.

Magical attacks of all types are now parryable/blockable, they changed that some time in stormblood i believe, to make PLD more viable in raids with the use of sheltron and Bulwark. So you can't even tell if something is physical anymore based on if you can parry it.

Honestly its stupid. Anyone done E4S? The attack where he smashes the arena with his hand over and over? That's magical. Yes, Magical. He slams the ground with his massive fist, and its magical, it boggles the mind. There really needs to be a way to tell what damage type is what because even things that LOOK physical arent, even things that look magical, arent. The Auto attacks from Shiva in E8S For example? She blasts magic out of her hand, you'd assume its magical but last time i checked, it was physical and yet in E2S, where magic is also blasted out of the bosses hand, that IS magical, so its not like magical auto attacks are uncommon.

[RyuDragnier]

DRK shouldn't have to use Dark Mind for tank busters, and neither does GNB need to use Camouflage (parry so physical only).
They have enough tools between their 30% mitigation, their on demand shield, and Rampart/Reprisal to take anything in their stride if used correctly.

Dark Mind and Camouflage are flavour skills intended for trash pulls and chip damage.
They dont need to homogenize their only remaining unique abilities.

Homogenize in this case would work better. Add a 10% physical damage mitigation to Dark Mind, and then it can actually be used as a cooldown instead of being absolutely worthless 90% of the time.

[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.

[Packetdancer]

I have to agree that it's odd they say it can't be done. Any given ability must clearly have some kind of data flag in it which defines whether it does magical or physical damage, since that's necessary for it do actually do the correct damage type when playing. Why can't the client simply read this information and apply some sort of simple UI change to indicate an attack's damage type?

I suspect the client doesn't have the information, and that's probably the core issue. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the client doesn't have a concept of 'damage type' at all; all damage calculations are almost certainly handled by the server. So the client tells the server "I executed this ability" (where the ability happens to mitigate magic damage). The server just tells the client "you took <X> damage". The client doesn't know that the damage was magical or physical, the client just knows that the damage is <X> amount; the value of <X> as communicated by the server may be lower or higher depending on what mitigations the server is aware you have.

I mean, the damage processing part of that is fairly standard for MMOs (and really, any server-based game). The thing is, I can't see anywhere in that where the client ever needed to know the damage type, which means the client probably has no provision for that information to be conveyed from the server in the first place. So either the client would need to have every single possible enemy attack added to a table that lists whether it's physical or magical, or the actual client/server protocol would need to be changed to contain additional combat information in the packets.

Moreover, consider that the server architecture originally supported elemental-aspected damage types, and almost certainly supported combinations of them depending on certain things. So I'm guessing that behind the scenes the server does the calculation of total damage done and just hands that back. Think of Dungeons & Dragons, when you have a holy sword and the attack does <X> amount of slashing damage but also <Y> amount of radiant damage; the DM will take into account any mitigations the target has (i.e., takes half damage from radiant damage, for instance), and then just subtract the total resulting damage from the target.

Even without the old elemental-aspected damage, if there are any attacks which do both physical and magical damage—and it wouldn't surprise me if there are some—that means the server would calculate the mitigations separately and then just hand back a total damage, rather than handing back a "you take <X> physical damage and also <Y> magical damage". So at that point, communicating whether damage is physical or magical would require splitting any such attacks up into two separate attacks and sending the damage results separately.

And that is not only a non-minor change, but also would have implications for some abilities; think of Third Eye, where it reduces damage taken from the next attack by 10%. If you have an ability that does both physical and magical damage, if the resulting damage is sent as a single attack, Third Eye will mitigate the entire attack. If you split it into two separate attacks, now Third Eye would only mitigate the first. So for things like that to work, you'd need to actually change it so that all damage was bundled into 'attack' envelopes and then the physical and magical damage would share an 'envelope' to make them a single attack, while displaying the damage amounts separately...

I mean, I don't know for sure that's how any of their server architecture works; that's all just hypothesis and guesswork (albeit guesswork based on personal experience both as a software dev in general and a former game dev in specific). But from personal experience, things like that are 100% how you end up with spaghetti code/"that would be a lot of work to change" scenarios that make a given feature request a massive ask, when the request seems on the surface to be utterly reasonable and fairly straightforward.

[Tint]

Just wanted to correct you here.

Magical attacks of all types are now parryable/blockable, they changed that some time in stormblood i believe, to make PLD more viable in raids with the use of sheltron and Bulwark. So you can't even tell if something is physical anymore based on if you can parry it.

Nope, you can't parry magical attacks. But yes, you can block them now.

The change to parry (and block) was that you can parry (and block) attacks without facing towards the enemy now.

[VenKitsune]

Nope, you can't parry magical attacks. But yes, you can block them now.

The change to parry (and block) was that you can parry (and block) attacks without facing towards the enemy now.

Really? I'm almost certain i've been parrying magic attacks on GNB after the 99 kills (Read: Slog) through Seat of Sacrifice for the totems, namely the LB1 and earthshakers but i could be wrong, those could be physical for all i know or i could of been seeing things, i havent bothered to check. Just another problem with the current system, heh.
Funny thing too, there is no way to GUARANTEE a parry these days, only ways to guarantee a block so you could chalk it up to being "well i didnt parry it, must be magical" when its IS physical, you just have horrible luck on parry chances. Ironically, this might of been the only good use for the old parry substat...Testing their game for systems they dont want to implement because they're too busy adding umbrellas to the game.