Elemental damages

[Myrhn]

With some of the abilities and weapons skills and with the revamp of SMN we see the elemental damages making a return. Do you think we will see mechanics, mobs and even our character with elemental resistances again?

[Mikey_R]

Short answer....no.

Long answer, by adding in elemental damage, you risk a DPS doing less than the desired damage and so having it be shunned from certain fights. Since the philosophy is, everyone should be able to do everything as whatever they want, having enemies resist an element will just go against that philosophy. Imagine a fire resist enemy being fought by a BLM, where the majority of their damage is fire based as an example.

[Jeeqbit]

No, I don't think we will.

We used to have elemental materia and potions and it was fun to imagine what niche ways you could use them, but I think developers asked themselves if they really want someone stacking elemental resistances, especially out of ignorance and the answer would be no.

They were removed when eureka was being put in the game because eureka is all about adjusting your elemental wheel to be the same or opposite element depending on if the enemy is stronger than you. If they were put back in the game they could influence your elemental resistance in eureka more than intended, although that doesn't matter at this point when you can get full eureka element gear, 2 extra magia board slots and the echo and in the last two you have logos actions. You can become a god in there now.

[DeaconMoore]

Do we really have a return of elemental damage, or do we have flavor text?

[Mikey_R]

It is all just flavour. All the elemental attacks have 'deals X element of damage ' in their descriptions, even Dragoon has Elemental fire on Dragonfire Dive (I believe that and the elemental Ninjutsu are the only ones outside of casters).

[Canadane]

While I don't doubt that mechanically speaking within the game engine the elemental damage still exists and functions, I do doubt it'll ever be calculated to be different.
You're not going to start healing Ifrit with fire attacks like in 1.0 anymore, sadly.

[Rowde]

No, I don't think we will.

We used to have elemental materia and potions and it was fun to imagine what niche ways you could use them, but I think developers asked themselves if they really want someone stacking elemental resistances, especially out of ignorance and the answer would be no.

They were removed when eureka was being put in the game because eureka is all about adjusting your elemental wheel to be the same or opposite element depending on if the enemy is stronger than you. If they were put back in the game they could influence your elemental resistance in eureka more than intended, although that doesn't matter at this point when you can get full eureka element gear, 2 extra magia board slots and the echo and in the last two you have logos actions. You can become a god in there now.

I'm fairly certain this is semi-false information. This would be like saying they removed Piercing, Slashing, Blunt Debuffs from regular jobs so they wouldn't unintentionally buff Blue Mage abilities.

It's more likely that while elemental/physical resistances were removed from base content, there were still legacy/spaghetti code variables available that let them easily transition an elemental system into Eureka. "The remnants of the code are still going to be floating around, so why not use it in this one specific place still."

Speaking of BLU though, it's similar in that base content doesn't care at all what elemental/physical properties their abilities have. That only comes into play for BLU during the Masked Carnival (and interacting with the Condensed Libra debuffs applied by BLU).

[Jeeqbit]

I'm fairly certain this is semi-false information. This would be like saying they removed Piercing, Slashing, Blunt Debuffs from regular jobs so they wouldn't unintentionally buff Blue Mage abilities.

So you are saying it's false information that they removed elemental resistance materia and character page elemental stats right before eureka was released and despite this interesting timing it had nothing to do with eureka?

[Rowde]

So you are saying it's false information that they removed elemental resistance materia and character page elemental stats right before eureka was released and despite this interesting timing it had nothing to do with eureka?

Yes. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

I've never seen a direct quote/interview that states this.

What has been said on multiple occasions is they're constantly having to deal with the remnants of legacy code from 1.0 whenever they make adjustments to systems, to the extreme where they sometimes are unsure if they can even make adjustments.

What I was saying... from my limited perspective... by "removing" elemental resistances from the base content, in reality they probably just "zeroed out" the elemental values on the superclass (or set them all to whatever they determined is a neutral value, whether that be 0, 1, 50, 100, etc.) and obfuscated those elements from the player UI. So in future design of base content, they effectively never have to think about what those values should be set at for enemies anymore. However, the variables still exist, they didn't have to rewrite every existing method argument/parameter to no longer deal with actually removing them.

So it's more, we don't want to deal with elemental resistances anymore, but the codes still there... so maybe we can do something extreme with it in isolated content now.

Which is also just a guess on my part, you could ultimately be right in your assertion. The falsehood is stating it as a certainty that one was done because of the other.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

So you are saying it's false information that they removed elemental resistance materia and character page elemental stats right before eureka was released and despite this interesting timing it had nothing to do with eureka?

Yes. Eureka's elemental wheel is just a hidden % buff that's applied to the damage you deal and take based on a binary check of your magia board slots vs the enemy's element, it's not using the actual element stats. If it were using the actual elemental stats, you'd be seeing a ton of attacks being straight up negated with a certain amount of magia defensive slots. (Video of what I mean - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2e6EcPlytM ) (Explanation at 1:50+ mark)

The element stats are all still there though, they're merely just hidden. You can easily realize this due to the plethora of -X resistance down- debuffs that still exist like in Shinryu Normal/EX where standing in a puddle back in the day lowered your lightning elemental stat to 0, making you take metric tons more damage. or how Scylla's puddle in Syrcus tower gives you Fire Resistance+, which back in the day multiplied your fire attribute by 10x over to give you like 80% damage reduction on her flare. (Coincidentally, any of said elemental attacks are also coded to be true damage to make sure they can't be negated outright from the increased elemental resistance)

As far as the topic, no. Elemental damage on tooltips is just for lore flavor. BLM's existence alone prevents elemental damage from ever being a thing, since it would completely annihilate that job's ability to do anything and make them dead weight if the boss happened to be Fire element.