Elemental damages

[TheMightyMollusk]

Elemental damage in an MMO with random parties is a terrible idea. You run the risk of having party members basically unable to participate. Imagine if fire damage healed Ifrit and you got into a party with two thaumaturges; it would take forever to whittle him down with Blizzard 1. Or, for that matter, getting black mages in a version of Shiva healed by ice attacks; they'd run out of mana and basically have to sit out big chunks of the fight. And then there's red mage, which uses all elements in their rotation.....

[SeverianLyonesse]

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.

Huh. This actually brings up something interesting, though. Even if class abilities shouldn't use elemental traits for the sake of fairness, there are other ways elemental traits could be implemented that are class-independent.

You could have things totally player-blind like Scylla's puddle, whereby the boss mechanics grant elemental buffs/debuffs that affect every player's damage output/resistence. I think a few bosses have stuff like that but I think overall it's kind of rare.

You could also have a system that, although job-indifferent, would still depend to some extent on player equipment like the materia system. Which is what we already had, I guess. Tbh I'm not sure why they didn't keep elemental materia around as a defensive system. I can see it creating balance/flavor problems as offensive imbuement, but defensively it's not much different than other stat materia or the potion system, both of which are still in place. My suspicion is that it was removed because materia melding as a mechanic is kind of stupidly implemented. I don't know why melding even exists...it is inconsistent, it is slow, it's soulless. The way it exists in XIV, it's just not fun.

[Jojoya]

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?

Extremely unlikely. It seems like every MMO that started with elemental damage/resistance mechanics eventually gave them up in favor of using a generic magical damage. Despite some players wanting more complexity in damage design, the majority want simplicity.

[Dyvid]

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?

No with a but. They should create a caster job that revolves around the elemental wheel.

[Rowde]

No with a but. They should create a caster job that revolves around the elemental wheel.

Blue Mage doh...

[RitsukoSonoda]

Elemental damage and the whole weakness/resistance/nullify/absorb mechanics with it cannot be a thing without an overhaul to most of the caster jobs in the game to give them access to most if not all of the elemental types that doesn't involve some kind of build up mechanic and every element having a consistent output potency.

[Momo_Kozuki]

I only want more elemental damage stacking if it is for Eureka contents. That place is so perfect to flex your power.



The rest, no.

Blue Mage doh...

If you count their Masked Carnival's gimmick fight, sure. Not really feel anything different though. All GCD skills have similar potency and are pretty much just reskin of each other.

[Alestorm]

I can't see it working, because unless it was fire or frost vulnerabilities black mage would literally become useless without a complete rehaul of the entire class. It would be like that for every other job as well and I for one don't like the sound of having to relearn basically an entire MMO.

[KageTokage]

From playing other MMOs like Ragnarok Online and WoW that do/did have element mechanics, I can say it was generally more restrictive then entertaining or intuitive; particularly in the latter case where you were gimped into nigh-uselessness against enemies that were randomly immune to whatever magic type you might be specialized into.

[OranKells]

There are no elemental damages in effect. The tooltip descriptions of elemental damage are just flavor text. Black mages don't do less damage to Ifrit with their spells. We don't even have spells for each element, there's no water damage spells I can think of. There won't be elemental damage bonus resistances without given each job access to most elements lest certain jobs fall out of favor in some endgame fights.

The singular exception is blue mage and even that's largely restricted to the carnival. The reason that is even a thing is because they aren't even trying to keep that balanced.