What's the point of Physical and Magic Damage Types

[YukikoKurosawa]

...When there's no way to tell which is which? There are 3 types of damage attacks in this game a player can do, Weaponskill, Ability, and Spell. Abilities can seemingly be magic or physical, but they're just called abilities. The problem here is that the animations of pretty much everything in this game is a big, flashy anime move that looks like magic. FFS, Warriors are basically geomancers in this game, half their abilities are straight up earth magic, yet they're either weaponskills or abilities.

Paladins, for example, have an ability that slams their weapons into the ground and beams of blue energy erupt from the earth. Is this a spell? No, it's an ability. Worse, there is only this vague clarity with PLAYER attacks. Enemies? Zero. There is ZERO way to tell whether an enemy's attack is physical or magic. As I said, basically everything in this game looks like magic in some way. Sure, that big blast COULD be magic, but how would you ever know?

How exactly do the devs expect us to know what is an isn't physical or magic damage? Do they even know? There is absolutely nothing to give more than the vaguest hint that an ability, player or enemy, is physical or magic. There is no ability that is clearly listed as "physical" or "magic". I'd assume weaponskill would be physical and spell magic, obviously, but abilities just throw a wrench into this, and even weaponskills often look magical based on animations. I cannot even see whether an enemy's attack was magic or not at all.

If the devs want their to be physical and magic damage types, then there needs to be a clear distinction. Because as it stands now there is absolutely none so I must ask how do they expect us to know. And if they're going to have it be this indecipherable, than why even have physical/magic dmg types in the first place? Why not just have flat "damage"? What are they even thinking?

[Shurrikhan]

Careful, one might think you were advocating for a mod there, asking for such fancy functionality as being able to tell what damage is of what type in a game with typal mitigation and with inconsistent aesthetic indicators.




More seriously, though:

This only matters for incoming damage, as the tooltips already tell you whether it is "an attack" [Physical] or "deals (un)aspected damage" [Magical].

For said incoming damage, though, yes, it'd be good if we had some indicator from, say, both the cast-bar and the floating damage text as to whether the damage we will/did receive was magical or physical (or unmitigatable, a.k.a., "Darkness" or "True" damage).

[Vahlnir]

To do damage, obviously.

[Kolsykol]

It's to separate what is a GCD and what is a OGCD.
Abilities for example are OGCD's, weapon skills are not.
You can know simply by reading the tooltip.

And Spells will only get buffed by certain cooldowns while Weaponskills by others.

Edit: And yes this isn't a medieval simulator, the attacks are very flashy I fail to see how this is a problem...
If you don't like it then there are medieval simulators or less flashy games you can play o_O.

It will tell you in the tooltip too what the damage type is too.
And on a visual level there needs to be some consistency and it's easier to make an attack more easily identified and appealing by making it flashy with a bunch of effects that looks '' magical ''.


Edit since maximum post for the day:

Does this forum have a reading comprehension problem because I consistently notice an inability to read what somebody has said and infer a completely different meaning from a post than what was actually meant.

I never said I dislike it I said it makes it difficult to distinguish magic from physical. Especially Warriors who can basically be considered geomancers but nothing that do to my understanding is counted as magical dmg.

Cmon lol, I think it's fair to think that you dislike it based on what and how you wrote about it.
People who don't dislike something doesn't talk about it the way you did.

[Lieri]

Otherwise its a boring game. Everyone just pokes everyone with a stick.

[Shurrikhan]

...

I think you're missing the point here. We don't have typal damage buffs anymore, so that much is irrelevant. Yes, we can tell what damage type our outgoing damage does; more importantly, though, we have zero reason to bother.

What remains relevant is INCOMING damage.

Let's say an enemy has a cast time on "Spear of <Something>" attack. It looks like a literal spear. Can you block it? No, because this was Heavensward, that's Sophia, the spear is magic, and you can't block magic damage.

Now, this primarily affects just GNB and DRK, but still to a somewhat noticeable degree: Much of the complaints about DRK's Dark Mind mitigation are specifically because a few of the attacks that are magic don't look like they would be. Despite having a 20% mitigation on just a one-minute CD and that affecting the majority of tankbusters this tier, it looks like it'd only affect about half, which would put it behind the likes of Camouflage.

[Faafetai]

I am pretty positive Titan's punches contrary to what you would assume, is not physical, but he has magical punches because he is magical. At least thats what dark mind tells me in the fly text. I might just be getting lucky dodges or something every time, but I swore this was a thing when I was messing around in titan extreme.

I would like for a way to know what the attacks would be. Figuring them out it fun, but some are a bit strange.

[dspguy]

Otherwise its a boring game. Everyone just pokes everyone with a stick.

I remember being very confused why my BLM was expected to cast Fire III and Flare on Ifrit and occasionally Blizzard/Freeze on Shiva. There is no difference, elemental weaknesses, etc. If a player wants that nuance, go play BLU. Otherwise, we are playing a game where each ability is just potency and nothing else.

[Nizzi]

Bring back Darkness Damage

[Welsper59]

It's likely just a tiny remnant of the old style of MMORPGs. A time when weapon types were relevant (blunt, slash, pierce, etc), you needed to skill up physical/magical stats, and the elemental wheel was a thing. It's not a big deal to keep obviously, which is probably why it's still around. A generally harmless thing. I don't think it'll be removed completely, but its relevance has long been dead in this game.

Even when you look at jobs with those types of things as points of concern, the problem isn't the existence of it, it's the balancing between similar jobs. It's pretty funny to me when topics related to job balancing are brought up. People want uniqueness but despise the idea that you don't have similar/exact goodies as other jobs and may not be equal to them in almost every way lol. It wouldn't shock me if, despite any complaints, people would be happy with homogenized and consolidated controls (e.g. PvP) as long as they have what amounts to a fresh coat of paint and visual flair.