Targeted mitigation often does not work

[Renalt]

I've noticed it does indeed work. Tank will eat a tankbuster and it'll hurt a lot but if I use my mitigation on them before hand I've noticed they take less damage than before. I pretty much just use them for tank busters and nothing else.

[OM3GA-Z3RO]

Then in Shadowbringers, we got Dark Missionary and Heart of Light, aoe mitigation which only works against magic, but with the above context, I didn't think it was that much of a problem because of how SE likes magic damage.

During Shadowbringers it became a 50/50 guessing game and so people that were really into numbers had to do multiple tests to see if Dark Missionary and Heart of Light had any effect against Attack X and/or Attack Y.

What I have noticed in modern content, where we actually have abilities like Reprisal, Feint and Addle, is that they are necessary when the content is new to prevent wiping to a raid-wide, so perhaps they have stopped caring about the damage type in content where they expect proper and coordinated use of these abilities. But either way, all three of them mitigate both now, so it helps to know the damage type with Feint and Addle to optimize it but it's not entirely useless if you don't.

The reason being is because people don't want to play the guessing game and the problem is that Feint and Addle were barely used at all because they weren't necessary, now that they reduce both types albeit only half effectively compared to each others counterparts but at least now it does "something", I see people using it more because it does that.

My concern with adding the damage type is that if it's too obvious what the damage type is, then it puts into question what the point of a damage type is. If you don't know what it is, then you have to explore and figure it out and I imagine that is the intention. If we are going to explore and figure it out for ourselves, then it should be reasonably obvious from the animation or the cast name whether it is physical or magical.

The problem is that Animation and Cast Names are very inconsistent, some monsters raid wides that makes them roar are Physical or Magical there is no way you can figure out which is which unless you do heavy experiments and just like my previous post, Eric's Warden's Wrath looks Magical but it is not, it's a Physical attack and then his Slam Shut which is also a raid wide and it looks slightly the same as Warden's Wrath is a Magical, so a DRK or a GNB that does not have this knowledge willl get punished due to the games inconsistencies and expectations that: "The player is supposed to figure that out themselves" having a main fundamental thing like mitigating damage for the entire party being a complete guessing game is very bad game design.

I think there is a way in the battle log to determine it. If they "begin casting" and then "cast" an attack, it's magic. If they "ready" and then "use" an attack, it's physical.

They stopped following that philosophy at the end of StB the battle log telling you what the boss is doing is the most inaccurate way to determine what is Physical and what is Magical.

"The Ultima Weapon uses Homing Lasers."
Guess what, that is Magical

"The phoinix uses Experimental Fireplume"
Guess what, that is also Magical

"The phoinix readies Scorched Exaltation"
Want me to give you the answer to this type?

"The Terminus wrecker readies Meaningless Destruction"
This is a raid wide guess what Type this is

[Jeeqbit]

They stopped following that philosophy at the end of StB the battle log telling you what the boss is doing is the most inaccurate way to determine what is Physical and what is Magical.

It doesn't distinguish on player abilities either, just player GCDs. It doesn't seem like a strict attachment but it would be a start if it was.

Eric's Warden's Wrath looks Magical but it is not, it's a Physical attack and then his Slam Shut which is also a raid wide and it looks slightly the same as Warden's Wrath is a Magical

Shining Cells and Slam Shut are arena transitions. Is there an example of a physical arena transition or can we assume all arena transitions are magic?

[Avoidy]

talking about addle, feint and reprisal

there isn't even a way to tell w/o a combat logger

reason for all this is that even though the animation might be coming straight from the boss, the actual dmg source is an entirely different entity that is often not targetable, let alone existing anywhere in the arena

seems like strange coding to me, or is this in fact intentional? to herd the group to use one of the 3 elsewhere? but again, it happens often that there is nothing to use it on for a rather long time, and how the heck r u gonna tell in the first place w/o a third party tool

reprisal in particular, u have 2 in a group both on a minute CD, guess i'm just gonna mitigate some autos? or not even because boss is casting but the dmg isn't even coming from them

wishful thinking but some positive change here would be nice

/rant over

Yes, I wish something would be done about this. I had no idea until super recently, when I was informed by a friend of a friend who knew a guy who saw with "special glasses" that damage wasn't coming from the enemy itself, but from environmental elements emitting the damage. This entire time, I'd thought I was helping to mitigate stuff like that, but nope!
I wish this game had more feedback when stuff works properly. If you nail a positional, I wish the skill made a slightly different and more satisfying sound. If you got a mitigation off in time, I wish the impact sounded... idk, muffled? Or had some kind of visual indicator so your team knew that you had their back and -- most importantly -- so we'd know what actually worked outside of eyeballing the damage taken. You can look at the combat logs later, but I want immediate visual/audio feedback that it worked right then, at the time of it working. It'd make the game way more enjoyable. Or failing that, if you're gonna make attacks come from something you can't mitigate, let the players know somehow.