If you check out your spells, you’ll probably see something about them dealing fire or lightning damage. And that’s cool – enemies having strengths and weaknesses to particular elements is an RPG staple, after all. We all like having the edge, and some of XIV’s boss encounters are hard. Unaspected damage refers to spells that don’t have an element associated with them. Like a bullet to the face, or a simple blast of magic. So if you were in a situation where an enemy was resistant to all your normal spells, unaspected damage would bypass that. It might not be as effective, but it’d work when nothing else did. An overwhelming amount of the enemies you face will not have strengths or weaknesses pertaining to particular elements, no matter how covered in ice or fire they may be. You don’t have any of those weaknesses either. Nothing is going to hurt you any more or less outside of a limited handful of situations. This is evident if you just take a look at any of the gear you pick up throughout your adventures. Do you ever see fire/ice/wind resistance on any of them? Nope. Just the normal stats like Strength, Intelligence and so on. So why does the game still talk about unaspected and elemental damage if it doesn’t have a point anymore? Does it affect anything?
Is Unaspected Damage Still Relevant?
No, and it hasn’t been for quite a long time. It had a very small part to play in the original A Realm Reborn experience, but has been utterly phased out. Unaspected damage and other references to elemental attacks are either forgotten relics, or simply flavoring text to make some attacks look more exciting. But elemental damage did pop up again in Eureka, an optional zone in the Stormblood expansion. Eureka tasked players with exploring a mysterious island filled with elemental enemies. And yet even there, the element attributed to your spells didn’t matter. Players can basically configure their element to whatever they desire, and that essentially overwrites any element attached to spells. Outside of some very niche situations, elements aren’t something you’ll have to worry about in FFXIV. It’s an outdated system the game has left in the past, and really just exists now to give your abilities a little more flavor.
