How to Read Damage Taken Analytics in FFXIV

The Events view of the Damage Taken tab on FFLogs often offers the most useful information in regards to how much mitigation and shielding were applied to a given instance of damage, but newer players may find themselves confused at all the acronyms.

• P: Stands for Parried damage.
  • Only physical damage can be parried, reducing 15% of its damage. All classes have a natural chance of parrying physical damage, and Gunbreaker can increase their own parry chance with Camouflage.
• B: Stands for Block.
  • Only jobs with shields have the ability to block, which means only Paladins can in endgame content. Unlike parry, blocks can apply to both magical and physical damage. A blocked attack has its damage reduced by roughly 20% in endgame Paladin gear.
• A: Stands for Absorbed damage.
  • This is how much damage has been absorbed by shields present on the player during the damage snapshot. A: values are only present on the damage resolution line. Very rarely, A: will not show up under the damage resolution line even if shields mitigated the damage. This happens with the following sequence of events: damage snapshots > shield expires naturally (or is otherwise dismissed/clicked off) > damage resolution. While the shield mitigated damage in practice, FFLogs will not display it as having absorbed anything.
• M: Is Mitigated damage.
  • This is how much incoming damage was reduced via % mitigation, discounting shields. The % value is how much % mitigation was applied to an incoming attack. This % is calculated based on what defensive buffs and debuffs FFLogs thinks were present during the damage snapshot, and while mostly accurate, can occasionally be wrong when it comes to damage dealt by subactors. Reprisal/Addle/Feint can sometimes not show up as mitigation and thus not be accounted for in M: calculations, leading to inaccurate U: values. Always remember that mitigation not appearing on FFLogs does not mean that it did not have a real effect.

FFLogs also deals badly with long fights that often reuse actors, such as mistakenly displaying King Thordan's Ultimate End as being cast by Ser Hermenost. This also leads to inaccurate damage calculations as it would discount Reprisal/Addle/Feint from active mitigations. The following screenshot shows Ultimate End as being 70k raw according to FFLogs, when in reality, it deals close to 95k damage without mitigation. Apply critical thinking when you see things in logs that seem completely off.

• U: Is Unmitigated damage.
  • This is how much damage the attack would have done with no shields and mitigation. You should only look at U: values on the damage resolution line (aka not the line that says "Prepares"). U: values on the "Prepares" line do not take into account any shielding when calculating unmitigated damage and will be completely wrong on any hits that were shielded. Occasionally, U: values can be inaccurate if partial shields were present on the player when the damage was taken. For example, if the player took 0 damage from a previous attack that did not completely consume the shield. FFLogs does not know how much of that shield is left over by the time the damage of interest landed and thus will be using inaccurate A: values in calculating U:.

• O: stands for overkill damage.
  • Essentially how much you died by. O: can also appear on healing views to denote healing beyond max HP.