Overview of FFLogs Death Information in FFXIV

The Deaths tab shows all deaths that have occured in a log, along with a summary of damage taken and healing received before the death.

While it is a useful overview, most deaths require a deeper analysis than just looking at the surface damage taken and healing received.

Clicking into one of the deaths will give a more detailed breakdown of the events surrounding the death.

There is a lot to unpack here. Firstly, the detailed death view offers a graphical representation of the player’s health leading up to their death. In this example, you can see that they started out with max health but were hit by two attacks preceding the fatal blow.

We want to focus on the killing blow, in this case, the tankbuster Heavenly Heel which dealt 83,728 total damage to the tank who only had around 74k health at that point, thus overkilling them by 10,136 damage.

Similar to Damage Taken events, the detailed death view also shows relevant mitigation buffs that were present for each instance of damage taken. In this case, the only relevant mitigation buffs were Feint, The Blackest Night, Rampart and Oblation. Note that the buffs shown on this line may be inaccurate sometimes as FFLogs displays buffs active when the damage was resolved. This means if a shield or defensive CD was applied after the snapshot, (thus having no effect) but before damage resolution, it can show up on the killing blow line and lead to inaccurate conclusions on how much effective mitigation there was.

For example, the above image shows the black mage dying to the Irresistible Grace stack in the final phase of the Epic of Alexander (Ultimate). While it is a hard-hitting attack, the player was at max HP and had five forms of mitigation on them, which is enough for survival normally.

However, if we look at the same attack under the damage taken view, we see the accurate portrayal of mitigation with respect to the actual damage snapshot. Irresistible Grace has a ~1s gap between the snapshot (the 'prepares' line) and the actual resolution, and the only mitigations applied in time were Reprisal, Tactician and the shield Nocturnal Opposition (an old Astrologian ability). Missing another 10% from Collective Unconscious and the beefy shield from Shake It Off is enough to drive the damage into fatal territory.

You can cross check with the summary tab using events view and confirm that the two aforementioned mitigations were indeed applied between the damage snapshot and resolution.

Back to the original death summary, clicking into the Multiple Heals line expands it to reveal all sources of healing received by the tank before the killing blow. In this case, we see that they only received a few regens but no single-target healing outside of Protraction and Aetherpact, both of which are fairly weak, leaving the tank at only 75% HP before the buster occured.

Scrolling all the way to the bottom displays a list of all buff-based mitigation available to the player and when they were last used, giving us an easy view of whether more mitigation could have been applied to avoid the death. In this case, everything but Shadow Wall was already used, and 77s since the last usage is not enough for Shadow Wall to come back up again. However, note that this tab is not a comprehensive list of mitigation as it only displays buff based mitigation, thus leaving out something like Reprisal that could have been applied to reduce damage as well. It also does not include mitigation from the party, for example Exaltation or the cotank's short CD.