Currently we aren't making good enough use of the elements yet.
- Dark is needed for some Dark spells, some skills that are designed to both heal and deal damage.
- Holy isn't used but might end up becoming the "Healing" element, by doing so we can bring White Mages and Paladins heal in equal terms compared to heals being casted by other jobs. Main problem with this approach is that Unholy (formerly Undead) would not reverse the heals that have Holy attached.
- Earth is hardcoded to be ignored by Float status. There are limited skills that work for and against this; Mantra Knight's Terra 5 for example, hits 5 times but you have a chance of hitting yourself unless you have Float. Float in addition also currently blocks Don't Move and Slow.
- Wind Element was being used originally to act as the "any element" flag which was what allowed Oil to become Venom (units inflicted with Venom taking 2x (wind) elemental damage). This will likely be changed.
- Black Mages and Mantra Knights, both damage/nuking oriented jobs currently has free elemental bonus from their corresponding unique weapons (Rods and Axes respectively). This will likely be changed with the advent of ARH, so high tier spells like Fire III can only be cast from Rods, for example.
There are neat things we could do with Elements,
- Make certain jobs and or items have elemental weakness
- Make certain jobs and or Items have elemental advantage against other jobs and or items
- Combination of 1 and 2, so if you have Fire bonus, you'll be weak to Ice; Ice bonus + weak to lightning; lightning bonus + weak to fire.
- Elements can be used to manipulate the AI's decisions. Though this is a very minor gain (we don't really need this).
- NEW: Elements to go with Skillsets, for example, using Fire element on all Black Magic spells, Wind element on all Mantra Knight spells, etc.
- NEW: Elements solely used for ARH in a global scale; every class has certain spells they can use depending on their weapon's element of choice.
[/b]
there are a few things id like to mention from my own patch and i dont know if it will be of any use
my "any" element is actually water because nothing in game strengthens it or blocks it
Earth i made inflict slightly more damage than other elements because it can be blocked by float
and wind can inflict 2x damage if you're floating
fire x2 by oil
storms make thunder do more damage if i recall
and ice? does anything strengthen it anyway?
i actually turned the gravity spells into dark
and did the same thing with healing spells being the holy element
however in my patch there are 4 tiers of each element, so theres the ra,ga,ja of wind, water, earth, and dark that were absent from the original game in the first place...
I updated the list, I am leaning towards using Elements solely for class skill customizability. It just works and it's easy to balance. It also gives us an awesome way to differentiate weapons and clone jobs.