Will they ever add melee DPS without positional attacks?

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Originally Posted by Rayo

How about we just give melee some more ranged options and shorten caster cast time to the point its basically instant, homogenize all the jobs even further

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I mean, first off he only asked for *a* melee without positionals. I find it funny you're crying that he's the one who's wanting homogenization while stalwartly defending that every melee dps *must* have positionals.

The thing that trips people up with positionals is that they think they have to be positioned directly on the E/W sides of the target for the positional to count. As long as you're at the SW/SE side then you are at the flank, so it's literally just hit a GCD, move 1-2 steps during the downtime, hit next GCD and repeat. As for bosses spinning around etc. fights are scripted so unless you have a bad tank then it's simply a matter of knowing/anticipating when those moments are going happen and act accordingly.

Anyways if you want a job with no positionals, SAMs your closest bet since their positional bonuses are potency based IIRC.

SAM is definitely the job you want if you do not want to deal with the "melee dance" FFXIV has going on. Having played a caster, tank, and melee I always feel DPS melee have a hell of a time compared to my BLM/RDM due to having to avoid boss mechanics like cleaves, aoes, and etc.. my BLM just casts non stop till they have to avoid an aoe. SAM definitely feels superior to MNK with that powerful feel but less crack head dancing.

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Originally Posted by Dualgunner

I mean, first off he only asked for *a* melee without positionals. I find it funny you're crying that he's the one who's wanting homogenization while stalwartly defending that every melee dps *must* have positionals.

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Okay, that got a laugh out of me.

posionals or not, blm is still the most difficult dps in difficult end raids...

and the most difficult melee are not difficult cause of the positonals, but cause of the rota / timing / aligning of ogcds (Drg and Nin are the "difficult" melees in SB; which both are not as positonal heavy, as the "easier" melees Sam and Mnk are.. , well between Sam and Drg positonals, Drg actually has more, but its not the positonals that make it tricky, they are more predictable than Sams somehow)

imo Sam is probably the easiest melee, just seemed hard, till the community figured out its correct rota / ocgd usage..., mnk imo close 2nd or as "easy", once the positonals are a little bit in the muscle memory

whlie Drg and Nin, the most loved melee are the most difficult in SB.., seems fair .. want a "wanted dps, need to earn it" (imo in HW and ARR, Drg was the easiest melee ... and mnk was the hardest or one of the hardest, because of the positonals back then...the rotas of the others where "simple" compared to SB; when you reach lv 50 mnk and sam might seem hard, but at by the time you reach 60, they wont feel so difficult thx to the positonals routine)

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Originally Posted by bustamanteverde

SAM is definitely the job you want if you do not want to deal with the "melee dance" FFXIV has going on. Having played a caster, tank, and melee I always feel DPS melee have a hell of a time compared to my BLM/RDM due to having to avoid boss mechanics like cleaves, aoes, and etc.. my BLM just casts non stop till they have to avoid an aoe. SAM definitely feels superior to MNK with that powerful feel but less crack head dancing.

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I wouldn't say SAM is a class you want if you want to ignore positionals. True, the easy skill floor makes the class do OK DPS just spamming Midare, but it's the use of Kenki that really brings the class up. One missed positional is 5 Kenki, which is 1/5th of a Shinten which means every missed positional is a loss equal to 60 potency.

I'm all for a melee class not relying on positionals, but SE would have to come up with another mechanic to create a skill gap, though, to keep it interesting for higher skilled players.

i don't get why people keep saying ninja is a hard melee...i mean on 3.x w/o a warrior ninja was kinda challenging if there was downtime/disengage mechanics, but now?it only has 1 dot that its now a combo finisher that you only need to do once every 3 combos, dwd is now 60sec cd, we don't need to align 90sec cds with b4b like before. the only kind of hard part is optimizing ninki usage on fights...also about positional, it does make the gameplay of melee harder if you're optimizing, because you're constantly losing damage with every positional you miss, and on endgame fights with bosses mechanics that often force you to even lose uptime, hitting your positionals is very tricky.

your always opposite the tank as is, so you're likely behind the boss at all times, which is where most dps positional attacks require you to be, and in the case that you aren't you have true north.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I'm baffled that people believe positionals make for engaging melee dps gameplay. Quite a few other games with better combat have melee without positionals and still manage to be far more fun.

I believe myself that complexity in MMO combat should be in the boss mechanics, your rotation (easy to learn, hard to master), situations where your rotation allows you to adapt on the spot for extra damage, lining up dps cooldowns with boss phases where you have max uptime, making full use of all utility and so on. Navigating clunkiness like positionals on a spinning boss or animation locks isn't skill, it's artificial difficulty.

Positionals are just tedious sometimes in regular play too. For example as a ninja questing, you'll never get behind a mob for your finisher so you're always slightly gimped. Or trying to trick attack a SB A-rank while on the hunt deserves a medal if you pull it off more than half the time. These aren't necessary to play the game, but certainly don't make the combat feel smooth in day-to-day gaming.

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The concept of artificial difficulty seems lost on a lot of players. Clunky job design where you're battling yourself more than any encounter? Just like get good. Instances with horribly balanced mobs? Again, just get good. Encounters where the camera is a bigger obstacle than mechanics? Why haven't you gotten good yet?

Well I don´t think SE will ever create a melee DPS without positional beside tank. During they want melee have downtime for miss positional and skill gap. So range/mage dps don´t fall behind melee dps with movement/low dps output or they will need to add fight be like Neo Exdeath type with everyone downtime. Well though SE already add alot new content without positional fight already O5,O6,HoH and eureka.

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Originally Posted by TaiyoShikasu

The concept of artificial difficulty seems lost on a lot of players.

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Well, the game "could" just play itself. Everything that you have to actually do as player is just artificial difficulty and tedium.

I see the term as more of a buzzword, truth be told. Like, boss mechanics? They're just clunky encounter designs where you're jumping around the arena more than playing your class. Totally artificial difficulty.

The actual questions are: Is it engaging? Is it interesting? Is it fun? All of them are subjective.

The way I see it, positionals are a decent enough class mechanic in trinity combat design where bosses focus their attacks on the tank and therefore only move as much as the tank himself. It's not much, it's not particularly interesting, but it's "something" to breathe some engagement into trinity design. A lot of class designs exist just for the purpose of making the trinity not boring by making you "fight against your own class".

The further you stray away from the trinity, via attacks that flat out ignore the tank and bosses that fly and jump around the arena and bombard it with all kinds of AoEs and mechanics, the more these things become superfluous and frustrating. You got other things to focus on and you'll miss a lot of positionals through no fault of your own, or lose your Enochian, stacks, or whatever due to jumps, invuln phases or plain movement.

That said, they might actually add a melee without positionals at some point. I wouldn't even preclude that they get rid of positionals altogether if their encounters become even less trinity-like, because then positionals will become more and more detrimental. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

You see it as a buzzword 'cause you don't actually know what it means. There is nothing fun, interesting, or engaging about running from point A to point B and back to maximize damage on a target. Those things should come from the job itself and the encounter. If it doesn't make for good quest design, why would it make for good job design?

Casters and ranged have all kinds of things within their job to make them fun, interesting, and/or engaging on top whatever mechanics are being thrown at them as do tanks and healers while melee are shackled with something as unintuitive as positionals which is already a detriment in any solo and overworld content.

I don't know... I have a lot more fun with my melee jobs than I do with my casters. Seriously, what does rdm have that makes it fun other than it's jump in/melee chain/jump out (and pray that you don't jump into a boss AoE).

I personally don't find positional tedious or all that difficult to deal with.

And note, I'm not particularly for or against positionals. I just don't find them that big of a deal.

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Originally Posted by Aloy

Its funny how people say "go play warrior" (and also getting lot of likes too). Either they are trolling or.... dunno what else to say?

I get it, lot of people like the positional gameplay... but do we really need to have it in every single melee DPS job?? People who like positional attacks on melee already have lots of job to chose from...

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Honestly, without positional, melee dps is really boring. I was actually amazed when I started playing a ranged dps because there are so many more mechanics that they have to deal with than melee does. As an example, in ifrit ultimate, the ranged have to position the eruptions in the right places while maintaining their damage output. Melee during that phase need to keep attacking things.

This is actually pretty widespread throughout so many fights. While positional can be annoying, they actually allow melee to do something rather than simply standing behind the boss the entire time hitting the same rotation over and over again.

Personally I could see NIN adopt a DoT juggling/poison stacking playstyle (similar to ARR SMN) to replace its combo abilities. The only reason Gust Slash/Spinning Edge exist in the rotation is to act as filler. You could easily just remove the combo effects from their hotbar, add Mutilate back in on Gust Slash, then put the slashing debuff back on Aeolian Edge while balancing out the numbers and leaving the positional requirements as is. By staggering out the DoT/debuff/buff timers you could encourage a similar behaviour to combos where your DPS dips and spikes in short intervals while freeing the player to make decisions about what to press next at any given moment instead of "1-2-what do I do?" But I understand that kind of gameplay is also harder for new players to catch on to as the free-form nature of it makes it just as easy to screw up when you're unaware of how your kit works.

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Originally Posted by KDSilver

That's not really troll.
This is because Warrior has always be known as being the dps-like tank.
That's all.

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I know that Warrior has more DPS than other Tanks, but I cannot have the role of dps as a warrior.. I cannot que for dungeon or raid as Warrior DPS...

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

Personally I find it boring hitting a bosses backside throughout the whole fight, the Positional thing is ridiculous in this game.

I mean it's just not epic in any shape or form, oh look I'm hitting the bosses big ol'l butt for the next 10 minutes!

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You must confuse FFXIV with wow... in FFXIV you cannot stay in boss butt for 10 minutes.. with all the mechanics and avoid you have to do... So your scenario that you stand still for 10 minutes in the boss butt is either imagination or from another game... but even in that case, you know.... no one stops you from moving to flank... if that makes you feel..... better

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I'm baffled that people believe positionals make for engaging melee dps gameplay. Quite a few other games with better combat have melee without positionals and still manage to be far more fun.

I believe myself that complexity in MMO combat should be in the boss mechanics, your rotation (easy to learn, hard to master), situations where your rotation allows you to adapt on the spot for extra damage, lining up dps cooldowns with boss phases where you have max uptime, making full use of all utility and so on. Navigating clunkiness like positionals on a spinning boss or animation locks isn't skill, it's artificial difficulty.

Positionals are just tedious sometimes in regular play too. For example as a ninja questing, you'll never get behind a mob for your finisher so you're always slightly gimped. Or trying to trick attack a SB A-rank while on the hunt deserves a medal if you pull it off more than half the time. These aren't necessary to play the game, but certainly don't make the combat feel smooth in day-to-day gaming.

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This guy gets it

You can hope the BLU won't
After all, it's a "mage" so perhaps instead of positional it will have a few casted spells like Midare for the SAM.

I agree it'd be nice to have 1 melee without positional. NIN isn't so bad as it only has 2, and one of them is done scarcely.
So technically as long as you're behind, you only need to reposition once every 30s so it's not so bad.

They did add melees without positionals. Theyre called tanks and samurai

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Originally Posted by vVAstrAVv

They did add melees without positionals. Theyre called tanks and samurai

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You literally lose the equivalent of 60 potency for every positional you don't hit on Samurai.

Playing SAM is generally worse than losing 60 potency.

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Originally Posted by vVAstrAVv

They did add melees without positionals. Theyre called tanks and samurai

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Missing a positional on Samurai is arguably worse than most other melee, you don't lose potency on the weaponskill, but the kenki you don't generate is roughly a 60 potency loss, ignoring it is pissing away a lot of damage for nothing.

A lot of people underestimate just how much that extra bit of kenki matters to your DPS and think that because its not a flat potency increase, it doesn't matter.

Got back recently, started fresh on Diabolos server.

I remembered why I looooove Ninja and DRG as soon as I picked Rogue back up. Position-based attacking and Combos are the equivalent of seeing bigger, brighter booms as a Caster/Ranged DPS. A DPS with no worries about position, range of engagement, or melee chains would be kinda...lame.

For everyone else, I heard "Warrior is Strong" again.

If we get a melee with no positionals I want a ranged DPS with all positionals and a healer that strictly does DPS to monsters but it converts over to healing to the party >_>

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Originally Posted by MajisTek

If we get a melee with no positionals I want a ranged DPS with all positionals and a healer that strictly does DPS to monsters but it converts over to healing to the party >_>

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While those all sound horrible in practice, the sentiment is good. We should be thinking outside the box with new jobs, so that we get unique and varied gameplay. More positionals is boring, give us something we have never seen before

I think certain special attacks having positional is a good thing, and really is the whole point of a melee class, they in there, close enough to make use of them.
Positional in a basic combo however are godawful and the reason I don't play monk.

But if they can find an interesting mechanic to replace the odd positional, then go for it.

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Originally Posted by MajisTek

If we get a melee with no positionals I want a ranged DPS with all positionals and a healer that strictly does DPS to monsters but it converts over to healing to the party >_>

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That's how they did healing in The Secret World. Healer targets enemy with their assault rifle, and secondary targets an ally. Ally is then healed a portion of the damage the healer did. Loved that system...combines dps with healing, and was effective.

They just need to add an other extra on the combos, when you don't use positionals.

Like, 4-5 GCDs, 1 to start a combo and then you have to follow with the other 3-4 according to procs.

Idk, there should be other things possible than just positionals to make melee game engaging.

No. And they better not either. I use to main Samurai for for a bit, but then I switched to Monk because standing in one spot doing your rotation as Samurai at lvl 70 is incredibly boring and kinda killed the class for me.

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Originally Posted by Magnedeus

No. And they better not either. I use to main Samurai for for a bit, but then I switched to Monk because standing in one spot doing your rotation as Samurai at lvl 70 is incredibly boring and kinda killed the class for me.

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Compared to monk all three of the other melee basically stand still. But Samurai does have positionals--very important to hit positionals that cost the equivalent of 60 potency if they're not hit.

So you reallg shouldn't be standing in one spot as a SAM at 70.