Wish there were melee DPS without positionals

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Yes. And while you're at it please remove healing for healers. Or how about we give phys ranged positionals. They do less damage unless they are 10 lalas away from the enemy.

In all seriousness, how about instead of removing something yet again to make the game even more boring we add to it? There is honestly not much left to remove.

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There's ironically not much left to add, either, since the jobs are bloated out with forgettable oGCDs and single-purpose gauges.

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Originally Posted by Aco505

I'm not entirely sure what is making you think I'm making it a huge deal but it should be possible to get all positionals in optimized environments. Nothing matters in any other case because the DPS checks are usually not harsh enough to require you to squeeze that extra potency.

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I literally said as much. Multiple times now. Fixing the way positionals themselves work, as described above, would provide that for nearly every fight, where the most one would ever lose thereafter is still 2-4 positionals across the likes of parts 1 and 2 of P12S combined.

Which would leave the purpose of True North almost solely on leniency --almost never necessity-- outside of maybe 1 or 2 positionals per fight where the melee stays put when they don't technically need to, just to avoid freaking out there team (like not attempting in-and-out for Earthshakers in T13).

At that point, I don't think that's reason enough to say that button would be required. That's it. That's all I'm looking for: to make it so the positional system functions without relying on True North. Even then, I don't think that button would do particular harm any more than, say, Swiftcast in its basically only ever being used for Raise outside of BLM, but that's a separate question from whether the system should be left broken in itself.

Hell, I haven't even advocated for the removal of True North. My only comment close to that was in reply to someone saying that positionals should be removed so that we could save the button spent on True North, to which I replied simply that we can and should make positionals work regardless of True North, at which point we could save the button -- or we could leave it.

I'm fine with either one. I'm just not fine with positionals remaining in an unpolished beta state that worked clunkily but without much issue in ARR but has since had several wholes put in it by encounter design.

Tl;dr: I'd just rather True North not be the only means of address we get for such basic and obvious actual issues within the positionals themselves as having to predict mechanics-forced boss spins down to the quarter-second (the turning from which won't be visible in time to the player since what we see of enemy positions is about a half-second + ping behind) and of bosses moving to the edge of the arena --neither of which were things we had in the past-- leaving those problems forevermore dependent on an auxiliary action to deal with.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Repositioning every 10-12 seconds on average is pretty standard for melee jobs. Some jobs just have a greater variance around how frequently those are spaced (i.e. you could have three to four in a row and then a lot of downtime). The numerical count of 'positionals' doesn't necessarily always mandate movement on every melee job.

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I know. I've said as much. I'm just pointing out that how 'positional-dependent' a job would be would have to do more with their positionally dependent potency per minute, or what positional potency is commonly lost in practice among X percentile of that job's players, rather than merely how much potency is at risk at a time.

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Originally Posted by Aco505

And I sincerely hope they don't make DRG the easy job for positionals.

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Same. Heck, I'd rather they give back Monk's (though possibly with a passive leniency mechanic of infrequent value).

I can see positionals going away in the future. It just seems inevitable. Positionals are one of the remaining vestiges of the complexity(hah) of ARR. They got rid of healer stance dancing. They got rid of tank stance dancing. They got rid of hate shedding abilities (because now tanks can hit with just a few abilities and drop tank stance and keep hate for the entire boss fight). They removed accuracy, taking away one of the key ways we had to decide what gear to wear. They took away the "kill shot" moves that worked when the enemy was below 20%. Most non-savage dungeons/raids/trials have very little complexity in terms of cooperating with your group. Dodge the poop and mash-mash-mash to victory. Every expansion they remove some button bloat by taking away abilities just to add more.

I think positionals are on the chopping block. Just between all of the boss jumps we have now and the fact that a while ago they added 3 stacks to True North... they'll either add more stacks or increase the duration and lower the cooldown to the point where you can just keep it active full-time (making it another button click like BRD songs) or they'll just cut it out entirely.

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Originally Posted by dspguy

I can see positionals going away in the future. It just seems inevitable. Positionals are one of the remaining vestiges of the complexity(hah) of ARR.

They got rid of healer stance dancing.

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Probably because it adds nothing but bloat apm, punishment for taking Spell Speed, and additional uptime cost equal to one's roundtrip ping per cycle unless swapping after a sub-GCD cast (which were few back then, as filler attacks were a full GCD)?

It was the difference between an auto-clutch and a manual clutch with which one could perform no additional feats; it adds something more to press, sure, but zero extra complexity. It'd be like if Kaiten had no gauge cost and you just had to remember to hit it before each Iaijutsu, rather than it offering anything to the Kenki system as a whole.

By all means, I wouldn't mind seeing some actual interesting stance-dancing as one might do with Astral/Umbral stances on old THM (if it had more buttons and therefore needed that means of address), Light/Dark Magics stances as per other FF games' SCH, or an unneutered Diurnal/Nocturnal stance interplay on AST, but... Cleric Stance was not that; it was just a choice three-quarters of one's kit being effectively greyed out or the remaining quarter being effectively greyed out. It didn't add to one's kit; it just gave it a password to put in every time you wanted to move past button #4 or move back.

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They got rid of tank stance dancing.

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Now that was an actual loss, if only indirectly. All that ultimately matters is that we lost the ability to trade offensive output for self-sustain or vice versa, reducing agency and healer-interplay.

Though I'd argue that losing specifically high-Enmity skills wasn't much worth complaining about, as they produced incredibly little complexity relative to their button cost (and what little was added was obscured to most players, essentially coming down to "The Price is Right" through guesswork on how much Enmity your highest-Enmity DPS would put out before the boss dies).

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They got rid of hate shedding abilities (because now tanks can hit with just a few abilities and drop tank stance and keep hate for the entire boss fight).

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As they should have. It made no sense to put on CD something that is almost always worthwhile and therefore would only ever be hit on CD (Diversion) or would need to be hit nearly on CD regardless for resource (Lucid Dreaming, Tactician, Refresh). Better would have been to allow Diversion to temporarily pull threat --as to peel adds for healers-- or bait a mechanic, etc.. And if there'd be no use for either, there's really no use for that button except to be hit-on-CD apm bloat with an obligatory extra button cost.

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They took away the "kill shot" moves that worked when the enemy was below 20%

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Probably because on their 90-120s CDs outside of Bard's Misery's End and NIN's Assassinate... you'd only see 1 or 2 uses per boss fight anyways, making them provide very little for their button cost.

That said, I'd still be all for adding a Deathblow mechanic (deals up to X% more damage if that would thereby finish off the enemy) to Bloodletter or upgrading it conditionally to Misery's End when used against a <20% HP target, letting Assassinate hit harder against enemies under 20% HP and to reset its cooldown if the enemy dies within a second of being hit, etc.

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Tl;dr: Yes, we've seen removals in the past, but each of those came at very little added complexity/interactions/engagement relative to their button costs. Positionals have no button cost in themselves.

What few needs we have for True North, depending on Melee tuning, is only a result of (A) the system being left in its unpolished ARR beta state and (B) new forced boss-spinning or positionals-inaccessible mechanics being added to boss fights in inconsistent severity, making simple compensatory tuning for Melee less than ideal. That's a reason to fix positionals themselves via long-requested polish, so that it'd have no obligatory button cost, not to remove an otherwise cost-less means of engagement/interaction/complexity.

Maybe play something else?

The entire game since 5.0 has been designed around melee jobs. The earlier game meant melee occasionally had down time because the boss was out of range. Hit boxes are so big now that it isn’t an issue.

Positionals are part of that role.

even if positionals defacto dont matter.., do not delete them (just lower the crit & dhit influence a bit, pls Yoshi)
... that said, expect every dps class that shares gear to have one "easier" & one "harder" dps.., for personal preference, can chose to play which you prefer, for easier & harder content etc..

like Blm (harder) & Smn (easier); .. Drg (harder) & Rpr (easier), .. Mnk (harder) & Sam (easier) etc.
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maybe Nin will become the "harder" job and the new melee dps the "easier" (with less or no-postionala).., or Nin will be the easier (loses its positionals, as it already has few) and the new melee dps will be the harder one (with positionals)...
(?)
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a no positionals melee dps wish might come true (but not having positionals, will likely have some other class mechanic to keeo it engaging)

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Originally Posted by Shiroe

even if positionals defacto dont matter.., do not delete them (just lower the crit & dhit influence a bit, pls Yoshi)
... that said, expect every dps class that shares gear to have one "easier" & one "harder" dps.., for personal preference, can chose to play which you prefer, for easier & harder content etc..

like Blm (harder) & Smn (easier); .. Drg (harder) & Rpr (easier), .. Mnk (harder) & Sam (easier) etc.
...
maybe Nin will become the "harder" job and the new melee dps the "easier" (with less or no-postionala).., or Nin will be the easier (loses its positionals, as it already has few) and the new melee dps will be the harder one (with positionals)...
(?)
...
a no positionals melee dps wish might come true (but not having positionals, will likely have some other class mechanic to keeo it engaging)

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That sounds so incredibly stupid and absurd, which makes me think that is exactly what SE is planning.

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Originally Posted by Deo14

That sounds so incredibly stupid and absurd, which makes me think that is exactly what SE is planning.

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but it's already the reality for some classes that share gear..,

and do you think the masses of players woul like to have 2x classes that share gear to both be "difficult"? .. instead of dividing thrm into an easier & harder class? play one (easy), and practice the other (harder) makes sense too.., making both hard or both easy is imo a bad choice..

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Originally Posted by Shiroe

but it's already the reality for some classes that share gear..,

and do you think the masses of players woul like to have 2x classes that share gear to both be "difficult"? (instead of dividing thrm into an easier & harder class?)

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Conversely, do you really think the majority of players feel the need to arbitrarily cap half of all jobs to a lower skill ceiling (and likely, unless repeating the current RDM v. SMN debacle or worse, decreasing their maximum output accordingly)?

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Originally Posted by Shiroe

but it's already the reality for some classes that share gear..,

and do you think the masses of players woul like to have 2x classes that share gear to both be "difficult"? .. instead of dividing thrm into an easier & harder class? play one (easy), and practice the other (harder) makes sense too.., making both hard or both easy is imo a bad choice..

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Dividing gear set so it fits this easier+harder job is just as arbitrary as any other reason.

Try SAM. By the time you're level 90, you can sync up your 2 charges of True North with your 2 charges of Meikyo Shisui (the thing that shortens your 3 combos to 3 button presses) and be guaranteed to get positionals off some of the time. And then the rest of the time it won't matter.

Personally I think once they nerfed the potency of positionals they should have removed them, but I suppose they remain so people who have learned to master it on every fight get to squeeze out that last 1% extra damage or whatever the math is. The only thing I've never understood about positionals is why they come in two flavors. If I'm behind someone, aren't I in a more tactically advantageous position than being at their flank? Flanking is better than attacking from the front, but attacking from behind is like...extra flanking, right? I guess I'm an idiot because I don't understand.

Next expansion: positionals get removed, boss hurtboxes become even bigger yet somehow melee now does even more damage because "they have to work harder to keep uptime guys"

I wish they would doing something like T11 to counter this, you can have enormous hitboxes but you cannot enter the hitbox for any reason and it forces you to rotate around the boss rather than moving through him

Combined with something akin to T11’s mechanics I feel that would be a potential counter to the melee problem that doesn’t involve abusing positionals

I feel like the "melee problem" is plenty well solved by just...

• Not purposely breaking the mechanics that have existed since 2.0 (by forcing bosses to the edge of the arena without changing them to omni-position while their flanks and rear are hidden, forcibly spinning bosses frequently and without telegraphs, etc.).
• Not granting units ridiculously obese hurt-boxes.
• Not overtuning melee relative to their difficulty (internal and contextual together).

Done.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Conversely, do you really think the majority of players feel the need to arbitrarily cap half of all jobs to a lower skill ceiling (and likely, unless repeating the current RDM v. SMN debacle or worse, decreasing their maximum output accordingly)?

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the jobs are already kinda devided in easier, (mid) and harder jobs , assume, half the jobs will be considered "easier" and the other half "harder".., or think more easy or more hard jobs would be better? or all the same..
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it was just an assumption, that jobs in the future, that share gear ,could each one be "easier" und the other be "harder", as it is already kinda the case for a few jobs that share gear

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Originally Posted by Deo14

Dividing gear set so it fits this easier+harder job is just as arbitrary as any other reason.

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feels as if its already happening with some jobs, might continue with the new job that shares gear with Nin.., if Nin is the "harder" job, the new melee dps might actually "not have positionals" (Crosair? kinda mobile for a melee?).
... but if Nin is considered the ",easier", how would the new job be more "difficult".. (hope not by nullifying its positionals., better make a new job without positionals)

.. just random thoughts

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Originally Posted by Shiroe

feels as if its already happening with some jobs, might continue with the new job that shares gear with Nin.., if Nin is the "harder" job, the new melee dps might actually "not have positionals" (Crosair? kinda mobile for a melee?).
... but if Nin is considered the ",easier", how would the new job be more "difficult".. (hope not by nullifying its positionals., better make a new job without positionals)

.. just random thoughts

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It's still completely arbitrary. Seems that you like the idea of of gear being split into 1 easy and 1 harder job. I like the idea of gear sets being split to 1 melee and 1 ranged job for some interesting variety (imo RPR with caster gear would be more fitting than current maiming). Others might like if it was more thematical, like SAM and MNK. Neither of these views are correct or incorrect. In that case, I think it's better to follow all these ideas and none of them at the same time. There isn't right answer, so it's whatever, maybe if you like SAM, you'll MNK, maybe not, it's dice roll either way.

Positionals are just an integral part of XIV and Melee Jobs. Want a Job without Melee positionals? play anything besides a Melee DPS. Problem solved.

While Endwalker has trivialized positionals, it's essentially our form of Melee Tax. Once we remove positionals, we might as well question why we even deal the damage we do, and why Ranged Tax even exists aside from mastering Melee Range. Once one Melee has to not deal with positionals? I can already see how it's going to be viewed as unfair, and used as an argument point to make all Melee's equal by deleting positionals... I know some parsers that would love this, another thing that would not get in their way of getting a shiny parse.

Anything that has a chance of making our Job/Role gameplay even dumber is something I'm just going to be against. Draw a line somewhere... Job Gameplay is dumb enough as it is. This is also why I don't like to view how Jobs are divided by difficulty, as there should be room to give Jobs more optional complexity. The fact we can constantly keep meme-ing on how SMN is the easiest job at the bottom where it will remain, no possibility to give it any complexity or depth or gameplay improvements... and it not even being viewed as a negative, its rather seen as a fact... there's something wrong about that... call me crazy

I think positionals will be on the chopping block in 7.0.

Every expansion, the dev team is faced with cutting out a number of buttons off the hotbar to make room for new abilities. Sometimes they don't have to (look, we gave you a trait that changes this ability into a new ability with more damage!) but sometimes they just have to cut out an ability altogether or find some other way to compress what is on our hotbar.

It is quite possible that True North will be removed along with positionals. I also think some of the "guaranteed crit" abilities will be removed and just worked into the ability itself. For example, maybe MCH's Air Anchor and Chain Saw will be guaranteed crits and Drill will have a trait that raises its base crit hit rate to 50% or something. Of course, MCH doesn't have positionals, but it is a way to get rid of a button.

This happens every expansion and it will happen in 7.0. The question is... which abilities will be lost?