Should they remove positionals at this point?

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

I'm not making a blanket assumption about anything. I'm asking a question, not making a statement. Now my question is based on what I've personally seen people lamenting about positionals on the forums and how I've seen people play in-game, but that's it. Maybe some of the posters in this thread do indeed know how it works, but I can't tell because they haven't actually said why they don't like it. Hence my question because I'm legitimately curious.

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You asked a question, yes, but you immediatly answered it yourself and went on to explain something extremely basic in a thread about positionals.

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Is it because people think they have to run around a lot to reach the Rear and the Flank?

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You should have stopped there. Because the answer is no. The rest of your post was unnecessary.

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

Fair enough that the target dummy doesn't move (which is an odd contention because the point of the image and text is to illustrate how easy it is to adjust to a spinning target while still landing most of your positionals and not having to run two miles around the target's entire hitbox every time it moves), but most mobs in the game don't move that much anyway outside of brief phases or specific periodic attacks. Sometimes you might not hit your position because you have to avoid an AoE, but that's not an issue unique to melee or positionals. However, if the mob is constantly "spinning faster than a beyblade" to the point where you can't land most of your attacks properly, that's an issue with your tank. Give him five across the eyes and tell him to sit still and celebrate the fact that most tanks do a pretty good job of holding mobs in one place.

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I'm seriously doubting that you played any Savage fight this tier, and I'm even starting to wonder if you played Extreme ones. Seiryu, for instance, moves a lot, spin a lot, knockbacks you a lot, covers one half of the platform a lot (while following the tank), follow the former MT during a tank swap up until the TB, forces you to follow your healer sometimes, and teleports mid facing south.

Granted Seiryu is quite an extreme example, but numerous bosses do move a lot, and force you to move a lot. Also, for some reasons, the devs like it very much when the bosses go mid to cast something... and face south. That's almost malevolent at this point.

Why do you think they changed every melee DPS job at or during Stormblood, and now drastically buffed True North at 4.5? If you think that it's as easy to do positionals than positioning yourself properly on a training dummy, then you should have absolutly no idea why they made all these changes. You could probably answer about the gap between good and bad players, but that's only one part of it.

Currently, you have to pop True North for almost every mechanic. Which does raises the question of this thread: what's the point of positionals if the goal is now to get rid of them using True North as much as possible, and mitigate the punishment of failing them by raising potencies? 4.5 clearly showed us that SE wants to reduce the importance and impact of positionals as much as possible, in order to do stuff like Seiryu.

Many people want to see positionals go away for melee.
Yet I haven't ever seen anyone offer feasible alternatives for it.

Even though I don't play melee DPS I feel like if they remove positionals they need to add something else in exchange. Otherwise they are going to be making melee DPS way too easy to play and way too rewarding. My reasoning is that a bad caster is a bad caster for missing something a melee dps have a little bit of help with: Rotation. While a perfect rotation is something I consider easy to be done, often times you'll see that summoner that doesn't apply dots at all, that black mage that doesn't know what blizzard IV is or that red mage that simply refuses to alternate Verholy and Verflare based on what the job demands. While every job suffer from mistakes like that, melee dps have a combo rotation highlighted to be done perfectly and in the order it is supposed to. If you take away positionals it really bottles down to being a 1, 2, 3 combo with no conditionals to it other than using self-buffs on cooldown. And while some people might say that ranged dps don't have positionals, and that's why melee dps shouldn't also; Ranged dps end up having a more supportive role throughout the fights and the way their combos work tendo to be pretty RNG. I personally don't think it's a fair comparison.

At least to me, a melee dps with perfect positionals is like that black mage that knows exactly when to use leylines and when to save it and use triple cast instead to maximize damage upkeep. It's just executed differently.

Personally, I'd like them to go away but I understand not everyone shares that view.

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Originally Posted by mosaicex

Many people want to see positionals go away for melee.
Yet I haven't ever seen anyone offer feasible alternatives for it.

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Yes, this. Every job has downsides that make maximizing DPS a challenge. Casters need to learn fight timelines well to minimize movement, melee need to learn when the boss is going to move so they can continue to hit positionals or pop True North as needed.

Ranged physical DPS have lower overall damage potential because they don’t need to worry about movement or positionals. They are the go-to mechanic handlers on mechanics that can be baited onto a specific player for this reason. So I’d say the downsides here are (occasionally) handling specific mechanics and lower personal DPS.

Yes, melee players need to be in melee range - but honestly most casters and ranged stay in melee range for heals, unless there are mechanics that force them out. And with the gap closers/movement skills on all the melee jobs, staying in melee range almost constantly is not a problem.

Each job has something to separate highly skilled players from the rest of the pack - positionals are one of these things. Removing positionals removes a lot of the optimization melee players need to do to maximize DPS. If you can just stand completely still and wail on a boss with near 100% uptime, there needs to be a trade-off. Less damage like BRD/MCH? I doubt people would want that.

Personally I agree with whoever says to just do positionals for the last bit of the combo(snap punch, demolish etc) like it is with samurai.

If fight mechanics were more random instead of scripted, I would probably agree with you OP. But things like positionals still keeps fights interesting after you've learned it. Keeping up a optimal rotation while dodging mechanics and still landing your positional bonuses is quite challenging, so you're basically asking for an element of difficulty to be taken away. It's like me asking for no unavoidable AoE as a healer, or for no tank busters as a tank. These are elements for each role that the player controlling them can't do anything about; they can only handle them in the best way possible. Mechanics are meant to disrupt your flow, and punish you if you don't follow. If overlapping mechanics make it difficult to land positionals, then welcome to content that challenges you.

Seeing this makes me sad. The worthwhile thing to do is positionals on melee, something to kill the boredom. If you really don’t like melee positionals then try a different job.

I don't think positionals should be eliminated entirely, however, I do think more bosses that require a specific dance is a lot of "stand here" need to have the position-less target ring. Midgardsormr is a good example of this in this raid tier. Too much of his fight requires you to stand in specific points for elongated periods that really punishes melee jobs, and while all the fights of this tier do it to some degree, none are as much of an offender as that fight.

There is a degree of optimization that you learn as you play a fight more and more, and you'll still miss the occasional position due to how you need to do the dance of the fight (True North helps with this if you know you're going to miss for a while) but when you have an entire fight where the mechanics of beating it require the party distribute itself in certain patterns for the entirety of the encounter, then that's a boss that should just not have a positional ring so as not to make non-melee jobs more powerful simply because they don't have to worry about where they're standing in relation to the boss's hit box.

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

I play the laziest positional melee dps and even I wouldn't want them scrapped entirely. That said, they need find a way to make all the other jobs like samurai where they aren't losing huge potency chunks if they can't hit their positionals. The positionals do make doing stuff out in the world a huge pain. Not that there's much to do there I suppose.

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I see a lot of people saying SAM's positional's are mostly inconsequential but if you do the math, you find that 5 kenki roughly equates to 60 potency, which is much more than any other dps missing theirs. Just because it doesn't add a flat potency increase doesn't mean you aren't losing a lot, SAM tends to get a pass because their raw potency is very high, but the loss can be noticeable.

The biggest problem with positional's used to be if you missed them, you didn't get the buff they apply, like DRG missing Heavy Thrust meant you wouldn't get the buff, which in a fight like Demon Wall where you couldn't attack the flank, just absolutely sucked, even NIN as of now can miss applying Trick Attack, which is a massive chunk of DPS down the drain. I always wished they applied the debuff even if you miss the rear, but add more damage if you do hit it.

I dunno, I feel that positional's add some depth to melee and isn't something I want to see removed based on "I dun like it" because I think it adds just enough to make them more engaging than without. A lot of people express disappointment in missing positional's or how sometimes its impossible, but its not like you are expected to hit the positional every single time without fail, you learn to hit as many as possible as you learn the fight.

Take Pantokrator in 011s, I can't hit every positional when circling the boss, if I tried, I would die, so I save True North for it, minimizing the loss as much as possible but even then I can still miss some, it is all part of the dance and I enjoy that.