Will they ever add melee DPS without positional attacks?

[TaiyoShikasu]

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.

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?

[Zojha]

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

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.