Should they remove positionals at this point?

[Tigerlilley]

Stop trying to make DPS brain dead. Positionals are fine.

[Brightamethyst]

Positionals are fine.

Except that they're not really. They may not be completely broken and unplayable, but they're not ideal either.

Positionals are an interesting idea, but the reality is that they're often more annoying than fun or challenging. Boss has back AoEs, or spends a lot of time moving, or randomly turning, or whatever? That's not skill, just frustration.

[Tigerlilley]

Except that they're not really. They may not be completely broken and unplayable, but they're not ideal either.

Positionals are an interesting idea, but the reality is that they're often more annoying than fun or challenging. Boss has back AoEs, or spends a lot of time moving, or randomly turning, or whatever? That's not skill, just frustration.

Completely disagree. I've raided Monk through since T1 through all Savages and Ultimates. Positionals are both challenging and rewarding to get right as well as being an integral part of melee jobs. I swear to god no one on this forum is happy until everyone is a 1,2,3 rotation you can just faceroll and no one needs to be accountable for their own gameplay. Waaah, everything is too hard. Nerf jobs. Nerf savage. Nerf primals. Nerf story trials. Sigmascape Savage was hands down the worst raid tier in this game, boring, uninspired, clearable within a week. 2 of those fights were no positionals and it didn't make either of them better.

If the boss has back aoes or spends time moving, you learn the fight and where to optimise True North. If its randomly turning, talk to your tank.

No wonder dev's only listen to the Japanese. They actually take the time to learn and practice their jobs.

[Brightamethyst]

I swear to god no one on this forum is happy until everyone is a 1,2,3 rotation you can just faceroll and no one needs to be accountable for their own gameplay.

Literally no one has ever asked for that. The issue here is that there's a big difference between "challenging but fun" and "complicated for the sake of being complicated", and unfortunately a large part of the game's combat systems fall solidly into the second category.

[Tigerlilley]

If one skill per combo has a positional (nin drg sam)
or literally has a 123 flank 123 back repeat (monk)

is too complicated for you? Then the issue isn't the design.

[Fyce]

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

[Seddrinth]

Literally no one has ever asked for that. The issue here is that there's a big difference between "challenging but fun" and "complicated for the sake of being complicated", and unfortunately a large part of the game's combat systems fall solidly into the second category.

Complicated? In the time it took you to type out your post you could've read the skill description for one single melee class and understood the positional requirements. Like Tigerlilly said, one positional per combo is not complicated.

[Seddrinth]

Except that they're not really. They may not be completely broken and unplayable, but they're not ideal either.

Positionals are an interesting idea, but the reality is that they're often more annoying than fun or challenging. Boss has back AoEs, or spends a lot of time moving, or randomly turning, or whatever? That's not skill, just frustration.

If the boss is randomly turning then maybe you should talk to your tank and raid team to figure out the optimal strat. Many statics will place melee on certain intercardinal positions and ranged on other positions, for example, to better take advantage of melee positionals. It's really not that hard or that big of a deal to figure it out with your team.