Should they remove positionals at this point?

[Gumpy]

Positionals should be in the game, anyone thinks otherwise is objectively wrong.

This isn't anything new, but the new EX fight (last half) really drives the point home about how hard it can be to properly hit your positionals on a melee class. So much so that the only adjustments made to MNK were in regards to more damage for NOT hitting your positionals and a shorter cooldown on True North, because the difference in doing so was much larger. They clearly acknowledged that it was a problem, in fact the addition of True North itself originally should be the obvious example.

They've acknowledged that the gap between a bad mnk and a good mnk is massive and wanted to reduce the disparity. Positionals reward better play they might be easy to do, but going for more of them and hitting as many as possible is the challenge. Seiryu EX doesn't really prevent you hitting positionals, it prevents you from hitting as many like you can in other fights like o9s or o10s. True north is there for the moments when you can't hit them, an expression of skill finding the best places to use it.

From a learning perspective players have to learn their rotations + fight mechanics and then there's the added degree of difficulty with positionals for the fights with the only benefit being you do more dps. With DPS checks being a thing, with the above changes to MNK, and with the design of these recent boss fights it feels like they are basically accepting the fact that you aren't going to hit positionals every time.

Learning your own rotation and fight mechanics is pretty fucking easy. Oh no god forbid that you use positional to become better and do more DPS on a DPS job. It's called optimizing, you know the thing that literally every role should be doing anyways. And how are DPS checks a bad thing?...

To me this is either bad game design or bad boss/es design. You have a skill set that promotes a higher learning curve that separates good players / bad players, then purposefully design fights that take that a step further and say good luck trying to land them OR here is a fight where you can ignore them entirely. That's really what makes me question why they exist.

Please don't use "bad design" without knowing what the design is trying to do. The design choice to make positionals harder to do in some fights is to make it more challenging for a player to do well in a fight. It adds an element of getting better at the game, something that should be encouraged in EX and above content. Let me put it another way, if a caster didn't have cast times and could move around just as freely as bard or machinist. Would it still be a caster?

I would also say the positionals of the boss are still important to learn, so I don't think it should just be a plain targeting circle even if it no longer applies to player's skills. Not getting hit by a cleave cause you are standing in front of it for example. In fact I wouldn't even mind a slight resign to make the flank more distinct if it stays.

Now you're contradicting yourself. You shouldn't be standing in-front of the boss anyways so that's a moot point. I do agree that the difference between flank and rear should be more distinct however.

There is also the issue when soloing which isn't hugely important given how easy it is, but you are basically stuck with True North or hoping they just so happen to cast long spells while you just so happen to be on your positional gcd. Prior to the TN cooldown change, you didn't exactly get to do it that often and even now 90 seconds isn't exactly a short amount of time. Thankfully everything dies before you can even go through half your rotation anyway so while the point is valid it is kind of moot at the same time.

This I agree with, questing on monk is harder than it should be compared to other jobs.

Additionally I should bring up Eureka and Deep Dungeon. For whatever design reason they thought it was ok for none of these mobs to require positionals. Why is that? The mobs and bosses are effectively the same mechanically if not easier than usual, so why was it worth it to remove them in this case and not throughout the game? Someone put actual thought into it for a reason.

This tells me you've missed the point of those two pieces of content. They're "soloable" so making things that face you 24/7 have positionals would ruin it for a monk player for example.

Given the above, I don't think removing positionals would make the those jobs "boring" because:

1) Hard fights are mechanic heavy and either make it nearly impossible to maintain full uptime + positionals anyway OR remove the need for them entirely given the nature of the boss.
2) You don't even effectively use them half the time when soloing.
3) They are removed from content where it doesn't even matter anyway.

1) Again, learn where you are able to use them and get as many possible is a skill that should be learned.
2) True
3) lol