Should they remove positionals at this point?

[Kaitoo]

While not removing it, they maybe should redesign it. Its get frustrating and goofy if you dancing the safety dance for no reason or the boss insta spins

[Nedkel]

Without "the average player" you seem to hate so much, this game wouldn't exist.
It's logical to appeal to your playerbase.

Is it so hard to accept that some people simply don't like the mechanic?
It's not to "justify being bad", nor asking for a removal of CDs. You are using outliers as a generality here.
Some people don't like the mechanic. And not having a single melee DPS job without positionals is disappointing. That's all.

Not everything revolves around being good or bad. There is no slippery slope of any kind. Just a legitimate request not to see an already dying mechanic being kept for no reason to the point of not having a single alternative.

Those "some people" could play the jobs that doesnt require to play around positionals, there are 12 of them if they are willing to play any class.
There is already an option for them, jobs with positionals are absolutely fine and balanced, why change the thing for a small minority of players? What will this change for better in this game but making it more boring and less unique?
Removing this mechanic from the melee dps equals to the balance havoc, do you want to break balance for 4 melee jobs just for appealing to the players who does not even bother to read the skill description?
If they dont like it, they dont have to, there are jobs for them if they dont mind.
Its like complaining about tanks that have to take the beating.
Please change the tanks because i want to play them, but taking damage is annoying i dont want that!

At this point i doubt any new, newbie or casual player actually complains about this stuff, its just people that are super lazy (so lazy they cant even push themselves to try out different job) and struggle to adapt. Dont adapt the game to the players who doesnt want to adapt to the rules in it, this kind of practice has never gone well for any mmorpg. There are "average" players who could adapt and do well, there is no need to change anything. If anyone has problem to press few buttons and move left analog stick, then im sad to say this but this game is not for him, sorry candy crush awaits.

[Crushnight]

What if they added a buff to each positional action where you can get the next positional potency of a positional action regardless where you hit the boss but it only gets applied if you hit the positional with the 1st positional action.
For overworld it should work like potd/HoH stuff no flank or rear positions on basic mobs. Boss fates A and S ranks should still have positionals

[Seddrinth]

Without "the average player" you seem to hate so much, this game wouldn't exist.
It's logical to appeal to your playerbase.

Is it so hard to accept that some people simply don't like the mechanic?
It's not to "justify being bad", nor asking for a removal of CDs. You are using outliers as a generality here.
Some people don't like the mechanic. And not having a single melee DPS job without positionals is disappointing. That's all.

Not everything revolves around being good or bad. There is no slippery slope of any kind. Just a legitimate request not to see an already dying mechanic being kept for no reason to the point of not having a single alternative.

The "average player" doesn't have to use positionals if they don't want to. Unless you are raiding savage/uwu, you can clear content without using any positionals. Why not just leave positionals in tact for players who want to complete challenging contents and min/max?

[Shurrikhan]

The story of the Official Forums. Just because people can beat content with it, doesn’t necessarily mean it is worth having.

Does enjoying a mechanic make it devoid of merit too, then, I wonder?

[Shurrikhan]

Disable positionals when solo. That I support 100%. But, no, they should not disable positionals for raid. It separates good players from bad players. Bad players like myself couldn't hack it playing melee so I went ranged. Good players should be rewarded with higher deeps that they deserve.

I'd offer a slight adjustment to this:

Make positionals easier to pull off when solo. They're already technically doable. I do them consistently. It just looks really stupid because you have to stand some near-infinitesimally small distance from the enemy's center of hitbox, move and instantly strike, repeat. (May be more difficult at higher latencies; my latency is low, as if to compensate for inane packet loss.)

All that needs happen to both smooth positional use in content now that our more flexible skills by which to avoid positioning (Mutilate, Fracture, Touch of Death, etc.) have been removed is to check twice for positionals -- once at queue initiation and once early in the animation -- and take the "best of".
Add to this a more natural turning speed to mobs so they're not spinning like tops, and solo positioning can be fun rather than feeling like an exploit just to get off properly.

Or heck, bring Defense into the equation instead, such that the benefit varies with mob level and perhaps even type. As a side-effect, rampant damage scaling is curtailed a bit, level sync procedures facilitated, cleaves given a natural mechanic for gradual damage reduction (cumulative mitigation across Defense), and so forth.

[stormygabe]

Hopping onto this all kinds of late. Personally, I like positionals. I'm coming from GW2, which has a super active combat style (even the mages) so it's nice to play a class where I'm always moving around. I also like having to think about what I'm doing. I still have a lot to improve on, but it's a nice challenge. I do kind of agree with taking them out from solo play, but a part of me still kind of enjoys trying to land skills properly. Obviously, it doesn't work most of the time, but then I always find odd ways to entertain myself in a game.

[Khalithar]

I'm sorry but if that is what you enjoy while playing DPS I would advise you to play ranged physical dps instead. Arguably you get targetted by more mechanics as well so from the tiny insight this post gives me, it seems you should be right at home with ranged physical dps.

I almost exclusively play tank. Positionals don't matter to me *personally* but when I'm having to move a boss (I raid savage the bosses are movement heavy) or when the party has to move to stay alive, I see the melee in my raid and in various group content unable to land their positionals while we're doing what we need to as a requirement for staying alive.

You say you like positionals and I do not, but since you wanted me to elaborate more let me tell you what *I* see when it comes to positionals which you sort of touched on yourself but I'll take it a step further.

The frustration comes mostly from how lately bosses just spin around like crazy; they're massive or they decided to create a insta death zone in said areas you need to land your positional.

What I see when it comes to the combination of positionals and mechanics is the melee DPS jobs (sam, mnk, drg, nin) being penalized and missing out on dps through absolutely no fault of their own. Now granted they do when they have to run outside of a hitbox to survive a mechanic but when melee are in melee range doing mechanics correctly, there is no reason why they should suffer a dps loss/penalty simply because some designer made some arbitrary inane requirement where you have to be in just the right spot for full damage because it adds "depth." You may like it, but I consider it utterly asinine. A melee in melee range that is able to stay in melee range and does their rotation correctly while doing movement heavy mechanics correctly, should never receive a nonsensical dps penalty because they weren't standing in the "correct" place, true north notwithstanding.

Edit: Let me just add though, that based on the design decisions we've seen so far, I have a feeling that positionals are on the way out or may be reduced to fewer attacks with that sort of necessity.

[m3eansean]

Some of the newer savage/extreme raids have mechanics that require a melee dps to miss out on positional potencies and true north has too slow of a cool down to cover all of those instances.

If they are set on keeping positionals, I would like the true north CD reduced to 15s to make it fair for the melee's in content like this. More often than not, my team mates will opt to run as ranged dps on these fights so positional mechanics can be ignored, we just bring NIN along for the TA buff.

[Shougun]

Some of the newer savage/extreme raids have mechanics that require a melee dps to miss out on positional potencies and true north has too slow of a cool down to cover all of those instances.

If they are set on keeping positionals, I would like the true north CD reduced to 15s to make it fair for the melee's in content like this. More often than not, my team mates will opt to run as ranged dps on these fights so positional mechanics can be ignored, we just bring NIN along for the TA buff.

This is why I thought they could pre-bake true north into melee DD as a passive give and take mechanic based on performance (and remove true north for another new skill each melee can toy with, level 70+ job specific skill would be neat). For whatever reason some mistook this as an argument to remove positional, which it wasn't.

Before either A. mechanics mess you up or B. other players do, so even if you're doing it all right sometimes it just feels bad to miss them and there wasn't a thing you could really do. Also if they add in a passive pre-baked mechanic then SE can play with the boss movement a bit more and not mess up melee.

Tl;dr of the concept was as you do well you get a few "exceptions" that will automatically be consumed on a failure to meet the positional, meaning it works on the fly but too many failures will cause it all to spiral out as one would expect (there would be a max buff stack, so you can't store 1,000 and then forget how to play lol).

Another concept I thought of was that all positional melee get a dash move by double pressing the movement key/stick (hotkey can be rebound). Based on direction it'll dash you to one of the sides of the boss ring (flank left, flank right, back) such that if you were on the back and double tap right it'll circle you to the right side and for a few seconds lock in that positional. Meaning even if you were moved out of position it'll count as that direction positional. Forward should be either manual still.. or at least a triple tap, just for safety lol (and that's a vary large dash distance for some bosses.. which makes it less realistic looking).

Alternate controls that might be more consistent and easier would be not based on where you are on the circle but just what you press such that double tap right is always the right side (even if you were on the left side), forward is on the butt of the boss, and left the left side (so if the boss is spinning mad you can nail it perfectly given that you're trying to move).

Add a short cooldown, and it'll only work when you're in very close vicinity to the boss's circle. Should work such that if you're free to move it's not too much to move manually if you didn't feel like double tapping, but when things start to get funny you could better lock yourself into position temporarily (via a movement, you still have to play the game lol). I think the first is a bit friendlier to mishaps though, since if at a split turn mechanic the boss changes where you hit even though you felt it was their "right side" then the exception buff would save it from failure.

Also just to let you know True North lasts for 15 seconds, so a 15 second cooldown is uh.. pretty intense .