How would people feel if they took positional requirements away?

[Kaiserdrache]

How I do see the gameplay of the Melee Classes:

Samurai > no positionals, strongest Melee Hitter as Raw DPSer without any Support Skills, high focus on counterattacks when dodging attacks through Third Eye

Ninja > fastest attacker, deals increased damage when attacking out of the shadows and for each caused negative condition like poison

Dragoon > Positional based, deals impactful massive damage so more oftenly you perfom positionally correct hits, their correct performed rotations stacke and become each time a bit stronger, 1 mistake and the power bonus resets

Monk > DPS Support Hybrid with highest chance for criticals, staggers foes with critical and direct hits to bring them out of their balance, resulting in weakening their defense against specificly only monk attacks, if foes get stunned while being staggered it increases the staggered duration n monks can deal longer burst damage. In that time frame do they shortly surpass the dps of samurais, while if a foe is not staggered, then they are below them. Their focus is to deal critical hits at the right time, like short before a foe does a skill or right after, like said to bring thrm out of balance or by interrupting via a critical hit an interruptable skill

[Khalithar]

Do you think SE is going to add in four entirely new systems, one for each melee, that requires as much interaction as positionals do?

I really don't think positionals provide a huge amount of interaction equally for melee or at the very least I think the folks in this thread are playing it up (at least a little) as this great engaging system which it most definitely is not. Does every melee really need positionals? Do they need to come up with four new systems? I don't think so.

Let's just pretend that right now they dropped the positional requirement for sam/nin, the only difference for both of them is that they wouldn't have to move to the boss' flank for a single weapon skill as they should be standing behind the boss most of the time anyway. If the positional is providing as little interaction as that? I assert that it's pointless and would be better off being removed entirely. I don't look at it as "it's barely there so why not just deal with it," I look at as "it's barely there and practically pointless, just get rid of it."

No, but unless something replaced positionals, DRG would be even more dumbed down than it already is.

Ok. So have drg be the one melee job with positionals and just have it be Fang/Wheeling.

I'd actually love to hear how it'd be improved, as you fit my previous post's #2 entirely.

Because I think that the engagement for a melee should come from managing your cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, doing your rotation, and maintaining high dps while dealing with boss mechanics. Getting rid of the positionals would be a QoL change as I consider having to deal with them an annoyance. I'd love to play mnk, I think that it's RNG free and very straightforward rotation is fun. But the positionals stop me from playing it once I got it to 80 for the achievements.

Not all melee jobs have to have positionals as their only engagement gimmick. Now I'm not going to sit here and brainstorm ideas for every melee job, that's not the topic of this thread, but I assert that it doesn't have to be positional requirements for every melee.

[wereotter]

That's quite a large step though. You'd then have a mechanic existing solely in dungeons, trials, and raids.

Imagine, for instance, if your gear was only a thing when in dungeons, trials, or raids. In the open world, everything scales automatically to whatever gear you have, without any increased rewards, and PotD, Eureka, and HoH all use their own gear systems. Mightn't that seem a bit... off?

Maybe neither wouldn't seem especially convoluted to you, but it's definitely over the line for me. I'd prefer to just have a universal mechanic but actually do a good job of it, rather than do a half-assed job that we then hide out of shame half the time.

Because the enemy moves to face you, that’s already, more or less, how it is. It’s not possible playing in the open world to hit positional requirements, so the only thing I can see that keeping the standard ring on open world enemies accomplishes is to make melee DPS take more time to kill the same enemy than their other counterparts.

And things like true north don’t work when doing story progression because of how much you have to use it. It’s not available often enough.

[Powercow]

I really don't think positionals provide a huge amount of interaction equally for melee or at the very least I think the folks in this thread are playing it up (at least a little) as this great engaging system which it most definitely is not. Does every melee really need positionals? Do they need to come up with four new systems? I don't think so.

OK, let's put it this way: positionals involve you pushing a button to get more DPS. It involves you looking at the boss, the current mechanics, and knowing if the boss is going to do anything soon. If you simply rip out this aspect of every melee, then they are all, *ALL* worse off for it. To compensate they'd need a system that involved as many button presses and as much foresight in order to not make the job more dumbed down. Given how you seem to think it should be

managing your cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, doing your rotation, and maintaining high dps while dealing with boss mechanics

that would involve coming up with a new series of buffs, debuffs, rotational abilities or melee-specific boss mechanics on every single fight that are just as frequently used as moving for positionals and require as much thought -- which means either one new generic melee system of some kind or one unique to each job, or most outrageously a complete overhaul to nearly every group encounter in the entire game.

Let's just pretend that right now they dropped the positional requirement for sam/nin, the only difference for both of them is that they wouldn't have to move to the boss' flank for a single weapon skill as they should be standing behind the boss most of the time anyway. If the positional is providing as little interaction as that? I assert that it's pointless and would be better off being removed entirely. I don't look at it as "it's barely there so why not just deal with it," I look at as "it's barely there and practically pointless, just get rid of it."

So Sam/Nin becomes a matter of just sitting in one place for the overwhelming majority of the time. Yeah, if they kept removing aspects of positionals then it would indeed be practically pointless. As it stands positionals do add, by your very own admission, meaningful gameplay to the melee jobs. If positionals were

"it's barely there and practically pointless, just get rid of it."

then it wouldn't even be an aspect of the job worth commenting on, but it apparently is. Now I get that you don't like that aspect of melee jobs; I don't like aspects of BLM or DRK or SCH. But I don't go around advocating that they should have mechanics outright ripped out to make it more simple. I don't want Aetherflow or the Fairy Gauge removed, I don't want DRK's MP to be nullified, and I don't want Enochian gone just because I personally have some minor gripes about those mechanics. And don't say, "oh but those are more important for them than positionals are for monk" because they're simply not.

[Nedkel]

I'd be ecstatic and my gameplay experience for all the melee dps would be drastically improved.

You misspelled "dumber" with "improved".

Nothing will be improved, right now we are fighting to keep our gameplay mechanics in check before Square enix decides to "FFXV" them.
Look realistically on the latest changes, MOST OF THEM proved it that SE design team is aiming to make their jobs "stupid friendly", they are clueless of what community really wants and just push accessibility for no apparent reason.

This will drive away a ton of people who are exclusively playing FFXIV for the job design and ability to play everything on 1 char.
Yoshida cant help us, because he is being dragged into other game, we are left with auto-destructive devs who think appealing to complete casuals without will to learn is the way to make business in mmo market, this is completely and utterly wrong. Despite a ton of complains about healers, devs do not gave a single duck about reverting any of the 5.0 changes.
Today positionals, tommorow half of the skillset, another day all oGCD gone (like in WoW), diversity and gameplay completely broken into pressing few buttons with 2.5 sec cooldown.

[Makeda]

Lacking an 'action combat' system like Wildstar had, and Elder Scrolls "almost" has (cause it does, but it doesn't if you have something to compare it to)...

Positionals feel like an attempt to simulate some of that motion.

FFXIV's core combat engine is... seriously lacking. An age old tab-target design made because of people on controllers for PS3...
- That noted... they then went and stretched this design farther than any other tab target game ever has... with a combination of the positionals and all the ground 'dance patterns' we have to move around in...

Essentially taking a flaw and turning it into a feature.

It's pretty brilliant game design to take a concept that is 'dated, old, flawed, and not engaging' and with some key tweaks make it one of, if not the most dynamically fun MMO combat systems on the market. That "flaw" is still under there... but a series of features on top of it fix it "just right"...

If you start removing aspects of the 'feature fix' we will eventually just have the flaw left: The World of Warcraft combat engine...

So... I say keep positionals... unless you redesign the entire game all over again to have a full 'hit scan' based action combat system, complete with 'head shots' and so on... you need other 'gimmicks' to make tab-target interesting. And this is one of them.

[tdb]

they are clueless of what community really wants

And how do we decide who is part of the "community"? I took a quick survey of this thread:

12 people would like positionals to be flat out removed
16 people would like to keep positionals as they are now
14 people are unhappy with current positionals but think they should be revised or replaced with something else rather than just removed
4 people do not care either way
8 people expressed opinions that were too unclear to put in any of the above categories
I omitted a few posters who did not express any opinion on the topic.

It seems to me that the participants of this discussion are far from unanimous in their opinions. How, then, do we reach a consensus on what the community really wants? Do we ignore those who would like to remove positionals since they are clearly filthy casuals who want to dumb down the game? What about all the millions of players who do not even post on the forums?

[dinnertime]

Personally I don't care either way, but they do seem pointless these days with how much they've streamlined it and how it's less punishing if you mess up. Maybe I'd rather see them do something more engaging than positionals, though.

[ForteNightshade]

Ok. So have drg be the one melee job with positionals and just have it be Fang/Wheeling.

Then you have a situation where Dragoon is the only melee punished for poor tank positioning. In which case, you either have to compensate by making Dragoon even stronger or give the other melee something else. Simply put, it's be stupid to have only one melee with positionals.

Because I think that the engagement for a melee should come from managing your cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, doing your rotation, and maintaining high dps while dealing with boss mechanics. Getting rid of the positionals would be a QoL change as I consider having to deal with them an annoyance. I'd love to play mnk, I think that it's RNG free and very straightforward rotation is fun. But the positionals stop me from playing it once I got it to 80 for the achievements.

Monk is by far the least punished for positionals nowadays. You have Riddle of Earth on a 60s CD and two True North charges. If you're missing more than the occasional positional, that's on you and not the job.

[Kaiserdrache]

No, it would not be stupid, it would be downright correct to make Dragoon the only Class with positionals, because the whole job is the modt best designed for this gameplay, due to having much closer defense to the tanks, so that they can risk it without being dead directly to do their positionals, even if that means to take some hits in for that to keep your perfect rotation running without a break.

If SE would focus positioning on Dragoon only, they could make Dragoon gameplay more rewarding for performing subsequently perfect rotations after another by making each perfect round a slightly bit stronger by adding s stacking potency buff that comes with each successful rotation of all positional attacks being performed from the right position, like i described it in my last posting how i see dragoons as a melee job, what makes them different snd unique compared from the other.

Having multiple jobs do the same positional game play is just lazy job design, one class having to do this is absolutely enough, there is no, and there will be never ever the need to have with monk a second job with the exact same gameplay, despite them being with their much lesser defense not made for such a gameplay combat style, unless monks would get some skills to mitigate/ dodge incoming damage to avoid being hit for making sure to hit a target from the right position