How would people feel if they took positional requirements away?

[Reinha]

I could maybe tell you, but... positionals are largely why I still like modern melee (minus Monk and post-5.1 NIN) and am generally bored by modern Ranged jobs, especially all but Bard.

I'm the opposite. Reacting to random procs is what I like about BRD and DNC and playing a rigid melee combo rotation puts me to sleep. The positionals do nothing for me.

There is a reward for positioning yourself optimally but it just doesn't make it more interesting because you know where you have to be in advance and there are only 2 options. It's kinds of like when fighting B rank and the mob uses a slow and predictable cone telegraph. Doing a sidestep takes no thought. They could remove that mechanic and it wouldn't make a difference in difficulty or engagement for me, but it would be less busy work. Playing melee feels like every mob in the game routinely shoots cone AoE out of their rear and flanks, lol... Not exactly the pinnacle of good game design.

Go to Eureka, fight an enemy while a tank holds aggro. You don't have to move for positionals, you don't have to dodge AoE. It's incredibly boring, mind numbing, and made me put down Monk in there because I wasn't having any fun whatsoever.

I main tank, we don't have positionals. My level of engagement is the same in HoH and dungeons when playing a melee because it's not a very interesting mechanic to take one step left or right.

So you're OK with more interesting melee rotations, but don't think that melee need something new? Because a new rotation is a new system.

Yeah, of course I'd like that. I don't think they need it because plenty of people seem to enjoy melee and my preferences are not universal. Although, in this thread even the people who enjoy melee seem to think they have a boring rotation which requires hopping left and right to stay awake so maybe the devs should make some changes even if positionals stay the same.

And yeah, in some cases (like Ninja) the rotation would have to barely change to keeps up its level of engagement, but for others (Monk) it'd require the entire job to be overhauled.

Having a choice would be good. You can already pick if you want a pet as a caster and healer. We could have melees with and without positionals, tanks/melees with and without combos or healers with and without 3 dps buttons. We'll probably get a healer and melee dps next so there's still hope for more diverse job design.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm the opposite. Reacting to random procs is what I like about BRD and DNC and playing a rigid melee combo rotation puts me to sleep. The positionals do nothing for me.

There is a reward for positioning yourself optimally but it just doesn't make it more interesting because you know where you have to be in advance and there are only 2 options. It's kinds of like when fighting B rank and the mob uses a slow and predictable cone telegraph. Doing a sidestep takes no thought. They could remove that mechanic and it wouldn't make a difference in difficulty or engagement for me, but it would be less busy work. Playing melee feels like every mob in the game routinely shoots cone AoE out of their rear and flanks, lol... Not exactly the pinnacle of good game design.

That's fair, and admittedly it's a lot more interesting for me when the mob actually will be turning, but in predictable ways and/or times. HW Monk and any version of SAM, for instance, allow(ed) great flexibility in the timing of stanceless skills to impredictable (but predictably timed) movements, while staying at Rear because you know it'll turn to Flank before your Kasha actuates, or swapping a Yukikaze until later because of a random Rear- or Flanks-targeting AoE, feels... pretty good to me. I just dislike that mob positioning in general in this game is so unfluid, often unintuitive due to infrequent server polls, and unvaried. Again, it's not a great system, I just feel it's a whole lot better than nothing, which for now is all we'd be getting in its place. (If I had my druthers, it'd be part of a wholly revamped enmity and AI system instead, but that's out of scope for now.) That becomes especially important when we consider the precedents it'd set, which by now we should know to be wary of.

Now, admittedly, if I didn't play with a claw grip or by placing all my active keys on my right-side buttons under the assumption that I might always need to move (and therefore use my left stick), I'd probably be a lot more offended by needing to move constantly since it'd make my D-pad less convenient. (My mind skipped over that until playing with controller again recently, and I did not mean to omit any disproportionate costs of positionals to any one section of players, except, again, where they don't clearly fit among whomever the job design was trying to appeal to.) But, I hope that the game will come to make more, not less, use of movement, and removing positionals badly skews effective design towards turret play for the sake of comfort and convenience. I feel that instead we should be getting more use out of each button we cannot wholly remove anyways and making player control itself more convenient rather than just expecting less from those controls.