Shadowbringers Melee DPS Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

[Eorzean_username]

What changes could make Melee DPS less frustrating and more fun to play in FFXIV?

1. Melee DPS have extremely precise rotations with poor tolerance for disruption, delays, or disconnects from Melee Range.
and
2. Despite the above design observations, Melee DPS are far-too-frequently not allowed to have uninterrupted uptime on a target in order to execute these rotations.

There's two major, obvious possibilities here:

1. STOP DESIGNING ENCOUNTERS THAT SHOVE MELEE DPS OFF THE TARGET CONSTANTLY, AND AT TERRIBLE MOMENTS IN THEIR ROTATION, SO THAT THEY CAN ACTUALLY JUST DO THEIR DAMN ROTATION IN PEACE FOR ONCE.
2. ...ahem. Or, remove or redesign any rigid and inflexible rotational design elements that are incredibly punishing and demand precise and constant Melee Range uptime, such as Samurai's brutally-inflexible 60s burst chain, Ninja's "Trick Attack" kitchen-sink dump-everything window, etc, etc.

Alternatively, you could get more avant-garde and creative, allowing both of the above issues to be ignored, in favor of a more "meta Band-Aid". For example:

• "True North" could be replaced by an action that instead allows the next 5 (or whatever) actions with a range of less than 15y, to be executed from a distance of 15y (or 25y, or whatever).
• Or, "True North" could be replaced by an action that allows the next 5 (or whatever) actions with a range of less than 15y, to "accumulate" their damage (like old-school "Wildfire") from any distance. Then, all of this accumulated damage will be "delivered" to the target the next time that the player makes an attack within 3y.

Also, remove or redesign Auto Attacks.

Melee DPS will always be at a severe disadvantage during any disconnect window, so long as this sneaky, hidden, major source of total DPS continues to be cut into by disconnect windows.

3. Melee DPS are punished for trying to use the actions that they are given to deal with disconnects, forcing Melee DPS to spend most disconnect periods doing bizarre and annoying things, or just stopping their GCD entirely and doing nothing, all of which feels awful.

First of all, fix the Ranged Attacks that Melee DPS have access to.

• Stop breaking combo chains and doing other annoying things with Ranged Attacks. Holy Zodiark developers, please, just... stop doing this.
• "Piercing Talon", "Enpi", and "Throwing Dagger" are already bad enough use of a GCD as-is. They don't need to be completely murdered as options by also breaking combos.
• Also, "Enpi" should not consume "Meikyo Shisui", nor should it break "Tsubame Gaeshi", for the same reasons: "Enpi" is bad enough already.

  "But then "Hissatsu: Yaten" might become rotational!"

  Okay look, yeah, obviously, if that's ever at risk of happening... just change the numbers on it, or remove "Enhanced Enpi" entirely. This possibility should be quite low on anyone's concern list.
  

• Likewise, "Throwing Dagger" should trigger full potency from "Bunshin". Again, "Throwing Dagger" is already awful, it doesn't need to be penalized any further.

Do something with Dragoon jumps.

• It probably would not be very satisfying if "Spineshatter Dive" or "Dragonfire Dive" had no potency attached, so these will probably just never be real "gap-closer" actions. But that's probably okay, since Dragoons throughout Final Fantasy are already established to just jump on people right next to them, because they can.
• However, it would be quite nice if "High Jump" treated the Dragoon as being at their current position the entire time. In other words, using "High Jump" while outside of an AOE's radius, on a target that is inside the radius, should always count you as "safe" from that AOE, rather than randomly getting you killed, instead.
• Also, please, for the love of Halone, just convert "Elusive Jump" to "Elusive Dive", and make it leap forward.

  "But I'm a cool Dragoon that can always nail the backwards flip!"

  • Yes you are, but a lot of players can't or don't, making this button unnecessarily unintuitive, bizarre, annoying, awkward, clunky, convoluted, and dangerous.
  • Also, I don't see "I can launch my spiked butt at you at high speeds" as playing into much of a Dragoon fantasy. It's much more "traditionally Dragoon" to launch toward the enemy at high speeds.

Do... something with Monk.

• Look, I don't even know. This Job is still a mess of design clutter, and I'm not passionate enough about playing it to feel like untangling it all.
• But, at the very least, Monk does not need "Meditation" and "Six Sided Star" and "Anatman" and "Form Shift". Yes, each of these tools technically has a distinct niche and purpose, but in actual practice, it's largely just bloat and clutter that could be seriously streamlined into something more simple and elegant.

As for Samurai...

• "Hissatsu: Yaten" can probably die.

  • This ability is a trap and a gimmick in almost all situations except rare weird things like that one GCD you can pick up on E8S Mirrors that one time.
  • Or, it should be improved significantly, possibly by removing the potency entirely, removing "Enhanced Enpi", removing the "Kenki" cost, increasing the "slide speed" significantly, increasing the distance to about 15y, and significantly reducing the animation lock.

• "Hissatsu: Gyoten" can probably just get "normalized" and converted to a free action with a hard cooldown and charges. This reduces flexibility, but also reduces the guilt that Samurai feel for pressing it, so they get to freely use it, rather than feeling pressured to counter-intuitively try to walk places as much as possible and use their gap-closer only as a last resort.

As for Ninja...

• I don't know how to fix "Shukuchi" without removing some of its niche uses.
• Sometimes the ground-targeting option gives Ninja unique options in an encounter, even though it's clunky and unresponsive and has a chance of getting you killed when it errors-out for one of hundreds of reasons.
• On the other hand, maybe that really doesn't matter compared to just increasing overall usability by "normalizing" "Shukuchi" to be a standard target-based dash, so that clunky unresponsive Macros don't need to be used to manage a clunky unresponsive Ground-Target action.

4. Positionals are an outdated and irritating design element that punishes Melee DPS exclusively and disproportionately in most Encounters in the game.

So, yeah, in case this wasn't clear from my tirade above, I think that Positionals should just be removed from the game at this point in its design and evolution.

5. Melee DPS are constantly pressured to risk outright death or other disruptive effects just to try to execute their rotations in a satisfying way.

If Melee DPS rotations were significantly more flexible about disconnects, and provided significantly better options for how to keep the GCD rolling while disconnected, this issue would be mitigated at least somewhat.

6. Melee DPS are abnormally-punished for decisions made by Tanks and other players.

I don't know. This is complicated, and I'm probably too tired right now to think productively about this.

Better encounter design foresight would help at least somewhat. For example, asking yourself, "If this boss places a gigantic AOE targeted at a random player, what does it do to Melee DPS players if someone makes an error and drops that gigantic AOE directly under the boss?"

You can't always excuse this kind of design with, "Well it's a challenge to players to not do that!", because that one Bard over there doesn't care if the Melee DPS players are all zoned out for 30 seconds, since the Bard himself can just walk away from the AOE and keep pressing buttons. Generally-speaking, you should assume that players will only try to avoid doing things that are directly inconvenient to their own personal gameplay.

Also, increasing the frequency of "boss auto-positioning", where the boss just jumps to where it "should" be, would definitely help, although this always comes at the expense of making Tank players feel bored and unimportant, and like their role doesn't have the control that may have attracted them to it. On the other hand, it punishes Melee DPS players less for having a less-motivated or less-experienced Tank controlling the boss's positioning. I don't know if there's any answer here that can please everyone.

7. Melee DPS are abnormally-punished by Enemy movement.

Not making bosses that love to dash to random targets on the other side of the universe would help, for one thing. See the previous entry for a discussion about why you cannot rely on Ranged players to care about staying close to these kinds of bosses.

Also, doing SOMETHING about XIV's horrible tendency for moving targets to constantly outange Melee DPS would help a lot. Can't your programmers come up with some kind of "grace period" code or something that would allow Melee DPS to actually hit moving targets without requiring weeks of preparatory planning, a psychic connection to the Main Tank's brain, and a PhD in trigonometry?

Man look, I don't know, okay, I'm just some mediocre player that likes to flail awkwardly at Savage encounters and pretend that I'm any good at what I'm doing.

But I think that something is seriously wrong with both Encounter Design and Melee DPS design in FFXIV, and has been for a long time, and it's just really frustrating and makes these Jobs feel much more "stressful and exhausting and frustrating and infuriating" than "fun" in far too many situations.