Shadowbringers Melee DPS Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

[Eorzean_username]

What is this post about?

This post is about issues shared by all Jobs within the general "Melee DPS" Role in FFXIV, rather than any specific Melee DPS Job.

As well, while this post is going to focus on the Melee DPS Role specifically, the four Tank Role jobs share many of these same issues and frustrations.

Do you currently enjoy playing Melee DPS in FFXIV?

No.

In fact, Shadowbringers has pushed me to the point of refusing to even play any of the Melee DPS Jobs, because long-standing issues with Melee DPS design, and Encounter design, continue to go unaddressed, and instead just keep getting compounded, or given awful "Band-Aid" fixes like "True North".

What do you dislike about playing Melee DPS in FFXIV?

1. Melee DPS have extremely precise rotations with poor tolerance for disruption, delays, or disconnects from Melee Range.

All Melee DPS

Punished disproportionately for disconnects compared to other Jobs, due to the loss of Auto Attacks.

Dragoon

• Wants to keep its "Life of the Dragon" cycle aligned precisely with its awkward system of rotating buffs ("Blood for Blood", "Dragon Sight", "Battle Litany").
• Wants to keep "Life Surge" aligned with "Full Thrust".
• Wants to maintain full coverage of all actions under "Disembowel" buff.
• Needs to alternate between "Chaos Thrust" and "Full Thrust" combos, but disconnects force awkward decisions about whether or not to drop "Disembowel" coverage, since applying "Disembowel" forces you to also apply "Chaos Thrust" again.

Monk

• Wants to enter its extremely-important 90-second burst cycle with a specific alignment of "Form", "Leaden Fist", "Demolish", and so on.
• Wants to minimize overwriting "Demolish", but also not let "Demolish" drop.
• Wants to minimize overwriting "Twin Snakes", but also not let "Twin Snakes" drop.
• Disconnects require performing annoying on-the-fly calculations to project out how to do any of this correctly, due to the convoluted alternating Form system.
• The crucial 90-second burst cycle relies on uninterrupted Melee Range uptime for 15-20s, and also becomes frustratingly-deranged if any interruptions to its "Form" alignment mess up "Perfect Balance", "Twin Snakes", "Demolish", or "Tornado Kick" timing, or any Positionals.
• "The Forbidden Chakra" is frequently overloaded with procs and gauge pips, leading to frustratingly uncontrollable losses of DPS, and any disconnects further compound this by preventing "The Forbidden Chakra" from being activated to dump gauge.

Samurai

• "Nightmare fuel" 60-second rotation, where even small amounts of GCD drift will derange the ability to keep "Higanbana", "Meikyo Shisui", "Midare Setsugekka", "Tsubame Gaeshi", and "Shoha" aligned with encounter mechanics and party buffs.
• Wants to minimize overwriting "Gekko" and "Kasha", but also not let "Gekko" or "Kasha" drop.
• Wants to minimize overwriting Higanbana, but also not let "Higanbana" drop.
• Disconnects require performing excessive on-the-fly calculations to project out how to do any of this correctly, due to the frustratingly-rigid "Sen" system and the convoluted way in which it interacts with the 60-second GCD total, the "Iajutsu" system, and the actions "Higanbana", "Meikyo Shisui", "Midare Setsugekka", "Tsubame Gaeshi", and "Shoha".
• Disconnects also affect the totals of "Kenki", which can eventually compound enough to cause further on-the-fly adjustments to be necessary to avoid coming up unexpectedly-short for crucial actions such as "Hissatsu: Kaiten" and "Hissatsu: Senei".

Ninja

• Absolutely must apply "Trick Attack" on-time, every time, to avoid de-synchronizing this crucial party-support buff from other party members's personal DPS rotations.
• Relies heavily on ensuring that all of its personal DPS burst lands inside its own "Trick Attack" window, pressuring a 15-second window wherein disconnects are extremely punishing.
• Has an action "Ten Chi Jin" that punishes the player for any movement whatsoever, and must be executed immediately off-cooldown to remain aligned with "Trick Attack", and can come off-cooldown just in time for a disconnect.
• Has an action "Dream Within a Dream" + "Assassinate" that punishes the player for disconnecting, and also prevents movement with an animation lock, but must be executed immediately off-cooldown to remain aligned with "Trick Attack", and can come off-cooldown just in time for a disconnect or necessary movement.
• Has an action "Shadow Fang" that punishes the player for disconnecting, but must be executed immediately off-cooldown to remain aligned with "Trick Attack", and can come off-cooldown just in time for a disconnect.
• Wants to attempt to dump "Ninki" gauge inside "Trick Attack", but this requires the action "Bhavacakra", which cannot be executed while disconnected, but holding it for after a disconnect will often cause the player to run out of OGCD weave slots to fit this gauge dump into, or force it to drift outside "Trick Attack".

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.

Instead, far too many encounters force Melee DPS to devolve into uncomfortable, unfun, "improvised" stop-gap rotations that take away a great deal of the fun and satisfaction of the Job's gameplay.

Far too many encounters in the game, especially in Dungeons, Alliance Raids, Extreme Trials, and other "sub-Savage" content, but also in many Savage encounters as well, casually pepper an encounter's design with unpredictable, prolonged, exaggerated, or grotesque windows of forced disconnect from Melee Range.

In fact, it honestly seems like many of FFXIV's Encounter Designers either have never played a Melee DPS Job in their entire life, or are completely oblivious to the rotational needs and concerns of the Melee DPS Jobs.

Disconnects are applied at seemingly-arbitrary times that often are long enough to derange a rotation severely (eg, by allowing important buffs to drop all the way off), or allowed to occur at exactly the worst possible point in a Melee DPS rotation (for example, exactly at the mark where a Samurai needs to perform the crucial and hyper-sensitive "Higanbana" → "Meikyo Shisui" → "Midare Setsugekka" → "Tsubame Gaeshi" burst sequence).

In most cases, there is little to no way to "adapt" or "work around" the issue. Instead, a Melee DPS player must simply accept that their rotation gets completely ruined, with little to no recourse, or even anything "fun" to do instead (due to lacking any practical disconnect actions, in most cases).

In short — many encounters in the game are outright frustrating, demoralizing, and straight-up "not fun" as Melee DPS, and Encounter Designers seem either oblivious to this issue, or insensitive to this issue, or both.

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.

Dragoon

• Extraordinarily-long Combo Chains, combined with the addition of "Raiden Thrust" in Shadowbringers, mean that a Dragoon can basically never effectively use "Piercing Talon" without causing more DPS loss than just doing nothing, because "Piercing Talon" breaks combo chains.
• This feels horrible — Dragoon is effectively forced to just take its hands off the keyboard or controller and stop its GCD completely while sitting around patting its own spiked butt and waiting for FFXIV's Encounter Designers to allow the Dragoon to activate actions again.
• Potency attached to "Spineshatter Dive" and "Dragonfire Dive" means these actions will almost never actually be available to use as gap-closers, and instead just get spammed mindlessly from Melee Range as soon as they come off-cooldown.
• FFXIV's bizarre movement calculation system means that using "High Jump" from range sees to still treat the Dragoon as if they were located at every point between their current location and the target's location. In other words, using "High Jump" from range frequently just causes you to get killed by the AOE that you were supposed to be safely outside of.
• "Elusive Jump" requires bizarre and convoluted camera-spinning and other strange behaviors in order to function as an effective gap-closer. Failure to execute this directly will take the Dragoon away from the target, or into another AOE, or straight into a "death wall" or off the edge of the arena.

Monk

• Monk has nothing satisfying to do while disconnected, and it instead becomes a window for bland and unsatisfying "chores".
• "Form Shift" requires performing excessive projections and calculations to try to make sure that the Monk returns to the target in the correct form that will both keep the 90s window aligned, and yet also not allow either "Twin Snakes" or "Demolish" to drop off. In actual practice, whether or not this succeeds will usually end up being arbitrary rather than planned.
• "Meditation" is annoying to use, frequently clips the GCD awkwardly upon returning to the target, and just gives the Monk more OGCD clutter that the Monk already doesn't have enough weave space for, and is constantly struggling to not lose to overwritten procs. This makes this action much less satisfying than it might otherwise be.
• "Shoulder Tackle" is probably on-cooldown, because the potency attached to it means that it gets dumped in Melee Range in order to maximize the 90s buff window. Holding it for a disconnect means punishing yourself with compounding potency losses later. Neither outcome feels satisfying.
• "Six Sided Star" requires performing on-the-fly calculus of whether the disconnect will actually be long enough to justify the excessive GCD clock, or risks clipping unnecessarily into the subsequent GCD upon returning to the target. Additionally, the prolonged GCD from "Six Sided Star" causes the Monk to push out GCD space that could have been used for "Meditation", causing these two actions to conflict against each other in a way that feels like frustrating micro-management to sort out.
• "Anatman" is impractical and unusable in most situations, because it directly competes with "Meditation" and "Six Sided Star" for GCD space, and can also clip into resuming GCDs on the target, and even in situations where there is a prolonged period of time to utilize "Anatman", it will frequently get ruined anyway by the fact that these windows of an encounter usually also require party movement, which then immediately breaks "Anatman".

Samurai

• "Enpi" breaks combos, which is a DPS loss over just doing nothing and finishing the combo afterwards.
• "Enpi" consumes "Meikyo Shisui" stacks.
• "Enpi" breaks "Tsubame Gaeshi".
• "Hissatsu: Yaten + Enpi" is useless in almost any case where using the enhanced "Enpi" will break a combo.
• ... all of which means that "Enpi" is useless in the vast majority of situations where a disconnect occurs, which means that Samurai is forced to just sit around doing nothing with its GCD while waiting for a disconnect to end.
• "Hissatsu: Yaten" does not launch the Samurai far enough or fast enough to be worth using over just walking out and/or "Sprinting" out, and also consumes "Kenki", which can derange timing on crucial "Hissatsu" actions like "Hissatsu: Kaiten", and thus "Hissatsu: Yaten" is a misleading DPS loss in the vast majority of situations.
• "Hissatsu: Gyoten" consumes "Kenki", which means that for similar reasons to "Hissatsu: Yaten", this action is used only when absolutely necessary, and otherwise avoided.

Ninja

• "Shukuchi" is an awful, clunky action design that basically requires multiple different clunky and unresponsive Macros for Enemy Target, Friendly Target, and so on, in order to be used in any practical way, because attempting to quickly Ground-Target a tiny reticle in FFXIV's sluggish and unresponsive game engine is a fast way to get yourself "more killed" than just walking to that location would have.
• "Throwing Dagger" breaks combos and consumes stacks of "Bunshin" at dramatically-reduced potency, meaning that in the vast majority of situations, "Throwing Dagger" is completely useless, and the Ninja is forced to just stop its GCD and do nothing once charges of "Mudra" have been exhausted, or the Ninja cannot safely consume any further charges of "Mudra" without risking rotational derangement.

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

The game does not accommodate Positionals.

Tanks don't have to deal with positionals. Ranged Physical DPS don't have to deal with positionals. Caster DPS don't have to deal with positionals. Healers don't have to deal with positionals.

This means that if an Encounter Strategy favors doing things as a party that make safely meeting Positional requirements either difficult or impossible... Melee DPS players are just expected to "deal with it".

FFXIV's Encounter Design team also seems to not really care about this issue, or at least not pay much attention to it, frequently designing encounters, encounter phases, boss positioning, and so forth, in ways that make obtaining positionals risky, hazardous, or impossible.

Positionals aren't even fun any more, or necessary.

When I was level 9 and fighting Orobon FATEs in Western Thanalan, I thought that Positionals were interesting, and added dynamism and interest to a combat system that was otherwise fairly static and boring.

But FFXIV has not needed Positionals for a long time now. At each additional level cap, Rotations and Encounter Designs continue to become more and more refined, involved, and complex, with all sorts of design elements to track and manage. In this design environment, Positionals are little more than a tacked-on nuisance, and make rotations feel unnecessarily convoluted and annoying when both Rotations and Encounters already have more than enough going on already.

In many cases, Positionals don't even make sense any more, and feel blatantly tacked-on just because someone told the Job Design team, "This is a Melee Job, it must have positionals". Why is "Armor Crush" a Flank positional? Why does "Gekko" need to be done from the Rear? With many actions, there's a complete desync between any sort of "attack fantasy" or visual and the positional requirement, making it feel arbitrary and annoying.

The "Band-Aid" fixes for Positionals are becoming more and more conspicuous and awkward.

"True North" is an annoying action that basically serves to add additional tacked-on keybind clutter to Melee DPS rotations. There is nothing interesting about it, it's just slapped-out as part of an already-overloaded OGCD weave system whenever the player is once again forced to lose Positionals due to Encounter Design or party strategies.

The very fact that "True North" currently exists, and keeps getting its cooldown reduced more and more, is evidence of how poorly Positionals fit into FFXIV's modern design: the design team refuses to actually remove Positionals, and instead keeps tacking on more convoluted chores that effectively remove Positionals.

Also, "Riddle of Earth", but I'm getting burnt-out with this post, so I don't even feel like getting into this one, but it's more of the same issue. Positionals are so bad at this point, that the designers decided to give Monk "True North 2: Electric True-galoo", so you can "True North" while you "True North".

Also, more and more and more enemies are getting the beloved "Circular Target Circle" that signifies all Positionals automatically apply, because more and more often it's becoming blatantly-obvious even to the designers that Positionals won't work in a certain encounter or piece of content. So there's increasing swathes of game content where Positionals already don't even matter... but then sometimes, they suddenly arbitrarily do again, because their existence still needs to be justified.

And finally, the developers keep scaling back the difference between making a Positional and failing a Positional, again and again, patch after patch after patch, trying to minimize the difference between situations where you can and cannot land a Positional.

Holy Zodiark, devs, look at your own hand-coding on the wall: Positionals are not working as a design element any more, and you keep doing more and more to attempt to minimize their relevance, yet refuse to just remove them entirely. This sounds like the description of a bloated, unnecessary design element that has badly-outlived its usefulness.

"But as soon as Positionals are removed, then you'll be complaining that Melee DPS feel more boring and less skillful to play!"

I think that this metaphorical train departed the metaphorical station a loooooooong time ago. The time for worrying about this passed some time long ago, when "True North" kept getting its cooldown reduced more and more, "Riddle of Earth" became ludicrous, and potency differences between landing and failing a Positional kept getting squeezed narrower and narrower.

So, I think we're already there. At this point, Positionals just need a mercy-killing, which frees Melee DPS up to have different design elements used to add depth and interest. And that's if they actually even need that — even without Positionals, most Melee DPS already compete favorably for complexity, depth, etc with most other Jobs. Possibly even "out-compete" in many cases.

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.

Per everything discussed above, it becomes clear why Melee DPS feel a high amount of pressure to stay next to the enemy target for as long as possible, and are severely punished for not timing this correctly.

For example, a Melee DPS that's "good" at estimating how long they can stay in an AOE can pick up tens or twenties of extra GCDs over a given encounter, and mitigate or entirely avoid having their rotation deranged internally, or desynchronized from party buffs externally... all of which creates a dramatic discrepancy in DPS output compared to a more cautious Melee DPS.

This pressures all Melee DPS players to take these kinds of death-tempting risks in order to feel competitive, and if they don't, they will be judged unfavorably players that tend to just look at final DPS output.

In turn, this increases the burden on Healers, who have to clean up the messes for the many Melee DPS that feel pressured to take these risks to maintain their rotation, but get it wrong, and then either outright KO, or require an emergency spot-heal.

Then it becomes the entire party's problem if said Melee DPS has too much Weakness (leading to Enrage) or is KO'd during a mechanic that cannot afford to have any missing players (common in Extreme and Savage). So ultimately, this is irritating for everyone involved, and becomes everyone's problem.

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 dramatic discrepancy could be attenuated significantly, and probably reduce the stress or frustration level for many Melee DPS players accordingly.

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

• If a Tank does something bizarre with Boss Facing, Melee DPS lose their Positionals.
• If a Tank turns a short-range Cleave the wrong way, Melee DPS are the most likely to get KO'd.
• If a Tank sits a boss in an AOE, or doesn't move a boss to a new safe location quickly enough, or any of hundreds of other possible ways that a Tank can make a boss's Melee Radius a deadly hot-zone, then Melee DPS are the ones that lose out dramatically and disproportionately.
• The same issues apply for someone dropping a dangerous AOE right on top of a boss's hit circle.
• The same issues apply for Ranged players that stand outside the party stack, and lure boss leaps and jumps and dashes out of melee range.
• The same issues apply to any "safety" strategies that absolutely make sense for clearing encounters, but require players to spend prolonged amounts of time away from the boss.

Basically, any time something goes wrong, or any time an encounter strategy isn't perfectly optimized (often in ways that are impractical for PUGs, anyway), it is disproportionately-likely that the Melee DPS are the players that are going to get screwed over.

In this design environment, it is also disproportionately-exhausting and frustrating to play a Melee DPS Job. Why would someone want to play something that's going to very frequently be more work and more frustration for less fun and less output?

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

Similar to the previous observation, FFXIV's abysmal server-client positioning handshakes (or whatever, I'm just throwing out words that sound vaguely correct, hopefully you understand what I'm trying to say) means that as soon as a target begins moving, it becomes incredibly frustrating to continue to successfully activate Melee-Range actions without receiving errors and failures.

This applies when Tanks need to move a boss. This applies when bosses decide to just randomly dash over to the other side of the galaxy to charge that Bard that wants to stand at the South Pole while doing their rotation. This applies when bosses decide they suddenly want to stand on the East side of the room. etc, etc, etc, etc...

Therefore, in addition to all of the other nuisances and frustrations facing Melee DPS, they also need to learn all sorts of bizarre tricks and timings for how to anticipate boss movement, boss facing, boss turning, boss jumps, boss leaps, boss charges, and so on, and so forth, and lead these motions correctly, often in ways that are visually bizarre and unintuitive.

Otherwise, you just get flooded with "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range."

...and your rotation desyncronizes and deranges anyway, even though on your screen, you are standing RIGHT NEXT TO THE TARGET.

8. Melee DPS Role Actions are underwhelming and uninteresting.

...Maybe I shouldn't even mention this, since honestly, this is the absolute least of Melee DPS's problems, compared to everything discussed above.

But, uh, yeah:

• "True North" is a tedious and annoying "Band-Aid" button for something that shouldn't even still be in the game at this point.
• "Arm's Length" is a bizarre "Get Out of Mechanics Free" button that basically only exists to undo half of what Encounter Designers try to do, making you wonder why the encounter even has a knockback to begin with.
• "Second Wind" heals for so little that it barely makes any difference in the vast majority of situations, making it an annoying and unsatisfying keypress.
• "Leg Sweep" doesn't even need to exist, its cooldown is too long, and almost anything interesting is immune to it. This is boring and mostly-useless button filler.

"Feint"...

• ...is a frustrating and bland action that is sometimes completely-useless on entire encounters, because FFXIV's encounter design has a serious paraphilia about "Magic" damage.

  • Other times, it's useless for almost anything except some auto-attacks.
  • Then, randomly, Melee DPS will suddenly hit an encounter where "Feint" actually meaningfully reduces important damage.
  • It just feels very uneven — "Tactician" is always useful for something. "Addle" is always useful for something. "Reprisal" is always useful for something. Whereas, "Feint" is just randomly useless on entire encounters.

• One solution would be to be make "Feint" a generic 10% damage reduction. This is boring, but at least it would allow Melee DPS to feel "important" during party-wide mitigation schemes.
• Another solution is to always include dangerous "Feint-able" Physical damage in every single encounter. This is not likely to work out well in actual practice, since it will become obvious and gimmicky, and constrain encounter designs in a weird way. And also, it's basically doing the same thing as the previous idea, but with extra steps.
• A third option is to make "Feint" do something other than generic mitigation. For example, it could become a very clear "Tank" cooldown, for example, by making the target "Miss" all auto-attacks for the duration. This would give "Feint" a productive niche in significantly reducing damage from long strings of auto-attacks, something that Tanks and Healers struggle to plan enough cooldowns for in many encounters.
• A fourth option is to just remove "Feint" completely and leave mitigation entirely up to the Support Jobs. Fairly boring, but not significantly more boring than having a button that's literally or almost-literally useless on like 50-70% of encounters already.

"Bloodbath"...

...is actually pretty smart and satisfying, and rewards good rotational alignment and good play, and can actually make a huge difference when timed well and in the correct situation. So, I like "Bloodbath". I think that this is an example of a Role Action that's actually fun and interesting.

[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.

[Ralph2449]

Not to discredit all the arguments since some of them are sound but I can see a very broad and clear message from many of the complaints, the message being "I cant have fun unless I minmax literally everything" and that is a personal mentality problem, not a game problem.

The game neither asks you nor requires you to minmax literally everything from 100% positional, to perfect synchronization to perfect minutes long rotations, if a game ever did that there would only be a handful of humans in the world who would beat such a challenge but they are not because the devs know the game is played by humans and it designed for everyone, not machines.

The fact that you can buy ultimates should be a clear indication that there is a pretty acceptable gap for errors even there, so the game does not ask you or require you to be perfect, in fact it can see that is unrealistic and has allowed a generous gap for errors as well as the fact that you sometimes simply wont be able to have perfect positionals.

If you feel bad you weren't able to be perfect then you are the one who put that unrealistic expectation on yourself, not the game, not the devs, not even the playerbase because thankfully this isnt WoW, you chose to believe that you need that perfect level of gameplay and because of that you feel bad when you fail to achieve it, that is a clearly a personal psychological personal problem.

Coming from WoW this type of mentality has turned the community into one of the worst in the genre as well as make the game extremely unfriendly to new and casual players and it also perpetuates the myth that mythic/ultimates are something extremely hard only done by l33t 1% ultra skilled players which makes new/casual players think doing that content is somekind of godlike achievement which it really isnt, it is just harder content with less room for error than the previous difficulty, the room for error is still there but because of this perpetuated myth they feel like "Oh i ll never touch that, its too hard" which actually hurts the participation percentages.

At the end of the day this is a video game, it shouldnt be your main source of someone's self worth because they are too attached to video game achievements/performance.

And more of a personal opinion here but I ll always prefer "awkward on the fly decisions" because a player should need to think quickly to make the right choice at times instead of having everything predetermined and preplanned from the start.

[Nothv13]

And more of a personal opinion here but I ll always prefer "awkward on the fly decisions" because a player should need to think quickly to make the right choice at times instead of having everything predetermined and preplanned from the start.

That is the problem, the rotations are all predetermined and pre planned from the start by design (the combos and tight timings show this).

[Ralph2449]

That is the problem, the rotations are all predetermined and pre planned from the start by design (the combos and tight timings show this).

I mainly mentioned that because of the complaint regarding "awkward on the fly decisions", the game clearly is not designed in such a way that on the fly decisions would be the majority of decisions and they arent going to literally remake the entire combat system so there's no point arguing about it, plus unless they add a lot of rng both in the players and in the boss encounters I have a hard time imagining a system that wouldnt end up having some "optimal rotation" thus removing many on the fly decisions design wise at least, would definitely be a very different game.

Either way it doesnt really matter because like I said earlier, the jobs might have tight timings but the game does not require you to achieve those to perfection to beat any encounter so that is not a problem, a person who feels bad because they dont achieve perfect performance the game neither asks nor requires needs to look inward, it isnt the game's problem to fix.

[ssunny2008]

First i thought it´s going to be something constructive with the wall of text, then i read "annoying" and similar stuff in every 2nd sentence or picking of "what if" situations. So i´ve to ask...

Don´t you think, that you cleary don´t enjoy melee classes overall? Maybe just ignore them and play something different?

Of course real class issues can exist or definately exist. But all classes have them and it´s hard to cater everyone in such a game unless you give everyone just one button to play. Minmax is the next thing... as Ralph said already, it´s your issue, not the class or design one. Adapt with that what is given and make the best out of it. Those who´re able to do that are the real heros in games, not the other who train 123 at a dummy and do the exact same thing at the boss without adjustments to what is coming.

Dash into burstphase when you need them 10s later? Tank did a mistake, so the boss goes rampage? Disconnect from the boss and being "afk"? Boss mechanic into burstphase?
It´s up to you to adjust and to find timings or the "perfect" solution to handle such moments. Imagine a healer wouldn´t heal or rezz because you ate this aoe or prepulled the boss. His 1 click rotation would get doomed! If you can´t adjust or don´t want to, you shouldn´t play melee. You´ve even higher damage scalings than phys. ranges because of such reasons.

All i can agree is, that some of the skills are just boring and out of place. But that happened thx to all the dumb downs caused by other complainers about certain careers. But stuff like "TN should give a range option" etc. is just nonsense. If this is a case, i want the SAM to throw his sword, after that you need to move to that location and pick it up again.

You´re a Melee and Melees should obviously play in Melee range. The current content is even a joke compared to the latest tier especially to E8s. Everything else is not even worth to talk about. Bodzja, Delubrum or the weapons? I love to watch my Netflix series while "playing" them. Pointless grinds without much needed effort.

RNG boss mechanics are there to bring some variety to the game and instead of playing such dumb partyfinder strats strict down, the raid could easily adjust for more melee uptime. Again, it´s up to you and your party to adjust to the circumstances. Everything else would be static and boring to play.

As next you do know that "judging" over DPS is reportable? It´s not like you can quit any party or static any time at the moment this topic appears. It´s nothing but the good old d--- comparison for those with a low self-confidence. It doesn´t even make a good player out of you, just because you have the highest DPS. It just means you played your rotation well and probably have BIS gear, maybe even the most broken class imo (BLM / SAM). Either the boss is dead or not and as i said, the real heros are those who can make the best out of every situation. Not the ones who shout "WIPE!" in the party because something unexpected happened.

I don´t even want to talk about all the other stuff, especially not about positionals and "more depth". What is more depth? More buttons you click in an order? More ogcd´s you press within this rotation? Nothing has more gameplay impact in such a game than positionals. Feel free to presentate an original idea which is not just "button smashing" if you want. This game lives with positionals, casting times , RNG proccs and ogcd to keep you busy. This is no action MMORPG, it´s a strict rotation game and it would be boring as hell without those stuff. I would highly welcome range depended DPS on phys range careers, but the "mimimi" would be loud. It´s better to stay somewhere and hold buttons on cd, isn´t it?

[CKNovel]

If SQEX removes positionnals, I garantee you'll miss them before hitting level 90. You won't meet the enrage if you misses some positionnals, your character won't explode if you miss a positionnal.
On top of that, SQEX designed a lot of "Melee friendly" content, sometimes too much with hitboxes bigger than half the arena, other times there wasn't a boss to hit when you have to deal with some complex mechanics. DR Savage removed positionnals and it doesn't makes the Melee better.

That's pretty nuts to ask for no more fights that puts melee on a challenge when many allows permanent uptime.
Can't get your positionnal, use True North. Mechanic forces you into a position? Same way for every other melees.
If the tank is doing something wrong, it's up to the players to communicate, you can't get around that in savage.

Improving your melee uptime is part of the melee charm, getting positionnals and such is just a way to improve. It's not needed, you don't need it but when you cleared a savage it's always good to see that there is room for improving.
Getting around an AoE puddle, dealing with a mechanic won't put you behind a BRD no matter how they don't care about it. If you're behind a BRD, I have terrible news for you.
Also I'd like to point out that BLM and SMN won't care either if they don't have access to melee range/positionnals and they will outperform you.

But I agree with some points:
-Melee needs better ranged tools that at least don't break their combos.
-Remove Feint or fix it.
-Makes melees mobility tools a no-brainer, not a choice (like DRG backjump)

[ForteNightshade]

Allowing Melee full uptime without forcing them to get creative takes away even the slightest challenge in their rotation. As does the removal of positionals. At that point, every boss is a target dummy we mindlessly do our rotation on with no "on the fly adjustment." Making snap decisions adds to the flavor of Melee in the same way Casters will greed that final cast before moving. That isn't to say they haven't designed poor downtime mechanics. The towers in E7S, for example, is awful because one Melee can be randomly punished with no way around it. Someone just takes the loss. That kind of downtime should be avoided because it isn't fun whereas trying to find those exact moments where you can briefly step out and back in before your GCD finishes feels rewarding.

With that said, I do agree with some points you're brought up. Namely, Melee need far superior range tools. Piercing Talon is the go to example of awful design. Not only does it break your combo, but it's laughably low potency makes it better use your AoE combo. Frankly, it's absurd how weak this ability is.

[ssunny2008]

With that said, I do agree with some points you're brought up. Namely, Melee need far superior range tools. Piercing Talon is the go to example of awful design. Not only does it break your combo, but it's laughably low potency makes it better use your AoE combo. Frankly, it's absurd how weak this ability is.

Giving Melees superior range tools which doesn´t break the combo would be the same if you get ride of mechanics and let them stay at the boss.

Imo it´s a big part of timing and decision-making...

When do i move away from the boss?
Is the timing enough to play GCD into GCD?
Should i ignore the half GCD to safe my combo?
Can i finish the combo to use a range attack afterwards?
Do i use that range attack? Is it worth to break the combo at this point?
Do i use SSS or will i go for chakra points / formshift?
Moving or backjump / teleport?

Those are permanent decisions you make and timings to find out. Pretty much all mechanics will become more or less irrelevant if you give Melees bigger and better disengage / range tools. Tanks won´t even have to care for boss positioning too. It´s good as it is imo. If anything, SE should get ride of dash-damage and leave them as gapcloser only.

[ForteNightshade]

Those are permanent decisions you make and timings to find out. Pretty much all mechanics will become more or less irrelevant if you give Melees bigger and better disengage / range tools. Tanks won´t even have to care for boss positioning too. It´s good as it is imo. If anything, SE should get ride of dash-damage and leave it as gapcloser only.

... what? You'd still prioritize your single target combo because it deals more damage. It wouldn't change anything else except make the Melee less punished when forced to disengage. Which is fair because no other role has this issue. In fact, they specifically gave Black Mage a slew of movement tools to help mitigate that exact problem. Furthermore, there is no decision making with Dragoon. Piercing Talon is always a loss. It's complete garbage.