Shadowbringers Melee DPS Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

[Kolsykol]

This guy tries it so you don't have to!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1DVwqIHU_I

I am actually surprised by all of them except for MNK.
I expected SAM and DRG to be a bigger loss and NIN smaller, I am honestly questioning it a bit I guess I'll have to test it myself too.
It's worth noting too tho that the longer the fight goes on the more potency you end up losing.

But generally the moral of the story is keeping your GCD rolling > missed positionals.
Positionals are indeed not the end of the world to miss but you should still try and hit them but it's better to miss one instead of taking a mechanic to the face or delaying your GCD.
With SAM too for instance there's also things one might not think about until it happens, but less Kenki = higher chance of ending up with not enough Kenki for Kaiten.
That's a much less likely scenario if you're hitting them.
Altho I also think that it's somewhat fair to assume that someone who doesn't bother with positionals altogether is probably more likely to not put in as much effort overall either, like what else aren't they bothering with?

Reason why I might sound a bit '' defensive '' about it is because I don't think that people should take those results as an excuse to not bother with positionals.
But I think some will.

[ssunny2008]

Reason why I might sound a bit '' defensive '' about it is because I don't think that people should take those results as an excuse to not bother with positionals.
But I think some will.

Such "testing" in DPS still depends on a lot of luck thx to crit and direct hit. Especially on SAM you could have 3 Midare direct critical hits without playing positionals, which you possible won´t have with positionals. You won´t even know how 20 kenki more or less can effect a whole fight too.
There is no real excuse to not to try your best in a raid. There are still 7 players who "trust" in your performance in some way and positionals are part of them. Dungeons and desync farm might be another thing. Even if you won´t hit them all, everyone should atleast practice and try and shouldn´t rely on a game-carry. (Looking especially at you dancer.)

[Kolsykol]

Such "testing" in DPS still depends on a lot of luck thx to crit and direct hit. Especially on SAM you could have 3 Midare direct critical hits without playing positionals, which you possible won´t have with positionals. You won´t even know how 20 kenki more or less can effect a whole fight too.
There is no real excuse to not to try your best in a raid. There are still 7 players who "trust" in your performance in some way and positionals are part of them. Dungeons and desync farm might be another thing. Even if you won´t hit them all, everyone should atleast practice and try and shouldn´t rely on a game-carry. (Looking especially at you dancer.)

Definitely very true, I often find this very frustrating when I am parsing myself lol.
It can be quite inconsistent.

[LeonKeyh]

I feel like there should be a design philosophy when it comes to melee DPS where the skill floor of the jobs allow for reasonably low level skilled people to participate without drastically pulling down the rest of the team while still offering room for high skill level players to differentiate themselves.

Something like this (and the numbers/tuning are exact, but it's relatively what I envision in a system that allows for a low skill floor, but still having a high skill ceiling). "Effort" is probably a poor name for the bottom because someone could be giving THEIR 100% and come in much lower; I would define "effort" as the amount of skill/knowledge needed to be "perfect." The tuning level is a little low for hard content, but I feel like that's where it stands now based off some of the logs that I've seen in the content (I personally haven't played any though):



All of the different aspects build upon the level(s) below it, so if you don't keep GCD rolling, it's going to matter less that you had a perfect rotation. While it may seem ridiculous looking at this that someone who doesn't have a perfect rotation being able to complete "hard" content, this would be an average of all of the players and would also assume 100% GCD rolling.

Like I said though, this is merely my idea of how the design should look like, effort versus reward. Allowing for somewhere close to the Pareto Principle (80% of content, the normal content, being cleared with 20% of "effort"). Also, this is merely talking about class based mechanics and doesn't take into account not dying and doing mechanisms correctly so they don't get debuffs.

[Kabooa]

Like I said though, this is merely my idea of how the design should look like, effort versus reward. Allowing for somewhere close to the Pareto Principle (80% of content, the normal content, being cleared with 20% of "effort"). Also, this is merely talking about class based mechanics and doesn't take into account not dying and doing mechanisms correctly so they don't get debuffs.

This is not too far off from where it is currently.

Just rolling your GCD while adhering to the job's basic rotation puts you at 60-70%.

Adding on effective cooldown use puts you at 80-85%.

The effort getting to this point differs by job.

The remaining 15% of your potential cap at your ilvl is fight specific optimizations, cooldown alignment, and gear optimization.

[angienessyo]

Ninja main here, have you really played the class much beyond just leveling them? I have all 80s too but I couldn't tell you the first thing about playing any of them beyond NIN+RDM. I bring this up because your points on the class don't make sense. Shadow Fang is on a 70s cooldown so you exclusively use it within your Trick Attack window. Basically every Trick window will go Trick, Shadow Fang, then Dream Within A Dream. I'm really not sure how you're managing to get it outside Trick unless you're sitting on Trick way too long. Assassinate's animation lock+TCJ failing when you move aren't problems, they just require having some knowledge of the fight you're on. Putting Trick up every time it's ready also isn't a problem and the only times I can think of in recent memory where I had to sit on it any longer was E8S and Diamond EX. And the way our burst works, everything fits nice and neat into Trick if you did your opener correctly.

The notes on Shikuchi are odd too. I'm on controller, where I argue Shikuchi is hard mode and I only have 1 Shikuchi macro. I don't want them to ever take away ninja's ability to teleport away from a boss, because it's extremely satisfying to Shikuchi out at the last possible second, then immediately go back in. It's not at all difficult to just point my circle somewhere, even on controller.

A lot of what you're wanting changed for melee would rob us of some of our complexity. I actually love figuring out the perfect time to disengage/re-engage and pushing myself to stay on the boss just a half second longer. I love learning the fight and figuring out the perfect time to TCJ/Assassinate. I love mapping out a fight in my head based on what # Trick Attack I'm on. It's not any different from a BLM having to figure out the perfect placement for laylines and knowing where they can just sit and turret without fear of death.

Melee having to figure out perfect uptime comes with playing a melee class. This isn't just an FF14 thing, I was a fury warrior in WoW for 10 years and melee works exactly the same over there. I don't like playing casters that aren't RDM and I don't like playing phys ranged, and that's fine, I don't need to enjoy every class or role. I don't need FF14 to change casters or phys ranged just because I don't enjoy them.

[Grimoire-M]

To me, SE should appease everyone by making one melee job without positionals and/or combos. The only reason I want them to do that is to offer more variety within roles and to see how they would make the job more complex and reward maintaining uptime in that scenario.

[LeonKeyh]

To me, SE should appease everyone by making one melee job without positionals and/or combos. The only reason I want them to do that is to offer more variety within roles and to see how they would make the job more complex and reward maintaining uptime in that scenario.

It's been discussed a lot in this thread and in other threads; For the most part, positionals don't matter enough to chase them unless you're min/maxing for a top parse. A lot of people are claiming that it makes up less than 1% of your DPS, with the theoretical maximum being about 4% (for MNK). So, you could easily ignore positionals today with any of the jobs.

I'm not sure what a melee job would look like without combos though; A jobs who has 1 filler attack and a bunch of attacks that have cooldowns/procs (ala BRD)? The thing is, there are jobs that give you gameplay that has no combos (BRD and caster) and jobs that give you gameplay with no positionals (ranged/tanks)

[Grimoire-M]

It's been discussed a lot in this thread and in other threads; For the most part, positionals don't matter enough to chase them unless you're min/maxing for a top parse. A lot of people are claiming that it makes up less than 1% of your DPS, with the theoretical maximum being about 4% (for MNK). So, you could easily ignore positionals today with any of the jobs.

I'm not sure what a melee job would look like without combos though; A jobs who has 1 filler attack and a bunch of attacks that have cooldowns/procs (ala BRD)? The thing is, there are jobs that give you gameplay that has no combos (BRD and caster) and jobs that give you gameplay with no positionals (ranged/tanks)

But there are no melee DPS that give positional-less, combo-less gameplay, and that's the overall point I'm getting at. I do find melee-uptime interesting without factoring in positionals to begin with. To me, the point is to see how SE would change things up in that scenario, not to retread ground they've already done before.

To me it'd involve a lot of GCD gauge manipulation, which could be supplemented by procs or crit/dhit RNG to increase overall generation, but the focus would probably be on getting the gauge as high as possible in order to enable and maintain the use of high potency GCDs at key points. And downtime would be punished by having the gauge constantly decay.

[Nyarlha]

Every new DPS job released in the past 2 expansions has been "simpler" than their predecessors.

SAM, RDM, DNC were lauded/criticized as "easy" jobs when they released. The last melee job added, SAM, has barely any positionals and they don't even matter.

I don't expect this trend to change, and I'm fully expecting Reaper to be on the simple side, with minimal positionals.

Some people will complain, and we will just reflect their argument from this thread back to them : "maybe this job isn't for you".

As an aside, the double standard is funny : when something is changed to something you don't like, it's because of complainers. When something is changed to address your own complaints, it's "our feedback was heard".