Monk Positionals 6.0

[IruruCece]

The inherent volatility of positionals across content and groups is one of the reasons I'd really prefer to just see them go.

Some Black Mages also complain about fights that force them to move (and healers complain that some black mages try to sit through damage and stress their resources more as a result). Should we then also remove 3/4th of all castbars from jobs that have them? Some Black Mages also complain about astral/umbral timers because they don't want to feel "punished" for making mistakes. Should we just remove those too?

That's what this argument ultimately boils down to. Should we remove things that actually challenge players who are seeking to put out the most DPS possible? Because at the end of the day, a good Monk not only was able to land their positionals consistently, they could manage their resources to account for times when a boss/encounter was going to make landing them difficult. A good black mage learns the fights, learns where and when they can greed, to slidecast, when they absolutely need to move. Good players strive to follow "the plan", true, but more importantly they understand what to do when the game deliberately throws wrenches into that plan. That's part of the skill. That's what makes learning fights, learning a job as a whole, actually interesting.

I feel like people want to be able to reach the "maximum" their jobs are capable of without putting in the effort required to get there.

[Miralyth]

Some Black Mages also complain about fights that force them to move (and healers complain that some black mages try to sit through damage and stress their resources more as a result). Should we then also remove 3/4th of all castbars from jobs that have them? Some Black Mages also complain about astral/umbral timers because they don't want to feel "punished" for making mistakes. Should we just remove those too?

That's what this argument ultimately boils down to. Should we remove things that actually challenge players who are seeking to put out the most DPS possible? Because at the end of the day, a good Monk not only was able to land their positionals consistently, they could manage their resources to account for times when a boss/encounter was going to make landing them difficult. A good black mage learns the fights, learns where and when they can greed, to slidecast, when they absolutely need to move. Good players strive to follow "the plan", true, but more importantly they understand what to do when the game deliberately throws wrenches into that plan. That's part of the skill. That's what makes learning fights, learning a job as a whole, actually interesting.

I feel like people want to be able to reach the "maximum" their jobs are capable of without putting in the effort required to get there.

I can't agree with the premise of your argument toward me. Your base counter-example uses cast bars, which are not volatile in the same situations that positionals are and therefore have a different feel to them. If you wanted to compare me liking positionals or not to a mechanic that is exactly the same and ask me about it, that would be fine. The base premise of my argument (a few posts back) is that I don't enjoy positionals, and their volatility is "one of the reasons."

Positionals have long since become near-automatic for me. I of course occasionally miss them through no one's fault but my own, I think everyone does some times, and that isn't what bothers me. My desire to see positionals go has nothing to do with difficulty and everything to do with being uninterested in them. I understand that other people find them difficult and enjoy that aspect of them, and I think positional difficulty would be a comparable argument to have with other mechanics, but that is not at all what I'm expressing here.

[meowmaou]

I can't agree with the premise of your argument toward me. Your base counter-example uses cast bars, which are not volatile in the same situations that positionals are and therefore have a different feel to them. If you wanted to compare me liking positionals or not to a mechanic that is exactly the same and ask me about it, that would be fine. The base premise of my argument (a few posts back) is that I don't enjoy positionals, and their volatility is "one of the reasons."

Positionals have long since become near-automatic for me. I of course occasionally miss them through no one's fault but my own, I think everyone does some times, and that isn't what bothers me. My desire to see positionals go has nothing to do with difficulty and everything to do with being uninterested in them. I understand that other people find them difficult and enjoy that aspect of them, and I think positional difficulty would be a comparable argument to have with other mechanics, but that is not at all what I'm expressing here.

I'm kind of inclined to agree now after playing EW MNK, NIN and RPR for a bit. At first I missed the positionals because they were quite challenging when I was newer to the job and that made it pretty engaging. Now I'm doing them on autopilot even though they're not in the game anymore.

I think my problem with them was that they're only a potency boost. If they felt a bit more rewarding, ie rewarding chakra or filling a new, second gauge(I know that'd be more punishing but I don't care, gitgud), then I might enjoy it more. But at the moment I'm kind of getting more of a kick out of DPS jobs that have more resources to manage, and I think that's where I'm at with how I feel about MNK: Perfect Balance isn't a very engaging mechanic, and chakra is poorly implemented. 3 damage oGCDs are gone so I'm not having to manage those cooldowns/stocks anymore, either. So I'm probably gonna play a different job for now unless they ever change some of this stuff about MNK, because whoever's balancing and adjusting DRG, BLM, SAM, NIN seems to have way more of a clue what they're doing than MNK which feels like a sinking ship.

[IruruCece]

The base premise of my argument (a few posts back) is that I don't enjoy positionals, and their volatility is "one of the reasons."

Positionals have long since become near-automatic for me.

That's fair, but I have to question your premise anyway. Anything can become automatic to a skilled player, or at least a player who has put in a lot of time on a given job. That's a big reason why there ARE so many jobs in the game, to help keep things fresh.

Eventually, blitzes will become "automatic" to you, or "near-automatic". Given that you're a level 90 monk, I suspect they already are. What then? Should we remove blitzes and instead replace them with, I dunno, castbars? Just to "mix things up" a little bit?

I feel like positions shouldn't really be a thing so much as combos opening up depending on position should be.

I guarantee that combos that are this reliant on position would get the Navnavs of the world extremely angry about a job they aren't even playing yet this expansion while they run through as a tank, assuming the log in queues allow them to even play to begin with. People already were complaining about Dragoon offering ONE button that opens up for landing a positional. If you think basing the entirety of monk around something like this wouldn't result in even more outrage from people who hop into threads saying "so i tried monk after getting (some other job) to cap and didn't like it so i stopped playing it", you're honestly fooling yourself.

People who simply don't want to be asked to do things that require movement aren't going to accept a job that "unlocks" something for landing a positional. They still wouldn't play the job. And ironically, SE has made an effort with every expansion since HW on to de-emphasize their importance, to simplify the job to make it more "accessible" even as its presence in endgame raids cratered. Pain points like TP were removed across the board. They held back on GL4 because they legitimately believed players couldn't handle that speed. They killed the tornado kick rotation in SB because they didn't like what players managed to put together with the flawed kit.

[Miralyth]

That's fair, but I have to question your premise anyway. Anything can become automatic to a skilled player, or at least a player who has put in a lot of time on a given job. That's a big reason why there ARE so many jobs in the game, to help keep things fresh.

Eventually, blitzes will become "automatic" to you, or "near-automatic". Given that you're a level 90 monk, I suspect they already are. What then? Should we remove blitzes and instead replace them with, I dunno, castbars? Just to "mix things up" a little bit?

I again cannot agree with your example, despite the fact I don't feel it applies here. You're comparing positionals to a GCD with an entirely different build-up and interaction. Also, the automation of positionals was not my premise - positionals being unenjoyable for me was.

I briefly touched on the automation of positionals just in reply to difficulty, and how that isn't a consideration for me in if I like them or not. Everything else is about fun factor for me. I don't find positionals fun, automatic or not. I do find blitzes decently fun (they are not yet automatic for me btw, but I just like doing them). However, and again, my posts are only about positionals right now. Not if they're difficult for me, or if they have merit as a difficult part of the game, but if they're fun for me. They're not, full stop. That's what my posts are about.

I kind of feel like you're selecting small parts of my post out to reply to and attempting to shift my argument into something that it isn't about. I don't necessarily think you're doing this on purpose, but that you're perhaps assuming or expecting a bit too much about my feelings on the subject. If you want to criticize what I find fun or not, that's totally fine by me, but it won't make those things suddenly fun or engaging for me. I absolutely respect that other people find them fun, that's great, but I don't. I'm here to share that people who don't like positionals on their fun factor alone do exist, because I am one of them.

Edit: I forgot to close quotes, derp.

[Shurrikhan]

Since the Mudras are ranged tools, you didn´t even have to think much about uptime or disengages.

Wouldn't this be the opposite, now that Ninjutsu has two charges and is therefore bankable? Outside of saving for TA, you'd want to save them for relative mobility... which amounts to thinking about uptime and disengages.

I can't agree with the premise of your argument toward me. Your base counter-example uses cast bars, which are not volatile in the same situations that positionals are and therefore have a different feel to them. If you wanted to compare me liking positionals or not to a mechanic that is exactly the same and ask me about it, that would be fine.

They're both gameplay factors that oblige preemptive, and often sequenced, movement.

[Miralyth]

They're both gameplay factors that oblige preemptive, and often sequenced, movement.

The context of my post, and what I was replying to, is the fun factor of positionals. Cast bars were being compared against them (although as the posts went on, I think the person speaking with me thought I was challenging something other than fun factor). Setting aside the fact that fun factor is completely subjective and up to the individual, utilizing cast bars executes differently than positionals. That was the point of me disagreeing with the poster. I agree, both are prone to the base concern of interruption - however, the circumstances and timing to which they're interrupted, as well as the way the player executes or plans these actions, are certainly not identical. My point still stands that they feel different to the player, which was the keyword that I used (feel).

If you want to challenge my statement, you'd have to pick apart that keyword, and stopping at the mere component of being interrupted would be a wholly unfair way to argue it. There are many more components to compare how a mechanic feels than being interrupted. Hence, not exactly the same.

Edit: I just want to reiterate that I think there was a misunderstanding in the discussion I had with that poster. I made several attempts to explain my intent, but I understand that this is a heated thread and that frustrations are running high in here, so I get it if assumptions are made. I really don't want to risk getting into another conversation where snippets of a post are quoted and debated out of context or intent. My reply to you is justifying my post against someone who probably wasn't even trying to debate the same thing I was, which makes it all the more silly for me to try and explain my position over and over.

[IruruCece]

Edit: I just want to reiterate that I think there was a misunderstanding in the discussion I had with that poster.

I understood your context just fine. I just think the premise of your argument sucked initially, and it sucked again when you tried to re-explain it.

[Miralyth]

I understood your context just fine. I just think the premise of your argument sucked initially, and it sucked again when you tried to re-explain it.

Cherry picking and weaving straw mans from what I said to address a separate narrative does not mean you understood. Alternatively, it means you understood and decided to use my post as an unrelated podium instead of expressing your thoughts outright. Either way, I'm sorry that what I find fun "sucks" for you.

[ssunny2008]

Wouldn't this be the opposite, now that Ninjutsu has two charges and is therefore bankable? Outside of saving for TA, you'd want to save them for relative mobility... which amounts to thinking about uptime and disengages.

I think you misunderstood my statement a bit. To use them for mobility or at times you´ve to disengage is what makes them superior BECAUSE they´re range tools. E9s for example made a difference if the boss used widerange or anti air first. You needed to get used to both of it on MNK. On NIN you just use your Raiton if needed, no matter what appears first. The timing doesn´t have to be perfect and you don´t have to think about it like "SSS? FS? Chakra? Is the timing still perfect?!", just delay your Mudra.