What is something you want REMOVED from the game?

[TheMightyMollusk]

Positionals are fake complexity at best and pointless busywork at worst, and I wouldn't miss them at all.

[Kolsykol]

Positionals are fake complexity at best and pointless busywork at worst, and I wouldn't miss them at all.

I don't really agree at all in more difficult content, but in most content it's probably true.
In Savage tho I enjoy figuring out when to True North for uptime, I feel like it's a nice form of skill expression.

Edit: There are some that feels thematically strange tho.
Why is Demolish a rear positional for example on MNK?

I think Aeolian Edge on NIN makes sense, sneaky NIN attacking from behind just makes thematic sense.
Visually tho it could be a bit more '' backstabbey ''.

[Shurrikhan]

Positionals are a dumb concept and there's a reason why WoW removed most of theirs.

Ah, yes, down from positionals only on Backstab, Gouge, Ambush, and Shred to... Backstab, Gouge, and Shred. While that may be a difference of 25%, it's also a difference of... just one ability.

____________________

Positionals are fake complexity at best and pointless busywork at worst, and I wouldn't miss them at all.

Admittedly, the way mob turning works, atop the game's sluggish poll rates, is not conducive to positionals. Surrounding design since Stormblood has also done about everything in the devs power to make them unexciting.

We no longer adjust our rotations in order to manage positionals over key moments in encounters; there's just True North for that, allowing bloat buttons to replace rotational nuance (now nearly impossible for most jobs anyways due to melee rotations' reduced modularity). There's more automated boss movement by which to end up with ill-timed spins for which no positional could reliably land, however prepositioned. There are sometimes fewer tells as to where the boss will turn next to perform its attacks. The timing for which boss facing lingers after completing a cast has become less consistent. Etc., etc.

But are those issues with positionals themselves, or merely a worsening of context?

Positionals at their core do just two things:

• They had necessary button presses / stick movement, essentially apm (just without being accounted for in the likes of fflogs since the site can't tell when you would have needed to move anyways or what forms a discrete movement).
• They further narrow what it means to be at the 'right' place at the right time, which in turn offers variable complexity.

That's it. They're apm without button cost and they form a sort of Tetris-like win condition that can offer depth/nuance through surrounding systems. Their complexity, while greatly diminished over the years, is not fake, and their added business is no more pointless than hitting your frequent but middling oGCDs.

If you don't like anything adding to your apm, then you probably won't like positionals. If you refuse to claw grip and/or don't like switching between stick and face-buttons/DPad on your controller, you probably won't like positionals. But, those who like higher apm, especially without having to spend further button counts discretely on them, or enjoy intersecting systems, variable priorities, and the like, tend to like them.