Removal of Positionals

[ForteNightshade]

I agree. Everyone complains about SMN being this boring in terms of rotation/optimisation (I love the concept, though) but people here are asking for all jobs to essentially turn more and more into it, funnily enough.

Removing systems is not the answer to stale design.

There is a pretty massive difference between the redesign of Summoner and positionals. As it stands, positionals have little interaction with the overall job and don't necessarily make it more engaging (subjective, of course). The complaints regarding Summoner, meanwhile, derive entirely from its rotation being so incredibly straight forward it can be condensed into a single button macro. Ninja wouldn't change if positionals on Aeolian Edge and Armor Crush were removed. In fact, Dragoon would be better off losing one of its positionals given the long string combo makes it cumbersome to manage.

[ZiraZ]

Well which is it? are positional cumbersome to manage, or are they faceroll and boring and anyone can totally land them all in P5s ezpz(still has not provided proof btw)
Getting mixed signals from these trillion posts people that think they know better about jobs they don't even play.

[Silver-Strider]

Well which is it? are positional cumbersome to manage, or are they faceroll and boring and anyone can totally land them all in P5s ezpz(still has not provided proof btw)
Getting mixed signals from these trillion posts people that think they know better about jobs they don't even play.

It's all subjective.
Some people find Positionals fun and engaging as a mechanic since anyone that cared about optimizing now had a skill ceiling for improvement.
Some people don't care about positionals at all and found the mechanic cumbersome and unintuitive.

Personally, I'm in the former camp as I found MNK to be incredibly engaging due to having such a constant need to reposition for its rotation and getting better at landing those positionals was the primary difference between a good MNK and a bad one. Now, you can Dragon Kick your way into a Purple parse with very little skill actually required and it STILL has the lowest population out of all Melee Jobs. The only time that positionals might have been cumbersome was back in ARR where missing a positional meant missing out on your DoT/Buff but that was a long time ago.

[Shurrikhan]

Wait, how the heck are DRG positionals "cumbersome to manage"?

You move twice per 10 GCDs, from rear (WT) to flank (F&C) after the 4th and from flank to rear any time between the 4th and 10th GCD (WT2).

Two movements, just 1 way each, per 25 seconds pre-Haste.

Number of positionals =\= amount of repositioning required.

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Note: If Chaotic led into F&C before WT instead, DRG would have the same number of positionals, but double the movement (any, any, rear, flank [1], rear [2], any, any, flank [3], rear [4]).

That's not to say that would be for the better, but there the difference between DRG's current 5 positionals per 10 GCDs and MNK's old 100% positional skills wasn't just a factor of 2. It was nearer to a factor of 3 with a typical Monk rotation, as Monk would only stay in place on DK-Twin-Snap and (True)-Demo-Boot along its sliding rotation.

[Aco505]

Well which is it? are positional cumbersome to manage, or are they faceroll and boring and anyone can totally land them all in P5s ezpz(still has not provided proof btw)
Getting mixed signals from these trillion posts people that think they know better about jobs they don't even play.

To be fair, P5S isn't the worse fight for positionals even if it is the one in this tier. Could just challenge that person to try and get all positionals as DRG in Titan UWU instead

Two movements, just 1 way each, per 25 seconds pre-Haste.

Number of positionals =\= amount of repositioning required.

In full uptime, yes. When movement and rotation of bosses is involved, things become quite a bit different and particularly when there's two targets as then 60% of your GCDs are positionals with 2 out of 3 being rear ones.

Allowing FnC or WC to be used in any order after the 3rd GCD would mostly be for comfort in any situation where it could help. Overall, most DRGs will stick with the usual order unless a specific encounter favored otherwise.

Sadly, I suspect they'll remove the positional requirement for CT/CS but I hope they keep it. We'll see!

[Lyth]

Positionals don't intrinsically have any difficulty associated with them. If I were to bring a player who is completely new to melee a striking dummy and to ask them to hit their positionals, they won't have any additional difficulty in learning how to do this over and above learning the base rotation. The number of positionals itself doesn't matter all that much; it's just memorization and repetition. What keeps them interesting is their interaction with fight mechanics.

For starters, you need a moving and rotating target. On the most basic level, this involves recognizing the specific GCDs where the boss reorientates themselves and knowing where you need to be standing in advance to avoid downtime. You can't be chasing their hitbox after the fact. The learning around anticipating this is fairly instinctive and just comes with spending some time in individual fights. Where it really gets fun is when you give the tanks some actual freedom to reposition the boss. The best tanks are consistent from pull to pull and set you up to succeed. But you also find that some tanks will consistently make positioning errors that you can adapt to, which can be a lot of fun once you learn to read them and find workarounds. It also means that a fight that's well designed with actual movement can still stay fresh for tanks/melee, because of variations in execution across different groups. I think that that interdependence between tanks and melee needs to be preserved, rather than removed for convenience.

I also think that expanding on melee's movement abilities has a huge potential to influence how interesting positionals become, simply because you have more room for complex movement patterns on bosses and more clever uptime tricks that you can devise for individual fights. Regress is S tier in this regard.

[Ransu]

Positionals don't intrinsically have any difficulty associated with them. If I were to bring a player who is completely new to melee a striking dummy and to ask them to hit their positionals, they won't have any additional difficulty in learning how to do this over and above learning the base rotation. The number of positionals itself doesn't matter all that much; it's just memorization and repetition. What keeps them interesting is their interaction with fight mechanics.

For starters, you need a moving and rotating target. On the most basic level, this involves recognizing the specific GCDs where the boss reorientates themselves and knowing where you need to be standing in advance to avoid downtime. You can't be chasing their hitbox after the fact. The learning around anticipating this is fairly instinctive and just comes with spending some time in individual fights. Where it really gets fun is when you give the tanks some actual freedom to reposition the boss. The best tanks are consistent from pull to pull and set you up to succeed. But you also find that some tanks will consistently make positioning errors that you can adapt to, which can be a lot of fun once you learn to read them and find workarounds. It also means that a fight that's well designed with actual movement can still stay fresh for tanks/melee, because of variations in execution across different groups. I think that that interdependence between tanks and melee needs to be preserved, rather than removed for convenience.

I also think that expanding on melee's movement abilities has a huge potential to influence how interesting positionals become, simply because you have more room for complex movement patterns on bosses and more clever uptime tricks that you can devise for individual fights. Regress is S tier in this regard.

This screams you don't do end game lol. Pull to pull? You should be doing aoe's in those situations to begin with and savage fights are static 90% of the time. Any time you actually have to move true north is available. Positionals barely have any meaning in savage, lets not pretend they add anything to non-end game content.

[Shurrikhan]

In full uptime, yes. When movement and rotation of bosses is involved, things become quite a bit different and particularly when there's two targets as then 60% of your GCDs are positionals with 2 out of 3 being rear ones.

Allowing FnC or WC to be used in any order after the 3rd GCD would mostly be for comfort in any situation where it could help. Overall, most DRGs will stick with the usual order unless a specific encounter favored otherwise.

Sadly, I suspect they'll remove the positional requirement for CT/CS but I hope they keep it. We'll see!

To be clear, I'm not asking for F&C and WT to be even easier to position than they are now, though I wouldn't mind being able to order them at will for the simple reason that having the two separate buttons is solely button bloat (though, I could say the same for every "combo" step past True/Raiden Thrust or Doomspike, or indeed XIV's "combos" on any job).

Rather, there's a difference regardless of context between positionals being consecutively performed from the same position vs. requiring different positions. Until a mob has significant net change in angle as least as often as your GCD, the movement required is only when the position changes, not merely when the position is required.

As such, it seemed a hell of a stretch for anyone to say that DRG's 5 positional GCDs per its 10-step sustained combo (as you only ever alter from that ST combo against precisely 2 enemies) amounted to a "cumbersome" requirement in movement, when they can be done with literally just two bumps of the joystick, or a single dash each of [A] and [D] strafes, per 10 seconds.

Positionals engagement is hugely positional, of course.

• Take T11, for instance, back in ARR: There you had an interplay between when the boss would angularly cleave, your GCD speed, tiny (e.g., a fifth of a GCD) delays when such would be enough not to clip your ToD/Fracture/Demo ticks, that movement, and rotational choice. Heck, had Fists of Wind carried a burst of speed upon swap, you'd likely have seen that play into the total system of considerations as well.
  
  
• But if you through a modern Monk into even in that context (minus Fracture and ToD, obviously), there'd be little interplay possible, because of the low relative weight of those positionals and just how few GCDs still even have a positional attached (along with, counterintuitive as it might first sound, the ability to avoid those positionals at variable cost via Touch of Death per 30s, Fracture per 18s, and woven Impulse Drives [high TP-inefficiency and a tiny potency cost even if used optimally, and significantly higher if it reduced the synergies of your native GCDs]).

[Lyth]

?

TN is helpful, but there are times where you want it in reserve for specific mechanics. It sounds like you haven't been in PF much, if anything. You do have to adapt to what other players do on occasion, especially when you're playing with a fresh group on every run. You should try it out, as it's good for your development as a player.

I'm also not sure why everything needs to be so faction orientated. Moving from team SAM to team BLM doesn't mean that you can't support interesting gameplay elements on your old role.

Take T11, for instance, back in ARR: There you had an interplay between when the boss would angularly cleave, your GCD speed, tiny (e.g., a fifth of a GCD) delays when such would be enough not to clip your ToD/Fracture/Demo ticks, that movement, and rotational choice. Heck, had Fists of Wind carried a burst of speed upon swap, you'd likely have seen that play into the total system of considerations as well.

You also had to strafe-lock prior to 3.4 to avoid missing directional autos when moving between positionals. There are a lot of layers that have already been removed from positionals in the name of making melee more accessible.

[OceanicSky]

I'll give you the hitbox thing because it actually matters in terms of fight mechanics and figuring out ways to maintain uptime optimally, but the take on positionals is pretty dumb. Realistically positionals add nothing to the game. Sitting at the corner of the circle and moving 1 inch left or right is not skillful, its not fun and its completely pointless considering whenever there is a mechanic that disrupts the ability to do that we have true north to compensate it making the entire design pointless. If true north didn't exist you would have a point, but as it stands positionals are meaningless and add nothing to the combat which is why I really don't care if they stay or go. They don't add or take away any kind of difficulty, so if they stay then whatever. If they go, nothing changes other than the fact a spot on my hotbar opens up.

I personally just don't get why people like them. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Do people not sit at the corner and intentionally make things harder by going all the way to the flank/rear instead of using the edges of the positinals? That's the only thing I can think of because, again, positionals do nothing for combat.



I level up mnk alongside my sam every expansion. I've never felt that positionals make mnk unique. I want mnk to have more things to do like near the end of the ShB expansion where the opener was fun as hell over worrying about pointless positionals. Make mnk faster and give me more things to press(more oGCD's) and more CD's to manage. That is way more interesting than stepping 1 inch to the left or the right in a game where the boss is static 90% of the time and the other 10% true north is always available.

You absolutely cannot say that you find that monk has nothing unique about it and then in the very next sentence praise the patch that removed monks most unique mechanic, Greased Lightning. What you want for monk is to just faceroll your keyboard with OGCDs when OGCDs are already a huge problem with monk since its impossible to every double weave anything thanks to the already extremely low GCD time. Tornado Kick rotation monk is and always will be the best iteration of monk where it was at the peak of its own class design.