Removal of Positionals

[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.

[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.