Dragon Sight change - Just remove positionals already

[CelestiCer]

If anything, all you have done is made my point for me.

- Positionals never stood in the way of any Fight design being made, ever
Zero points presented to disprove it. Showing what non-positional fights offer? doesn't disprove positionals existence holding back anything. Fights are designed around reaching the boss not around hitting all positionals. Makes claiming that they restrain anything quite bold. Not being able to hit all positionals doesn't make a Fight bad, it just means players b*tch over missing optional decimals that should be viewed as means to optimize - not the bar to clear a fight.

- Never have I stated to like Giant-Hitboxes
Liking aspects of EW/XIV doesn't mean I advocate for a game to be worse ( how did you get to that out of all of this? ) Ironic, as I don't support giant-hitboxes vs overhyping Wall-bosses that have the biggest hitboxes of them all. The " spoon-feeding-words " attempt was Cute.

• I focus on what I find Fun - regardless of Design...
• You focus on the Designs - regardless of others Fun...

Notice? I critique the game, but I ain't knocking your fun... Complexly designed fights doesn't by default translate to a interesting fun engagement. You may pick apart every example I named based on design, it doesn't take away that the once I happen to find interesting? more likely have have positionals. I named some EW fights because it's recent.

Endwalker has created literally the worst fights this game has seen since Gordias, period.

For someone championing fight designs, mocking ARR's Titan EX and E4S? That's your hill to /playdead on. I won't defend XIV's flaws... but, " DSR " is regarded as the best Ultimate by plenty. Vexes me to see a Heaven's Legend glaze over DSR...

- Fun remains subjective
As are players who want to disprove the values of positionals that others value when they don't play Melee themselves in this expansion... ( That sound like someone you know? ) Deletion of Non-Positional fights was never my stance. GL making it seem like that's my angle. Devaluation of Positionals is the direction we're heading, which truly adds nothing to the game.

- Better fights or mechanics are never promised...
Show me this " Amazing Improvement in Jobs " to replace positionals, and then I'll entertain the idea. Yet this imbecilic mindset... that we should give up Job features of any kind in exchange for the empty promise that Square will deliver better fights & mechs? Is incomprehensible. It's also a endless rabbit hole, as positional removal? is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to " any Job features we can come-up with as standing in the way of better fight designs to be discarded next ".

[Mikey_R]

P2S straight up would not work if you had to do positionals and it was one of the more fun/unique fights that tier. Players would lose their collective shit trying to do positionals on that fight because it would essentially be impossible to even complete half your positionals.

I will admit, I have no personal experience in P2S, so what I have to say is completely subjective. However, I did watch a video from a SAM PoV and there were plenty of times the SAM was sat somewhere with no mechanics going on. Obviously, they had pre-positioned for the next mechanic, but there was no reason they couldn't have been at the prime positional position and then head to where they needed to go for the mechanic.

There is also the potential that a different strat could be made, one which tries to keep the positional uptime as high as possible. Again, since I have no personal experience in the fight, I'm not going to speculate too much on how that would go about.

However, just taking one boss and saying this fight wouldn't work with positionals does not mean that you have to suddenly get rid of all positionals. Going from a different angle, if there was a fight that had casters struggle, or even make it impossible to keep casting continuously, would that fight then be justification for removing cast times? I can confidently say noone would make that connection, however, this is the claim being made here. One fight makes it a bit harder to hit positionals, therefore positionals are bad and must go.

Now, again, there is no reason you couldn't have a whole suite of melee with differing levels of positionals, yes, even one without any positionals. Is this something you would be against?

Plenty of them. Fitting a non-damaging oGCD during even-minute bursts can be difficult, more so when TN has to be used in a specific GCD. It's not impossible but more often than not something will be moved out of buffs, especially as the fight progresses due to GSK drift. There's also the fact that STD is always a single weave and that Life Surge may be used once or twice depending on timing, although the value of a 5th positional LS is not that important.

The change is mostly QoL for those situations, but a lowered skill ceiling in fights where it wasn't needed. I think it's a band-aid before 7.0, where they'll probably remove some positionals from the job and I wish they didn't but we'll see.

I can see where you made that connection, however, that wasn't the question I intended to ask. What I was implying was, are there situations where you NEED to use True North and you could not just do the positionals as normal and if so, how frequently does it come up? If one of the potential issues is caused by the party buff ranges, does the increase in the range in 6.4 then alleviate that issue?

[Aco505]

I can see where you made that connection, however, that wasn't the question I intended to ask. What I was implying was, are there situations where you NEED to use True North and you could not just do the positionals as normal and if so, how frequently does it come up? If one of the potential issues is caused by the party buff ranges, does the increase in the range in 6.4 then alleviate that issue?

I believe I replied to your question: it depends on the fight. Party buff ranges have nothing to do with it though, only the Dragon Sight change.

DRG's GCD string lasts 25s without any SkS, this means that your burst is always going to start and finish at different GCDs in full uptime, because those happen every 60s and 120s and these are not multiples of 25s.

True North will cover the next four GCDs and 50% of DRG's GCDs are positionals. The GCD string looks as follows: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 1 - 6 - 7 - 5 - 4. The positionals are those marked in bold.

With this in mind, in even-minute bursts your damage oGCDs and TN (or any other non-damaging oGCD) may clash depending on the fight at level 90:

1. In some cases, you can fit everything just fine: Act 4 of P4-2S.

2. In others you may be able to fix it in some way: P3S before the add phase, it required you to do a triple weave but didn't cost you anything if playing properly.

3. Finally, in some other situations it was borderline impossible without putting something out of buffs (i.e. 15s duration ones such as BL): P5S if bursting during the Double Rush mechanic. In this case it's due to not being able to double weave all the way throughout the dashes and because of having to press an additional oGCD (Arm's Length).

So the DS change helps with situations like 3 but reduces the skill ceiling required to do 1 and 2 although there can be other examples similar to Act 4 that would be way better with this change. For instance, it's quite helpful in Zurvan Unreal.

Speaking of P4-2S, getting all the positionals was RNG based as you often had to use two TN in Act 4, which was immediately followed by Finale, a mechanic in which you would lose positionals often due to the boss facing random directions and you getting a random clock position in the arena immediately afterwards. Therefore, the DS change would have solved that problem there, for instance.

If you do uptime BJCC in TEA, having this DS change makes it more lenient but reduces the skill ceiling, as it's possible to hit every single positional there without killing anyone if playing properly, even if you're the DPS getting the first thunder debuff. And this is as DRG, whose number of positionals goes up by one in 2-target situations, or 60% of the GCD string.

Any other situation (e.g. normal uptime fights like P6S) will probably not have this problem and you can greed positionals just fine while saving TN uses for mechanics in which you cannot greed normally such as Cachexia.

[Tetsujin]

No. Play ranged, caster, or tank. Enough with removing stuff. Add something for once, for God's sake.

[zeth07]

No. Play ranged, caster, or tank. Enough with removing stuff. Add something for once, for God's sake.

You know they've added other mechanics to DRG over the last 10 years that have nothing to do with positionals right?

Things that have actually added layers to the gameplay of DRG. Meanwhile they have consistently been removing positionals over YEARS of playing, or adding the abilities to remove them.

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This isn't a new idea, the devs are doing it themselves. Why keep some archaic game design around that added to the game during ARR but are effectively pointless now in multiple forms of content AND when it becomes "mechanically difficult" to do in a fight you are given (now multiple) skills to IGNORE positionals and removing that aspect of the mechanics. Any other time when they aren't an issue to perform they are brain dead move left/right a mm and press your buttons. Which again, I'm not saying it's "easy" to hit 100% positionals all the time but the entire point of those skills are to make it so you don't have to.....

And again, the developers are not only designing ENTIRE pieces of content devoid of positional requirements but also fights where they aren't needed individually.

It is such a stupid hill to die on 10 years into the game's life if anyone truly think they add any value to the job compared to it's actual job skills evolution since ARR. You know the ACTUAL MECHANICS of the job.

If you think you are some big brain skill level cause you hit Chaos Thrust from the rear compared to hitting True North > Chaos Thrust from anywhere you need to play more games.

[CelestiCer]

If you think you are some big brain skill level cause you hit Chaos Thrust from the rear compared to hitting True North > Chaos Thrust from anywhere you need to play more games.

- Says the person having played this for 10 years...
Standing still for equal DPS performance = Boring. Encourage Laziness. Positional removal deletes optional optimization. Easy to execute surface level, harder when doing it all the time everywhere. Encouraging DPS plus for movement is a plus. Standing still a lot is for casters, it's available if u wanna play it.

You know they've added other mechanics to DRG over the last 10 years that have nothing to do with positionals right? / Things that have actually added layers to the gameplay of DRG.

- What Square has done is homogenize our Jobs
Streamlining Job gameplay down to a handful of braincell requirements to play. Unless the 2 min meta is what you think is the pinnacle of Job gameplay. Encouraging Square to homogenize our Jobs more for nothing in return is just moronic, as is your assumption of players hitting their positionals and accusing them of feeling superior over you. Does this indicate that you can't hit even over half yours in normal raids post-DRG changes? Well... not my DPS loss.

- Once positionals are removed, and jobs are not improved?
It would not surprise me... if you lot who support any ounce of simplifying anything Job-wise? will double down... to request Square to remove even more under this false pretense to improve the jobs. Now there's more room for more layers and depth... riiiiight. It would not suprise me one bit =u=; but I guess we'll wait and see right. I'd like to be proven wrong that they are not making our jobs dumber.

[Lyth]

I'm surprised at the number of posters advocating for removal of positionals and combos on melee who don't actually main melee in the first place. These are going to be the same sorts of people who will invariably turn around and demand dps nerfs to melee on the basis of 'role difficulty' if and when such changes are implemented. We know that you're eyeing that M2 spot, but it's not yours, sorry. You already have R1 and R2.

If you want to instead make threads advocating for all spells being instant cast, given that casters pretty much are now ranged dps in all but name and special privileges anyways, you will have our collective support. Let people who enjoy melee enjoy melee. Thanks.

[Eorzean_username]

Positionals aren't the real problem anyway, it's that they're tied to the target rather than the player.

This makes them pointless gameplay in basically all solo content that doesn't just give up on the concept entirely (eg, Deep Dungeon, Bozja, etc), which is a pretty weird look to present to new players for so much of their initial experience.

It also makes positionals exasperating rather than fun in situations where targets spin their facing randomly, strats encourage stacking on a boss's face, Tanks that aren't trained properly, and so on.

This makes Positionals a fundamentally over-specialised design that's at odds with the rest of the game, and an archaic relic from a time when the game was much simpler and slower, and needed extra mechanical convolution to zest the rotational experience. Now, they're just legacy design bloat that people threatened by change continue to cling to as one of their 100s of hills they like to histrionically die upon.

That said, I think very few people ever actually had a problem with the basic concept of positionals — shifting a few millimeters left or right for big juicy potency gains is not exactly arduous.

Instead, what causes "Positional Hate" is that people feel like hundreds of factors outside of their actual control cause them to lose out on the mechanic. It feels helpless to most players, and so they react with hostility to the entire concept.

If positionals were tied to the player rather than the target, I don't think there would be any real backlash against them — ie, if for example you gained potency bonuses for not standing in the same location as the previous Weaponskill. Same active style, but now decoupled from encounter design, and also actually usable when going through the game's solo journey.

[Elena_Farron]

i never understood some of you who seem to be so in love with positionals cause personally it kinda gets on my nerves in fights like the new EX when i have to waste true north charges on the boss spinning because it lines up perfectly with my gcd. other than cases like this the truth is positionals are easy and the one time they aren't it's just annoying and you either press TN (very hard) or eat the potency loss.

there should be and are more interesting things about playing melee and positionals aren't one of them.

[Ransu]

I'm surprised at the number of posters advocating for removal of positionals and combos on melee who don't actually main melee in the first place. These are going to be the same sorts of people who will invariably turn around and demand dps nerfs to melee on the basis of 'role difficulty' if and when such changes are implemented. We know that you're eyeing that M2 spot, but it's not yours, sorry. You already have R1 and R2.

If you want to instead make threads advocating for all spells being instant cast, given that casters pretty much are now ranged dps in all but name and special privileges anyways, you will have our collective support. Let people who enjoy melee enjoy melee. Thanks.

I've been a melee main since ARR. I literally only played BLM last tier and I'm back to melee this tier to try out ninja because I basically refuse to go back to SAM until I see what they do with it in 7.0.

In ARR I thought they were were kind of neat, especially with MNK, but I was over the entire design pretty quickly. I'm at the point where I don't care if they stay or go because eventually to me they became so mundane that they are basically second nature and pretty automatic and I've watched boss fights get more and more static over time which is clearly due to the positionals. If they stay, whatever nothing changes for me and I'll still parse in the 80's and sometimes 90's. If they go, great, maybe we'll get less static boss fights and more interesting ones like P2S or Endsinger, so yes I generally lean in favor of them being removed because overall I see them to be pretty pointless because they don't add anything to the game. Boss circles going back to being small and having heavy movement forcing melee out of range of the boss and making me find ways to maintain my rotation in that manner is WAY more interesting to me than stepping 1inch to the left or right.