Dragon Sight change - Just remove positionals already

[CelestiCer]

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.

- Difficulty remains subjective
What's easy to you can be hard for another. I never understood this love for removing something on the basis that it's easy. Cause then I can suggest to remove anything that anyone finds that easy to do, making it a flawed argument point.

- Parsers have an allergy to anything RNG
Positionals inlc. due to rotating bosses. A parsing problem is not the bar to set to clear a fight. Though anything that stands in the way of a perfect upload is deemed a nuance right? LBing/Missing GCDs/perfect KT/specially fellow players those are like so the worst... ( sarcasm ). Also love the bravado of posters claiming positionals to be that easy when even the top parsers upload logs missing them, unless you lot claim to be better then even them? I remain a bit more impressed with someone landing them all on the hardest fights vs someone who doesn't. ( any 100% positional Rank 1 DSR enjoyers in this thread? ) Unless that's a crazy take.

- What has Square removed recently to return depth in Endwalker?
SMN Rework? Pre-Lobotomized RPR? Any Mug-change enjoyers in this thread? the 2 min meta? The existence of positionals doesn't disprove preventing any fight designs ( Like Endsinger/P2S etc which I found boring... ) ever being created. Not a fan of them, but I don't mind them existing. Yet every fight design now has gigantic hitboxes. Where is this improvement y'all are talkin about after all the homogenizing? I can't even get my " Kaiten " back. Idk what this unfound faith is in Square that you all have to deliver us depth/flavor/nuance of any kind after they remove anything, but pls pass the bong...

- I'm simply against anything that simplifies the game further
I prefer drawing a line somewhere vs nowhere. If you not gone draw it anywhere? just make the game Autowalk and turn all jobs into a 1 button rotation Jo. Cause encouraging Square to keep removing more in exchange for apparently nothing? that seems to have been working out so well so far... chefs kiss, mhm ( obviously )

[Elena_Farron]

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Idk what you are wafflin about because i didn't really say anything about parsing. Though i'm glad you mentioned the ludicrously sized hitboxes this expansion like the person before you, because i think that's what was much more interesting and skillful about playing melee than shimmying a little bit for some potency.

I actually think that Square Enix doesn't design encounters with positionals in mind at all, considering they like to make you run circles around bosses, use random movement patterns, or stand in front of their face for extended periods, which makes it feel a bit silly when you are pressing true north because it's clearly a bandaid fix for mechanics where Square Enix simply doesn't care whether you may hit your positional or not. I don't see how this is somehow a way of skill expression because personally it doesn't feel like it.

Honestly idk if you are serious considering you haven't even played melees other than SAM with it being your only job at 90, let alone cleared a single Ultimate. Though I do have TOP clears, etc. with 100% positionals hit.

[CelestiCer]

Honestly idk if you are serious considering you haven't even played melees other than SAM with it being your only job at 90, let alone cleared a single Ultimate. Though I do have TOP clears, etc. with 100% positionals hit.

Am actually pretty serious regarding my " Fun ", unless having fun is irrelevant in a... " Game "...

Tried most jobs on EU, fell in love with SAM and started playing on NA as only SAM. Got DPS shamed, then parse shamed, making me want to practice and get better gear for more DPS. Only to be Log shamed ( by a certain Diceroll ) in Savage as a new player... Ever since then I wanted to get better and help players prog/clear Ex/Savage as I see myself in plenty players who struggle there. I'm still bad... but I like to believe I improved a tiny bit since grey performing my first savage tier at E11S. Ultimate was never appealing, even less so with the phrase " Just go play Ultimate " after Kaiten removal. Never liked parsing, never joined a party for it for obvious reasons stated above... most of what I have is aimed for self improvement.

- Being Ultimate Shamed is a new one...
Didn't knew my points are null and void. I thought Positionals aren't limited to... well Ultimate. Also makes it hard to take you serious when you or others avoid tackling my argument points. Discussions with plenty who dislike positionals usually come from being " annoyed " as you put it yourself, by it standing in the way of a perfect parse. Postionals still gets missed by even top players. Landing them took something vs not landing them all.

- What has Square removed recently to improve Job depth?
Nothing. Yet players champion the idea to encourage Square to homogonize anything and that we should accept all degree of streamlining in exchange for something better, that never came. My SAM got simplified six-fold ( I'm losing count... ) I'm still waiting. Then Kaiten removal, and still nothing!

- I want more job depth, but pls Square keep simplifying the jobs
Like... How are we surprised that we are not getting Job improvements in the form of complexity/depth/layer/flavor/nuances when all we do is tout that we should accept more simplifications to our gameplay? Then why stop at positionals? remove gauges / delete our resources / erase cast bars / double our melee range / create hitboxes the size of our entire arena, we're basically halfway there in some fights. Positionals are not the pinnacle of gameplay no...

Its about drawing the line " Somewhere " vs " Nowhere ". Cause as far as I can tell? you lot draw the line at " Nowhere " regarding Job designs, Ultimate raider or not.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

I don't quite get this idea. I leveled as Monk and still got most of my positionals even when tanking / doing solo content.

It's gimmicky due to the XIV-traditional lack of polish / disconnect between the mob facing shown and the facing noted by the server, sure, but it's not as if it's so unintuitive as to never be engaged with outside of group content.

The conflict comes simply upon tanking while another melee is fighting the same target (see Pharos Sirius pre-nerf when tanks would throw a hissy fit at getting it for their roulette and refuse to budge), which then gets a little complicated, but was also technically doable.

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.

That's really not the same thing, though. The idea is that it's supposed to be contextual, not just an arbitrary requirement to walk one step left or right. The two only match up in the dullest possible contexts for positionals (static fights, which have been more the norm without positional bosses than with them).

And if it were just a bit more polished, be that by leniency (say, double-checking position in rapid succession and taking either success of the two) and/or adjustments to mob/boss spins (which are presently and have been traditionally jank af), etc., it'd be fine. Despite slower/clunkier movement in 1.x, positionals were easier to land by the simple fact that most mobs couldn't spin like tops.

[zeth07]

- Says the person having played this for 10 years...

Surely you aren't trying to take a dig at me for playing THIS game for 10 years, as if I somehow haven't personally played through countless other games to prove my point...

Anyone who has played a fighting game or action game would surely agree that positionals are the lowest of low in terms of any kind of "skill" requirement. And again to be clear I am not talking about the situations where mechanically it matters, because we are given skills to remove that factor at the cost of having to press an extra oGCD, wow. Which is why I do not understand the people who think it's some complex gameplay that adds to the job identity, it's nothing and is removed where it even has the slightest difficulty.

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.

Again, the game could just NOT be boring because of the mechanics of the fights... Or they could add more layers to the job itself that isn't positionals, as in something more unique. Just like the job has evolved beyond positional requirements over the last 10 years to make it more interesting. In ARR yes positionals added something because there was NOTHING. That isn't the case now and hopefully isn't in the future. They already said it was getting a rework and just the fact that every expansion adds something new means it should happen again.

[B]- 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.

I didn't say anything about homogenizing. Positionals are NOT unique to Dragoon to begin with. DRG has it's own job mechanics and could get other stuff in return.

For example:
- They gave us Blood of the Dragon, which changed our combos/buffs, and had Geirskogul.
- They added Mirage Dive, Dragon Sight, and Nastrond which brought some buff and an extra layer of gameplay with getting eyes for Nastrond as part of the "Life Cycle"
- Shadowbringers were more or less core changes besides the new stuff.
- Then we got Wyrmwind Thrust which was another layer of building mechanics.

So they could just as easily add something unique again, which they likely would...

[B]- 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.

When has this ever happened though? They always add something new because they would be stupid not to. Positonals are OLD and not unique to the job.

Are you someone who thinks all the changes to Blood of the Dragon makes the job inherently worse/less fun to play? Before you had to maintain the timer which ended up becoming pretty strict. Then they increased the timer (QoL) which made it a lot easier to maintain. Then they outright removed the timer (QoL) and now you don't have to worry about it, it's just built into the job. I imagine a lot of people saw these as welcome changes since they were just quality of life upgrades.

How bout when they changed Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw to not be random? Were you upset about that? Did that really remove the "skill" required to play the job?

I think a lot of people would agree that Dragoon as it is now was already in a good place in terms of playability and it didn't make sense when they were talking about a "rework", more so one that now involves an entire expansion of changes. Which means all the changes that HAVE happened put it where it is now...


The other thing I'll touch on is the Samurai Kaiten change which I think was/is overblown (of course). There is another perfect example of the same situation, which was Dark Knight using Dark Arts. That was beyond annoying, and if you somehow think fixing it removed some complexity or playability of the job you must like spamming the same skill for some reason. Kaiten was/is the exact same thing. Makes no sense to me.

////

Monk is another one, there was a 40 page post about MNK positionals in 6.0. If your "job identity" is based around positionals in people's head then it's not well designed or unique at all since other jobs had/have them. Add to the fact that even beyond what DRG got with Dragon Sight, they had Riddle of Earth with 3 charges to remove positionals anyway before all the other changes. Which again, are the devs themselves removing the positional requirement WITHIN the job that people seem to somehow tag as its identity, and that was more than DRG.

[Shurrikhan]

Again, the game could just NOT be boring because of the mechanics of the fights...

Sure. They're wholly able to do that. Even now. With positionals. The two are wholly separate. Never has the inclusion of positionals constrained boss design.

I didn't say anything about homogenizing. Positionals are NOT unique to Dragoon to begin with.

Tell me, which is more homogenizing? A sub-role having certain things in common between its member jobs, or there being no distinguishing features between sub-roles to begin with?

Let's say we remove cast times from casters because they're "just DPS anyways"? Surely that wouldn't be homogenizing, either? For each among RDM, SMN, BLM, and BLU... another job has cast times anyways, after all.
/s

The other thing I'll touch on is the Samurai Kaiten change which I think was/is overblown (of course). There is another perfect example of the same situation, which was Dark Knight using Dark Arts.

But they weren't the same situation.

With the Endwalker changes and removal of Kaiten, Kenki degraded from a gauge that required a degree of actual preemptive margining and had multiple spenders (even excluding situationals), to effectively charges of just the single non-situational spender (Shinten, in place of DA).

They were distinct, in large part because of Kaiten, right up until Kaiten was removed.

Was Kaiten the only thing making that difference? Of course not. Removing the 50-gauge cost from Senei/Guren was also a large part of that, as was doubling the cooldown of Ikishouten. But Kaiten was the final straw there, as the only other margining left is both situational and too modest to actually require any forethought.

[ataren3]

Unironically keep positionals and remove True North, and make the boss hit box small again. Make melee fun again instead of the current snooze fest.

That'd be kind of a fun take. Remove true north for every melee aside from monk. Other melee would need to figure out semi-unique rotations if they want all positionals but monk is already really nice and freeform for any fight (thank god too because I'd be crying for uptime without six sided star AND no ranged attack filler).

[Aco505]

That'd be kind of a fun take. Remove true north for every melee aside from monk. Other melee would need to figure out semi-unique rotations if they want all positionals but monk is already really nice and freeform for any fight (thank god too because I'd be crying for uptime without six sided star AND no ranged attack filler).

MNK is no longer the positional job it used to be, so it wouldn't make sense for it to keep TN but DRG, which has 50% of its GCDs being positionals.

[VentVanitas]

Monk is another one, there was a 40 page post about MNK positionals in 6.0. If your "job identity" is based around positionals in people's head then it's not well designed or unique at all since other jobs had/have them. Add to the fact that even beyond what DRG got with Dragon Sight, they had Riddle of Earth with 3 charges to remove positionals anyway before all the other changes. Which again, are the devs themselves removing the positional requirement WITHIN the job that people seem to somehow tag as its identity, and that was more than DRG.

just so you know, people who didn't play monk because of positionals still don't play it now. removing 4/6 of them did absolutely nothing to "improve" the job.

[Shurrikhan]

just so you know, people who didn't play monk because of positionals still don't play it now. removing 4/6 of them did absolutely nothing to "improve" the job.

Aye. Nor were the former greater number of positionals incompatible with the new Blitz system. We could easily have had both.

The only real competitor with Blitz was the pressure of alternative uses of Perfect Balance, such as for the likes of Stormblood TK rotations. Reducing it from 5 to 3 hits was fine for either system (technically even better for GL than the less frequent 5-hit ability was). And even then, a "use special move based on your last 3 skills" could easily have worked alongside GL.