Quote Originally Posted by Taranok View Post
You appear to have completely missed the point of how positionals force the designers to make fight more static.
Because you would have at most a loose correlation of a degree of one thing the developers might otherwise like to do that positionals would be punished by -- the boss moving to past the edge of the arena while still being attackable. That is, if we ignored that we already have fights where the same boss can be positional at some points and non-positional at others.

And I literally can't even begin talking to you if you think T9 was anything other than impossible for melee DPS.
And that's according to your... having played since HW? I actually played Monk through T9 and T9S. Again, T9 was not impossible for melee DPS. The worst that can be said for them was that T9 forced one PB-less return from Greased Lightning (which you'd lose at each end of meteor/adds phase). But given that Monk actually pumped back then, it was plenty worth it (especially up until hugely overgearing and blitzing through the fight).

and if you failed a single positional, your entire rotation shut completely down.
All you are proving with this is that you clearly did not play the game anywhere around that time.

What you are describing applied solely to two skills in the entire game: Heavy Thrust and Impulse Drive (and only on DRG). Neither are mid-combo, and therefore could not reset your combo; they'd simply delay it by 1 GCD per failure. Back then, a standard rotation would clip Chaos Thrust, so no, your rotation would not somehow "be completely shut down" by repeating a single skill every so often if you screwed up.
Monk did not fail to shift forms nor fail to gain buffs from failing to hit a positional; it just lost potency, identically to now.

This is at a time where you had to nail positionals on multiple GCDs in a row or you lost the entire combo. A little under half of all Dragoon GCDs required it.
Please have at least checked a damned gameplay video before commenting on a period of time you haven't played.

Two. Two Dragoon skills required positionals, out of 8 native single-target skills. Out of Heavy Thrust, Impulse Drive, Disembowel, Chaos Thrust, Phlebotomize, True Thrust, Vorpal Thrust, and Full Thrust... only those first two had positionals. That's... 25%.

Heck, the next GCD threshold used a loop of that brought the portion of positionals GCDs by rotational frequency down from that 25% to just over 18%.

:: Chaos Thrust didn't gain a positional until it was removed from Impulse Drive. And since only DRG buffs were ever dependent on positionals, it meant those previous sole outliers then worked identically to what we have today.

Hell, it's the reason Raiden Thrust no longer has a positional requirement.
Raiden never had a positional requirement. It simply doubled the value of the positional requirement already attached to the final dragon skill of either combo. Though it said it required that both Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw's positionals must succeed in order to generate Raiden Thrust, that effect was actually bugged for the entirety of its lifespan and actually required only the second positional.

We'll never know whether making Raiden Thrust (Draconian Fire) generate independently of the combo-ender's positional was done because (A) they felt it'd make that GCD have too much positionally-dependent potency (despite leaving MNK with ~193 potency every Bootshine tied behind a positional over that period), (B) because they planned to add an additional means of generating Draconian Fire, or simply (C) to save face when they continued to be unable to fix the bug.

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Tl;dr: Please get your facts straight before using parts of the game you clearly never played as if they warranted any part of your conclusions. Also, they don't; if anything, they disprove them.