Wish there were melee DPS without positionals

[GoatOfWar]

Play Warrior.
You're so tanky you don't need healers, do the highest dps of all the tanks, and you're also a healer yourself.
You're that fat kid on the playground with all the super powers when everyone else has 1 or 2.
You also get to enjoy preferential treatment from the balance team, adding a billion extra effects to every button.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

Just play Ninja and stand behind the boss, the positional loss from Armor Crush won't mean much over the course of a fight and you will be using Aeolian Edge more than anything, so go to town.

That or just play a tank.

[Rosenstrauch]

Samurai much the same. Or at least it was last time I played it.. just staying still and missing a positional every cycle worked out to be again a loss of ~2 potency per second.

Used to be that missing your positionals would either not generate kenki at all, or generate less than what you'd get for hitting them. When your 2-3 big hits (Higanbana, Madare, Guren/Senei) required spending 20/50 kenki, the impact on the player's DPS could be fairly significant.

Now that it's been standardized to "hit slightly harder", Kaiten has been removed, and Guren/Senei had their costs slashed to 25... well, none of it really matters anymore, yeah.

[Dzian]

Used to be that missing your positionals would either not generate kenki at all, or generate less than what you'd get for hitting them. When your 2-3 big hits (Higanbana, Madare, Guren/Senei) required spending 20/50 kenki, the impact on the player's DPS could be fairly significant..

It's never been significant even in 4.0 when Sam was introduced

In 4.0 If a SAM stayed behind the the boss and ignores positionals they would typically lose 5 kenki every roughly 21-22 seconds (gcd dependant) that typically equated to the loss of one 320 potency Shinten roughly every ~105-110 seconds (gcd dependant). Worked out to be approximately 3 potency per second loss.. which when you added up all your skills and potencies worked out to be a less than 0.5% loss of dps.

Given the developers stance on complexity and obsession on simplification I can't imagine that's changed very much. So they're still boring and worthless.

Scrap them entirely or make them impactful (eg putting them at start of combos as mentioned earlier.) But that would require player skill and the devs are afraid of that. Hence everyth8ng is braindead and worthless

[Llynethil]

If you don't plan to do savage/ultimates, you don't need to do positionals ever, you can have a raid where all dps is melee and all just stand in the back and you'll have 0 problems clearing it because all normal content is super easy, it'll just take 30s longer.

[Shurrikhan]

In 4.0 If a SAM stayed behind the the boss and ignores positionals they would typically lose 5 kenki every roughly 21-22 seconds (gcd dependant) that typically equated to the loss of one 320 potency Shinten roughly every ~105-110 seconds (gcd dependant). Worked out to be approximately 3 potency per second loss.. which when you added up all your skills and potencies worked out to be a less than 0.5% loss of dps.

Shinten at the time was 320 potency, making every 5 Kenki worth 64 potency. Per 9 GCDs outside of Higan reapplication, it had 2 positionals. That's at least of 6.32 positional potency per second.

Note that 6.32 is the absolute minimum; we had Kaiten, Seigan, and Guren all at higher efficiencies and any that Skill Speed would increase that consequent potency per second.

Was it huge? No. But it created a larger difference than those in job balancing at the time that'd have people up in arms, so it was far from insignificant.

And it remains so now, under the current 60 potency per positional or 13.3+ ppgcd -- negligible if playing casually, but rendering any balancing complaints (significantly smaller variances) pretty well irrelevant if one isn't even willing to try for them.

Scrap them entirely or make them impactful (e.g. putting them at start of combos as mentioned earlier)

You don't need to go nearly so indirect a route to add potency penalty.

Consider: If you're attempting to do a Gekko combo but you move the positional to the start of its combo -- Hakaze (which would mean that Samurai could have only one position from which to benefit, since Hakaze is shared across all 3 combos)-- and cause any failed positional not to progress your combo, you'd fall from 415 ppgcd (when including the contribution of Sen and Kenki) to 361.25 ppgcd, increasing the potency lost from 60 to 160.25, but that's still ultimately just potency.

So unless you just really, really like the gameplay of combos not being progressed unless you hit the correct positional... it makes no difference how that potency is made dependent on positionals. Simply double the bonus, and you'd basically be there, and without needing to simplify SAM's repositioning as you would need to if you moved its positionals to the beginning of the combo.


Old (1.x, ARR) is neither necessarily nor inherently better, Dzian. That's not to say that changes or new additions are necessarily or inherently better, either, but there are reasons some things from 1.x and pre-2.45 were removed.

[Dzian]

it had 2 positionals. That's at least of 6.32 positional potency per second.

It did have 2 but unless you were standing in front of a boss or deliberately trying to miss them you'd realistically only lose 1 if you just ignored them and stayed behind a boss for an entire encounter. So 6 32 realistically becomes 3.16 potency lost. (or there abouts)

You've done the same math i have. but unless your going to make the actual effort to deliberatly miss all positionals (Which is a bit different to simply ignoring them) realistically you'd always hit half of them if you just stayed behind the boss for example you would hit all your gekkos but miss the kashas. so by ignoring them and staying behind a boss the loss is roughly 3 potency per second. (exact amount vaires with gcd / skill speed etc)

[Hurlstone]

I'm OK with positionals, not my fav mechanic but not a deal breaker either, though I wish there was like... an effect or sound when we hit them right. Always paranoid they have not hit haha.

[Shurrikhan]

It did have 2 but unless you were standing in front of a boss or deliberately trying to miss them you'd realistically only lose 1 if you just ignored them and stayed behind a boss for an entire encounter. So 6 32 realistically becomes 3.16 potency lost.

Unless your going to make the actual effort to deliberatly miss them all. Which is a bit different to simply ignoring them.

I know; I've made the same point about re-positioning on the first page.

Regardless, you don't arbitrarily cut the minimum positional potency of a given job in half and then pretend that was its maximum. At least, not if your intention is to inform anyone in any honest fashion or make any earnest comparisons.

By all means, contextualize the numbers after, but don't purposely give glaringly wrong numbers under the guise of pragmatics, especially since the numbers it would be compared to have the very same trait (one tends towards whatever position, making frequency of re-positioning a better measure of effort to be put in than the mere frequency of positionals in less spin-y fights) despite having varied contribution from Flank attacks relative to Rear attacks, needlessly skewing those comparisons.
:: To do otherwise would be like comparing Healer or BLM offensive ppgcd directly to that of a DPS without accounting for the 30% damage & healing bonus of Maim and Mend or the 80% damage bonus of Astral Fire III.

(Yes, that includes your beloved old positional Impulse Drive --the only example out of ARR of a combo being delayed by a lack of positional, per your suggestion-- since you'd have to take more Accuracy to hit from anywhere but the Rear, making that your 'default' position. If we randomly discounted all Rear positionals as you're doing here, DRG today would have more potency dependent on positionals than it did back then.).

I'm OK with positionals, not my fav mechanic but not a deal breaker either, though I wish there was like... an effect or sound when we hit them right. Always paranoid they have not hit haha.

That's fair. Agreed.

Sadly, Bootshine is about the only one with any obvious feedback (and even then, one could have just lucky-crit).

Though, I imagine it'd get quite annoying if the same 'success' SFX were added over each skill, which is the most likely outcome of that suggestion reaching the devs and getting the usual Monkey's Paw treatment.

[Rychu]

I'm OK with positionals, not my fav mechanic but not a deal breaker either, though I wish there was like... an effect or sound when we hit them right. Always paranoid they have not hit haha.

Honest to god that would probably make people hit their positionals so much more than they currently do. The lack of feedback when they connect vs when they don't really gives the crayon eaters that make up a majority of the playerbase just not care to hit them, that alone could help.