Wish there were melee DPS without positionals

[Shurrikhan]

They could remove True North alongside Positionals and thus would save a Button for something else.. they did that before just worse with Samurai thanks to the Kaiten Removal

Save one button for on DRG at the cost of a bare minimum of 9.6 APM from the repositioning itself... >.>

Or, you know, they could just get rid of True North itself, in some way subtly correct for the gap between what the server sees and what the client sees in terms of relative positioning, and bosses jumping to the edge of the arena temporarily become omni-positional.

Voila, you keep the substantial amount of extra APM and means of player engagement, have a less problematic system in itself, and it'd have no extra button-cost.

[RyuuZero]

bosses jumping to the edge of the arena temporarily become omni-positional.

that would fix so many things it wouldn't even be funny
but seriously, I like that Idea^^ not so much the sole removal of True North but we will see.
6.0 got rid of Belts, who know what 7.0 get rid of

[Shurrikhan]

that would fix so many things it wouldn't even be funny
but seriously, I like that Idea^^ not so much the sole removal of True North but we will see.

My point was more that True North was a weird band-aid solution used in place of actual fixing the problems with positionals that had been present since ARR.

No problems over which the player cannot reasonably have agency (like the screen showing that the positional should hit, but the mechanic auto-turning the boss a quarter-second earlier in server-time says "No", or the boss jumping to where positionals literally cannot be reached) = no need for the bandaid and its button cost.

6.0 got rid of Belts, who know what 7.0 get rid of

Please be Materia, in favor of actual impactful customization that requires neither a level-capped crafter nor a gilsink and certainly no bloated inventory cost. >.>

[Aco505]

Or, you know, they could just get rid of True North itself, in some way subtly correct for the gap between what the server sees and what the client sees in terms of relative positioning, and bosses jumping to the edge of the arena temporarily become omni-positional.

Voila, you keep the substantial amount of extra APM and means of player engagement, have a less problematic system in itself, and it'd have no extra button-cost.

Doesn't solve the issue of bosses looking at the party during mechs or similar situations like Act 4, Superchain Theory I or Letter of the Law. Removing True North is not the solution.

Also, RPR is already considered the easiest melee when it comes to positionals due to how much flexibility you have with when to use them. You can literally save one TN stack for every Gluttony and be absolutely fine.

That some people in this thread claim DRG is easy with positionals because you switch to the flank less is a bit concerning though. It tells me that you don't really play the job that much. It's the heaviest job positional-wise, with 50% of your GCDs being one and the only melee job that doesn't have extra non-positional GCDs (Mudras, Iaijutsus, Enshroud, Blitzes), which means that you cannot play around them. That's one of the reasons why they added a TN effect to Dragon Sight, because the other melees use less positionals (except SAM) during their burst.

[Shurrikhan]

Doesn't solve the issue of bosses looking at the party during mechs or similar situations like Act 4, Superchain Theory I or Letter of the Law. Removing True North is not the solution.

I didn't recommend removing it in isolation -- only after dealing with moments of inaccessible positional and visual discrepancies between server's snapshot and the relative angle visible to the player (e.g., by taking the best of a rapid triple-checking so that either predicting the sudden untelegraphed boss turn OR reacting in time would both count as a successful positional).

But seriously, look at the rDPS gap between melee/BLM and the other DPS. If we did miss some 60-120 potency per minute from a lack of True North... would we even be able to see how little the gap has shrunk? Even before TN, it wasn't expected that a Melee would hit 100% of positionals, and they were balanced accordingly. Now that we can, why is that gap still as big (if not larger) than it was before?

Part of the dependence now on True North, moreover, is simply caused by habits unlearned since True North was added. Before True North, for instance, you'd stack the whole-party-stacks mechanics directly under the boss, where melee could still access Rear and Flank positionals while splitting the damage, etc.

[Aco505]

But seriously, look at the rDPS gap between melee/BLM and the other DPS. If we did miss some 60-120 potency per minute from a lack of True North... would we even be able to see how little the gap has shrunk?

This has nothing to do with positionals though. Like, if you wanna make positionals the defining melee skill, then go ahead and have them be a 10% loss if you miss them all.

If we got a patch tomorrow buffing all non-BLM ranged jobs so that the difference between the highest DPS and the lowest is 5% or less, the problem would be fixed. However, I suppose things are not that simple and SE has its own idea of job balance.

BLM was buffed into an overtuned state due to it "needing to be balanced in relation to the other casters". No one knows what's their actual philosophy when balancing jobs but I sincerely doubt positionals are the main driving point behind having melee above ranged.

As a side note, they have no problem putting plenty of melee downtime mechanics in non-savage (and lately ultimate) content. The Criterion dungeons in particular have several of these. While people are right to be concerned about DPS disparities (and these should be fixed as best as possible), they can easily switch their design philosophy in the next expansion and not adjust numbers due to this... and then we could be in a reverse situation, thus not really fixing the issue at hand.

[Shurrikhan]

This has nothing to do with positionals though.

You're the one making a huge deal out of an occasional stacking mechanic or the like, if mismanaged, possibly costing a melee some positional potency... when, yes, that risk was an explicit factor, even as far back as ARR, in melee getting higher output ceilings.

Again, if there's no point at which a Melee and its party cannot through optimal play get all of its positionals, True North becomes unnecessary. Deal with the boss-spins snapshotting before they're even visible to the player and with the boss moving to the arena's edge, and the rest is on the party. At that point, True North would exist only to degrade positional gameplay, rather than serving any purpose in covering over the problems in that system.

Better, imo, to just fix the polish of positionals themselves than just to rely on that bandaid. If we really want to give players the options to frequently skip positionals like they can skip knockbacks per 2 minutes, so be it I guess, but True North should never have been the answer to player concerns about, say, self-repositioning and forced-spinning bosses or the discrepancies between what we see and what we get in terms of mob positions/facing and their impact on positionals.

DRG has the lowest potency loss on missed positionals, and MNK/RPR have the highest outside of TA. DRG is scheduled for a 7.0 rework anyways, so I wouldn't be surprised if they move it more towards being an entry level melee for people feeling anxious about positionals.

But DRG also has the greatest frequency of required re-positioning, so it's not as if it's less engaged with or less dependent on positionals overall than other melee dps. It doesn't therefore seem to be leading towards any sort of "baby's first melee (positionals-wise)"; its current state could as easily imply the exact opposite.

[Aco505]

You're the one making a huge deal out of an occasional stacking mechanic or the like, if mismanaged, possibly costing a melee some positional potency... when, yes, that risk was an explicit factor, even as far back as ARR, in melee getting higher output ceilings.

I'm not entirely sure what is making you think I'm making it a huge deal but it should be possible to get all positionals in optimized environments. Nothing matters in any other case because the DPS checks are usually not harsh enough to require you to squeeze that extra potency.

And bosses looking at the party during mechanics is not uncommon. It's strange that you would think it's a mismanagement thing. How do you hit them reliably in the mechanics I mentioned without TN? You might be able to greed one or two but if the sequence lasts around 15-20s, then it's simply impossible.

If we're going with the idea that positionals can be missed even in optimized environments, then should casts be dropped there as well? Should Swiftcast be removed for non-raise spells? No, because the entire point of both is to strive to have 100% uptime.

The more you're used to a fight, the less you should drop either of these. Besides annoying RNG, there should always be a way.

I liked it how in P3S, careful tank positioning would take care of that for the Shiva AoEs before the add phase, for instance.