Wish there were melee DPS without positionals

[Theodric_Thorne]

Try SAM. By the time you're level 90, you can sync up your 2 charges of True North with your 2 charges of Meikyo Shisui (the thing that shortens your 3 combos to 3 button presses) and be guaranteed to get positionals off some of the time. And then the rest of the time it won't matter.

Personally I think once they nerfed the potency of positionals they should have removed them, but I suppose they remain so people who have learned to master it on every fight get to squeeze out that last 1% extra damage or whatever the math is. The only thing I've never understood about positionals is why they come in two flavors. If I'm behind someone, aren't I in a more tactically advantageous position than being at their flank? Flanking is better than attacking from the front, but attacking from behind is like...extra flanking, right? I guess I'm an idiot because I don't understand.

[kajv95]

Next expansion: positionals get removed, boss hurtboxes become even bigger yet somehow melee now does even more damage because "they have to work harder to keep uptime guys"

[Supersnow845]

I wish they would doing something like T11 to counter this, you can have enormous hitboxes but you cannot enter the hitbox for any reason and it forces you to rotate around the boss rather than moving through him

Combined with something akin to T11’s mechanics I feel that would be a potential counter to the melee problem that doesn’t involve abusing positionals

[Shurrikhan]

I feel like the "melee problem" is plenty well solved by just...

• Not purposely breaking the mechanics that have existed since 2.0 (by forcing bosses to the edge of the arena without changing them to omni-position while their flanks and rear are hidden, forcibly spinning bosses frequently and without telegraphs, etc.).
• Not granting units ridiculously obese hurt-boxes.
• Not overtuning melee relative to their difficulty (internal and contextual together).

Done.

[Shiroe]

Conversely, do you really think the majority of players feel the need to arbitrarily cap half of all jobs to a lower skill ceiling (and likely, unless repeating the current RDM v. SMN debacle or worse, decreasing their maximum output accordingly)?

the jobs are already kinda devided in easier, (mid) and harder jobs , assume, half the jobs will be considered "easier" and the other half "harder".., or think more easy or more hard jobs would be better? or all the same..
...
it was just an assumption, that jobs in the future, that share gear ,could each one be "easier" und the other be "harder", as it is already kinda the case for a few jobs that share gear

[Shiroe]

Dividing gear set so it fits this easier+harder job is just as arbitrary as any other reason.

feels as if its already happening with some jobs, might continue with the new job that shares gear with Nin.., if Nin is the "harder" job, the new melee dps might actually "not have positionals" (Crosair? kinda mobile for a melee?).
... but if Nin is considered the ",easier", how would the new job be more "difficult".. (hope not by nullifying its positionals., better make a new job without positionals)

.. just random thoughts

[Deo14]

feels as if its already happening with some jobs, might continue with the new job that shares gear with Nin.., if Nin is the "harder" job, the new melee dps might actually "not have positionals" (Crosair? kinda mobile for a melee?).
... but if Nin is considered the ",easier", how would the new job be more "difficult".. (hope not by nullifying its positionals., better make a new job without positionals)

.. just random thoughts

It's still completely arbitrary. Seems that you like the idea of of gear being split into 1 easy and 1 harder job. I like the idea of gear sets being split to 1 melee and 1 ranged job for some interesting variety (imo RPR with caster gear would be more fitting than current maiming). Others might like if it was more thematical, like SAM and MNK. Neither of these views are correct or incorrect. In that case, I think it's better to follow all these ideas and none of them at the same time. There isn't right answer, so it's whatever, maybe if you like SAM, you'll MNK, maybe not, it's dice roll either way.

[CelestiCer]

Positionals are just an integral part of XIV and Melee Jobs. Want a Job without Melee positionals? play anything besides a Melee DPS. Problem solved.

While Endwalker has trivialized positionals, it's essentially our form of Melee Tax. Once we remove positionals, we might as well question why we even deal the damage we do, and why Ranged Tax even exists aside from mastering Melee Range. Once one Melee has to not deal with positionals? I can already see how it's going to be viewed as unfair, and used as an argument point to make all Melee's equal by deleting positionals... I know some parsers that would love this, another thing that would not get in their way of getting a shiny parse.

Anything that has a chance of making our Job/Role gameplay even dumber is something I'm just going to be against. Draw a line somewhere... Job Gameplay is dumb enough as it is. This is also why I don't like to view how Jobs are divided by difficulty, as there should be room to give Jobs more optional complexity. The fact we can constantly keep meme-ing on how SMN is the easiest job at the bottom where it will remain, no possibility to give it any complexity or depth or gameplay improvements... and it not even being viewed as a negative, its rather seen as a fact... there's something wrong about that... call me crazy

[dspguy]

I think positionals will be on the chopping block in 7.0.

Every expansion, the dev team is faced with cutting out a number of buttons off the hotbar to make room for new abilities. Sometimes they don't have to (look, we gave you a trait that changes this ability into a new ability with more damage!) but sometimes they just have to cut out an ability altogether or find some other way to compress what is on our hotbar.

It is quite possible that True North will be removed along with positionals. I also think some of the "guaranteed crit" abilities will be removed and just worked into the ability itself. For example, maybe MCH's Air Anchor and Chain Saw will be guaranteed crits and Drill will have a trait that raises its base crit hit rate to 50% or something. Of course, MCH doesn't have positionals, but it is a way to get rid of a button.

This happens every expansion and it will happen in 7.0. The question is... which abilities will be lost?