What are some things you would be okay with SE dumbing down?

[Shurrikhan]

leveling MNK back in ARR/HW/SB was kinda fun dancing around the boss for those positionals and working out rotation best I could to hit them. The penalty for missing them now is pretty nonexistent (like 20 potency difference

It's 60p, or 69 relative potency, per Monk positional (DF = +15% damage). Monk positionals give a nice bit of extra oomph in Endwalker, actually. It's just still not that impactful compared to other optimizations.

In Shadowbringers those positional potency variances per GCD were a bit less, even in terms of relative potency, but I don't think they were ever as little as 20p? And the potency variance per minute was far, far more, even then. (Hell, Bootshine's positional variance alone would have trumped all of Endwalker's.)

So, they're worth less overall now, yes, but it's not as if only we're getting only some <8.33 ppgcd out of them. They're... relatively trivial, but not quite that pathetic.

MNK's old design (I get some didn't like it; I liked it better than all the Nadi business) was relatively simple, but still engaging because you had to constantly be moving back and forth on the boss's 135, giving it a sense of activity that it would have lacked. The entire reason they did the Nadi system was to make up for the gulf of what removing those positionals created in terms of mental deadtime.

This last bit seems unlikely. Nadi do not reduce the amount of mental deadtime. They merely improve upon the Perfect Balance windows themselves.

At the Fanfest just before Endwalker's release, we had both twice the number of positionals we have now AND the Nadi system atop it. Apparently, they just decided more than a single positional fork per job would be too hard... somehow(?), but that's a wholly separate question and area of impact from Nadi.

__________

Anywho, what I don't get is why we pretend positionals are some massive and job-defining optimization without equally accounting for job variances like stringency of rotational order, punishment for desync / value for salvaging sync, punishment for deaths, the value of rotational adaptations, the value of hitting some skills at the start of each oGCD gap and others at the end of the oGCD gap under this or that GCD sync, etc., etc., all of which likewise influence skill ceiling, and all of which we seem to consider just fine as means of increasing skill ceiling.

For my part, positionals are just a simple, efficient means of adding to skill ceiling at zero cost. Moreover, whereas we can site counterexamples to almost everything else, be they cast times or additional charges or gauge interactions, locating opportunities for higher skill expression also from NOT including those things, that's not the case for positionals. Never is forgoing positionals, in itself, going to have higher cognitive load than their inclusion.

So, unless a job would somehow be so far above the difficulty of any other melee if it also had to deal with positionals that it'd force the most skilled players onto it and/or all other players away from it (which already seems a pretty absurd premise), just keep the value of landing one's positionals reasonable rather than negligible on one hand or overly punishing on the other, and let people bother with them or not as they see fit, just like for any other individual means of optimization.

[ReynTime]

Fishing, mahjong, race chocobo breeding.
They dumbed down the core gameplay a lot already. I don't want any more. Now I only wish for all other metas to be dumbed down too so fishers, mahjong players and racers can suffer along with pve fans.

[Bonoki]

Fishing, mahjong, race chocobo breeding.
They dumbed down the core gameplay a lot already. I don't want any more. Now I only wish for all other metas to be dumbed down too so fishers, mahjong players and racers can suffer along with pve fans.

I honestly wouldn't mind Fishing getting some kind of condensed nerf, but there are a lot of hardcore fishing mains that would be very unhappy for any adjustments that makes getting their hard working achievements easier.

[ThaCa]

Dumbing down?

Party buffs, since they lead to buff stacking meta just delete all of them and have Jobs stand on their own feet.

No more too many buffs problem in Ultimate, no more holding stuff for buff window, all Jobs can finally be greedy.

[Supersnow845]

Dumbing down?

Party buffs, since they lead to buff stacking meta just delete all of them and have Jobs stand on their own feet.

No more too many buffs problem in Ultimate, no more holding stuff for buff window, all Jobs can finally be greedy.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have some buffing classes, AST, DNC and NIN are fine with their buffs but battle litany, arcane crest, chain stagmentation, radiant finale, searing light and embolden are just pointless bloat you stack in the buff window that punishes everyone if anyone drifts

[Rithy255]

passage of arms, no one stands behind me anyway.

[Renalt]

passage of arms, no one stands behind me anyway.

I remember once Passage of Arms was being used and everyone but 1 was where they needed to be. The other thought "I'm the main character" and wanted to Bee's Knees. I said "No you are not" simply by Rescuing them into the Passage of Arms.

[ForsakenRoe]

We see a lot of people, on various forums/reddit/whatever, disparage WOW combat as being 'too simple', yet removing positionals would take us one huge step towards that level of 'simple'. Half the fights don't even ask for positionals because they're wall-bosses, and another couple are 'no-positional' types like P2S. This crusade against positionals is just bizarre to me, and I struggle to read it as anything other than 'I'm bad at this feature of combat, so we should remove it'. Like, I'm bad at DOT management now (thanks to SHB removing them all from healers), but I don't go asking for every DOT to be removed from the game, as I can see the gameplay/optimization depth they can bring to the game. A version of the game that has zero positionals shifts the 'complexity source' to be entirely contingent on the fight, rather than the player's kit. And we've seen from P7S or E7S that SE cannot always make a fight that can carry the 'interesting depth' in place of the kit being made simpler.

Imagine we take this to the absurd level, and made every DPS job have just one button: 'do damage' button. But in response, to keep the complexity level the same, the 'dance' of the Savage fights becomes absolutely insane brutal. That's fine for Savage, but what of lower level content, where you can't have so much complexity? The class will be boring as hell to play in EX roulette, because it's mindless 1 button spam, and nothing there threatens you enough to justify the rotation being 1 button. Having additional optional depth available to the player, eg positionals on melee, alternative rotations like TransposeLines or whatever, etc, allows a player who would normally find that lower skill level of content (like EX roulette) a bit boring, to spice it up by doing these small things

So yeh, I'll just say it: if you want positionals removed, go play WOW

In Shadowbringers those positional potency variances per GCD were a bit less, even in terms of relative potency, but I don't think they were ever as little as 20p?

Aside from the Bootshine crit thing, yes every positional back then was just 20p gained. Effectively, SE rolled the damage bonus of hitting the positionals for any 123 combo on MNK into the final hit, which makes it more punishing to 'miss a positional'. I'm not entirely sure the Nadi thing would make it 'too much' for people, given how many old MNK players still do those 'phantom positionals' out of habit. The few times I play MNK for an EX roulette or whatever, I still do the old positionals. It's burned so deep into the muscle memory that it's actually harder for me to 'not do the positional'

[Theodric]

I honestly don't know how anyone could seriously consider WoW's combat to be 'simple' when comparing it to FFXIV. I wonder if they're even looking at WoW in the present day when they say that.

I play many characters in WoW but my main is a void elf warlock. Why does that matter? Well, for starters one's race choice leads to actual racial abilities. Minor in the grand scheme of things but XIV has no equivalent. I play a destruction warlock in particular. It plays very differently to demonology or affliction. Though at any given time I have three different specs to choose from.

Then you add in talents - which can be adjusted at any time - and that brings further choice to the table. For movement heavy fights I'll invest in burning rush to make my character faster. For fights where my character isn't expected to move as much, I'll swap it out for something else. Then, of course, there's the difference between PvP and PvE to consider.

Though let's not forget the flavour abilities that exist purely to make the game more accommodating to roleplayers or simply for fun. Like the ability to summon an eye of Kilrogg. Or for glyphs to be used to alter the look of certain abilities.

In short, I have a lot more flexibility when I play WoW.

In FFXIV, even if I enjoy a particular job there's no flexibility or flavour to pick from.

What some like to do is point to some mythical group of players who would enforce a specific 'meta' on everybody else as an excuse to not bother with the idea of granting players specific choices to make. In reality, despite actively advertising itself as a 'story driven' game there's a dire lack of individuality or flavour to embrace.

[Lauront]

Faster pace too, thanks to the lower base GCD, and on top of that you have abilities like Time Warp.