While i think melee design would suffer alot for it, fight design would improve without needing to take melee positioning into account for every fight, at least imo
Existence of Melee Positionals never stood in the way of any mechanic or fight design being developed. Square already creates encounters/monsters/fights/areas where they don't care if you can or need to land any, most or all your Positionals. Think P2S (which is an extremely boring fight)or any wall boss of which most to me are extremely boring with the exception of P10S in EW. Players are incentivised to manage their True North charges on-top of a tiny layer of depth towards weaving it properly during busy moments and encouraging optional movement without forcing developers to make every fight have mechanic vomit at any difficulty.Removing anything from Jobs does not translate to Square promising Better/Unique/Engaging Monsters-Bosses-Encounters-Raids-etc. Positional removal also does not make Square promise us that its going to be replaced with anything more engaging Job-wise or have more depth ( like with pretty much everything else they cull/rework from Jobs ). It just adds another thing to the list towards what they done to have made XIV simplified and streamlined which to me is terrible.
- Are they hard to Land? technically No
- Does it take effort to land them all perfectly all the time? Yes
- Will its removal make the game easier? Yes
- Even if removed, are better mechanics Promised due to it? Definitely No...
If I wanted to throw skills at the boss from whatever angle? I have that choice already that's called " Don't play DPS Melee ". Though I know some Parsers would be happy to have it removed. Read this many a times on the Balance Discord, this mindset towards removing anything getting in the way of a perfect parse ( players included )
" B-But I miss my pwositionals cause the bwoss always wotates wandomly wuining my perwfect pwarse run, whaa "
Or just don't do them. Which is what 90% of randoms do. But in saying that, I never do high-end, so grain of salt with the parsing crowd. I'm not saying removing them is some galaxy brain play. I'm saying that most people dont do them and don't care. And since none of them are tied to anything anymore, they exist only to make that crowd excited because number went up. So it really doesn't matter anymore.Existence of Melee Positionals never stood in the way of any mechanic or fight design being developed. Square already creates encounters/monsters/fights/areas where they don't care if you can or need to land any, most or all your Positionals. Think P2S (which is an extremely boring fight)or any wall boss of which most to me are extremely boring with the exception of P10S in EW. Players are incentivised to manage their True North charges on-top of a tiny layer of depth towards weaving it properly during busy moments and encouraging optional movement without forcing developers to make every fight have mechanic vomit at any difficulty.Removing anything from Jobs does not translate to Square promising Better/Unique/Engaging Monsters-Bosses-Encounters-Raids-etc. Positional removal also does not make Square promise us that its going to be replaced with anything more engaging Job-wise or have more depth ( like with pretty much everything else they cull/rework from Jobs ). It just adds another thing to the list towards what they done to have made XIV simplified and streamlined which to me is terrible.
- Are they hard to Land? technically No
- Does it take effort to land them all perfectly all the time? Yes
- Will its removal make the game easier? Yes
- Even if removed, are better mechanics Promised due to it? Definitely No...
If I wanted to throw skills at the boss from whatever angle? I have that choice already that's called " Don't play DPS Melee ". Though I know some Parsers would be happy to have it removed. Read this many a times on the Balance Discord, this mindset towards removing anything getting in the way of a perfect parse ( players included )
" B-But I miss my pwositionals cause the bwoss always wotates wandomly wuining my perwfect pwarse run, whaa "
Features not being utilized happens enough with other skills as well at all difficulty levels. Think Legsweep/Addle/Feint/Bloodbath/Secondwind etc, yet I don't find that a good basis to just outright remove everything.Or just don't do them. Which is what 90% of randoms do. But in saying that, I never do high-end, so grain of salt with the parsing crowd. I'm not saying removing them is some galaxy brain play. I'm saying that most people dont do them and don't care. And since none of them are tied to anything anymore, they exist only to make that crowd excited because number went up. So it really doesn't matter anymore.
Job-Depth is not limited to High-End it applies to all PvE combat as optionality i.e its not required to do it all as most in XIV's content has no enrages, but there is a desire in players to go beyond what is required. Party complimenting each-others performances for making a Dungeon go fast? Hey, that's that Job-Depth kicking in and proper rotation, utilizing features even as mundane as positionals all adding up ( cause content is braindead and get me the f-outta-here asap xD ) Or we can advocate for people to do less and less making both the content and the gameplay duller then a 1 button Job rotation... I'm sure we don't have those yet.
XIV's Skill-Floor being beneath the Floor is w/e vs the Skill-Ceiling dropping of Jobs left, right and centre. It's not a galaxy brain play? But I rather draw the line at " Somewhere " vs " Nowhere " when it comes to more and more and more simplifications, if that makes sense. Cause Square has had a good track record of removing a lot of features? and not giving us any depth back, making the gameplay extremely shallow. Would love to see Square change that in Dawntrail or any expansion or patch... but hey, lets remove more things amirite
I don't see flank and rear as depth. Especially since they keep making it completely meaningless. If my combos broke like they used to sure, but it doesn't, so again, it's completely useless. It's just there, so some parsing moron can feel special.Features not being utilized happens enough with other skills as well at all difficulty levels. Think Legsweep/Addle/Feint/Bloodbath/Secondwind etc, yet I don't find that a good basis to just outright remove everything.
Job-Depth is not limited to High-End it applies to all PvE combat as optionality i.e its not required to do it all as most in XIV's content has no enrages, but there is a desire in players to go beyond what is required. Party complimenting each-others performances for making a Dungeon go fast? Hey, that's that Job-Depth kicking in and proper rotation, utilizing features even as mundane as positionals all adding up ( cause content is braindead and get me the f-outta-here asap xD ) Or we can advocate for people to do less and less making both the content and the gameplay duller then a 1 button Job rotation... I'm sure we don't have those yet.
XIV's Skill-Floor being beneath the Floor is w/e vs the Skill-Ceiling dropping of Jobs left, right and centre. It's not a galaxy brain play? But I rather draw the line at " Somewhere " vs " Nowhere " when it comes to more and more and more simplifications, if that makes sense. Cause Square has had a good track record of removing a lot of features? and not giving us any depth back, making the gameplay extremely shallow. Would love to see Square change that in Dawntrail or any expansion or patch... but hey, lets remove more things amirite
I agree with what you are saying in principle, the fact that more content ignores positionals than stuff that cares about it and even when they do make you do it when you can’t ignore it with true north the potency gain is tiny but still if they removed positionals it still reduces the skill ceiling for no benefit
I’ll take functional illusion of complexity (even if it’s something as simple as phlegma being melee range for example) over no complexity at all at this point which shows how low my standards for the combat system are
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