What are your unrealistic expectations for the upcoming Combat Live Letter?

[Lyth]

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This recommendation has actually been rejected several times before (in this expansion alone) on the DPS subforum, where melee players who are directly engaged with the topic provide feedback. Just because you've tried to slide in the idea here doesn't mean that melee players are silently on board with removing positionals.

I think if you go out of your way to suggest detrimental changes to role that you don't play, then people in turn will be less sympathetic when it comes to your own concerns about healer gameplay. This is a basic courtesy.

It's already been explained to you why splitting melee dps into a two tier system of 'positional' and 'non-positional' jobs is a bad idea. Saying that you will find 'an alternative mechanic' to replace it without it having proof of concept is meaningless. All this does is recreate the Caster situation, where you have a split between 'low-effort' jobs that do less damage and 'high-effort' jobs that do more damage. You are removing gameplay mechanics without having something tangible to offer in return. This is what leads to the progressive simplification of jobs that we've been seeing.

I get that you've exhausted any and all interest in the healer topic, and unfortunately have to look elsewhere to engagement farm. That's fine, but please do it for roles that are looking for fixes, not ones that are happy with the current design (or at least have expressed that they want to see more positionals brought back rather than less). I'm sure that you have wonderful ideas to offer Physical Ranged and Casters instead.

[rawker]

Sometimes, reverting to a previous build, building over that one, and making improvements is the better approach. Currently, SMN is just so bare that you don't get anything new other than an ability swap for the most part. One might argue that BLM is just like that.. At some point yes, Fire and Blizzard swapping to Paradox, etc but you have to do something in order to achieve that.. EW SMN, there is no thought process, just pressing it when available. Should they have stayed with the old Egis and expanded on their strengths and improved on its weaknesses, then we could've had a great SMN that doesn't need to cramp all of its abilities every 2 mins.

[Supersnow845]

This recommendation has been rejected several times before on the DPS subforum, where melee players who are directly engaged with the topic provide feedback. Just because you've tried to slide in the idea here doesn't mean that melee players are silently on board with removing positionals.

I think if you go out of your way to suggest detrimental changes to role that you don't play, then people in turn will be less sympathetic when it comes to your own concerns about healer gameplay. This is a basic courtesy.

It's already been explained to you why splitting melee dps into a two tier system of 'positional' and 'non-positional' jobs is a bad idea. Saying that you will find 'an alternative mechanic' to replace it without it having proof of concept is meaningless. All this does is recreate the Caster situation, where you have a split between 'low-effort' jobs that do less damage and 'high-effort' jobs that do more damage.

I get that you've exhausted any and all interest in the healer topic, and now have to look elsewhere to engagement farm. That's fine, but go do it for roles that are looking for fixes, not ones that are happy with the current design. I'm sure that you have wonderful ideas to offer Physical Ranged and Casters as well.

Once again you have this weird absolutely unassailable belief that your word is law when it comes to melee. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t just so…………..dismissive for literally zero reason. Do you see me going on to any comment you make in the other forums going “acshooly sweaty nobody wants to hear your opinion karma farm on a different forum”. I would say this weird “courtesy trade” you are hammering on about would be valid if you didn’t freely espouse your opinions on the other roles without caring what their mains say, how many times have you argued with me about healers or goatofwar about tanks, aren’t you not providing us with this weird courtesy trade by your own definition

Because as you’ve seen from this forum alone your idea of detrimental changes other poepe like and it’s not just me, you can “if you don’t like positionals you aren’t a real melee main” all you like but there are melee mains who don’t like them and other people who don’t main melee who don’t like them (just as there are mains and non mains who do like them) you’ve got to let go of this “only my opinion on the subject matters”

You have provided exactly zero evidence that a sub role system wouldn’t work (which let me remind you I didn’t even suggest), all I’m saying is if you have a quarter of the games total jobs you dint need them to have all the same feature just because they are melee and because you happen to like positionals

[Lyth]

Again, we've had the positional topic come up in the DPS subforum a few times. This is not new, and it gets batted away fairly readily by people who are active in providing job feedback for melee - feel free to read through it. If anything, players have been asking for a return to more positionals rather than less. The response is much the same as when you had one or two people advocating for healers having 'less of a dps focus' than they already do. You can't ignore it, because the developers occasionally cherry pick singular threads for things like Kaiten removal and then are surprised that people are upset over the change. At the same time, it becomes tiring to keep re-explaining why an idea is bad, especially if the person in question hasn't made any attempt to understand the situation and gain some firsthand experience before weighing in on it.

The reason why a subrole split is bad is because it ends up being turned into a justification for dps discrepencies. Ideally, DPS subroles themselves shouldn't have a significant amount of dps discrepency, but that's another story. When the entire role is focused on doing damage, splitting the role into two categories that provide different amounts of dps is a bad idea. Why invest your time into a job that is underpowered? At the same time, players chafe at the idea of putting more effort to do the same amount of damage. And that does happen when you unilaterally remove a gameplay mechanic but have nothing to offer in return.

[sindriiisgaming]

Normal dungeons go back to arr levels of hard and actual brainpower is required (healers using esuna and tanks needing mitigation and smart pulling) resulting in mass leavers and wipes because goddddddd this game is so boring rn

[Asdif_Laoeg]

For the Healers:

All the oGCD Healings will change to GCD (some maybee with MP costs) with the exception of 1 or 2 (like Benediction and the Fairy Healing Abilities). With this simple change the Healer Experience should change vom 1,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1 to something better. And they would not need to change all the combat encounters with this change.

Easy Healer Gameplay improvement.

[Reinha]

This recommendation has actually been rejected several times before (in this expansion alone) on the DPS subforum, where melee players who are directly engaged with the topic provide feedback. Just because you've tried to slide in the idea here doesn't mean that melee players are silently on board with removing positionals.

The dps subforum is a dead forum that represents a minority among the official forum users, which in itself is a minority of the player base. Not to mention that many long time players have been banned from posting in here because of some completely irrelevant topics they dared to participate in. I'm a melee main who did savage this expansion and just like Supersnow I would like to have one (1) melee job without positionals.

[Valence]

If you really want to play a job that requires melee uptime but doesn't require positionals, tanks are always an option, especially as tank gameplay around positioning and mitigation becomes progressively more vestigial. As it is tanks, healers, and casters have been steadily losing their defining gameplay mechanics on the basis of trying to engage players who have zero interest in actually playing those roles. We don't need to add melee to that mix, and you will get community pushback for this on a much larger scale than you saw with Kaiten.

What kind of logic is that?

"If you want to play melee without positionals, just go play that role that obviously has core issues, has its (different) identity and role being diluted or slowly lost, and you'll have fun with it"

What's next, "if you want to play a support caster dps, go play a healer" ?

Duty finder will never matter as long as it's tied to the story, normal bosses barely have a design, it's more like a target dummy and no kind of rework or job design changes will have any effect on basement floor difficulty that only demands players do the bare minimum to clear.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be some changes, I'm sure healers could use with some more dps buttons to not die from boredom but you will absolutely never have to use your entire kit if the encounter simply has negative challenges in it.
I wish they would up the difficulty for normals and dungeons but they won't.
Not sure what fflogs has to do with positionls, the extra dps may just be a reward but the way it affects your gameplay goes beyond something numerical, I can very clearly tell when a melee is doing positionals and when they are not even trying just by the way they move or the extra greed risks they take in some encounters.

DF encounter difficulty is a red herring. I used to enjoy it as chill content when jobs were still fun to play.

But I know your mileage may vary, I know some people that just play for encounters and couldn't care less about job design. In fact, I do suspect it's a majority of the population those days, and SE knows it.

I think that it's a serious mistake to cater job design to people who are currently ambivalent to it. You drive away the core audience, and everyone else remains ambivalent. That's a contributing factor to a lot of the progressive simplifications that we're seeing across roles.

Contributing to this are bad actors who have no interest in the role but are out looking for personal gain. When Abyssos was released, all we heard from that tier about was how Casters 'should do more dps' because of the hitbox sizes and wall fights without positionals. This is where most of the push to remove postionals comes from. It's pretty obvious what their follow-up to this will be.

Likewise, a tiered system of 'sub-subroles' into BLM and non-BLM was probably the worst design decision to hit Caster DPS. Jobs in a subrole should have parity with each other at minimum, which in turn places some constraints in the design and types of gameplay challenges. If you remove those challenges, then that balance gets called into question. So if DRG post-rework is suddenly without positionals and comes with widespread simplifications and button loss as 'Dawntrail's SMN', does that mean that we suddenly create an 'unwanted tier' of melee DPS? At least SMN had Raise.

Unless players step in to defend their role and vocalize that these ideas are unwanted and unwelcome, the devs assume that players in the role want these simplifications and we end up with the likes of auto-healing tanks that don't manage positioning, casters that don't cast, and healers that aren't needed to heal while being restricted to one-button Broil rotations. A 'platformer without pitfalls'.

If you want people to be sympathetic to healer issues, then you have to offer a degree of mutual consideration to preserving roles that others care about in return. This is just the tip of the iceburg. Removing positionals will definitely come with significant backlash, at least after the fact.

While I'll never forgive SE for deleting old MCH in order to bring a non proc rphys into the role, the reason I'll not forgive is because it alienated all the actual players that played the actual job before. However, I wouldn't have been against them introducing a procless rphys into the role, for example it could have been the brand new one, DNC.

For the same reason, I don't see the problem at all with introducing a positional-less melee DPS role as long as it's Viper and not a DRG rework for instance. DRG has positionals and probably needs to retain them for similar reasons than MCH should have. If the problem is it makes Viper easier, then there is other leverages to use, notably rotational complexity, since damage output is probably a bad solution like we have seen for the SMN rework.

[Nighthawky2010]

-As an RDM main, please don't have another melee added to the combo....yeesh.
-Let IMPACT mimic the Jolt as far as rotation cast times go.
-Would like to see VerWater, VerQuake, and VerBlizzard. Something new besides verThunder & verAero on both single & AOE rotation.

-SMN: add more primals to the rotation.
-Bring back SHADOWFLARE

MCH: add some landmines
-Add some better than shotgun.

[Lyth]

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You'll need to define what you mean by 'rotational complexity.'

New jobs are always subject to scrutiny. I'm not sure if you recall RPR's launch, but it was widely described as having 'minimal positionals' and 'mechanically easy'. All melee jobs have seen a progressive reduction in positional counts over time, with most jobs averaging at about one positional every 5 GCDs or so. RPR is the same as most of the others, except that the positional counts are less evenly distributed, such that you might have three positionals in a row followed by some downtime. This in conjunction with TN gave players the perception that there were fewer positionals overall. From a rotational standpoint it does have some very unique features, especially around the setup of Double/Triple Enshroud, with set entry points into burst depending on your Death's Design timer. But you'd never know this looking at the job from the outside.

At launch, it was universally derided, and suffered a series of iterative nerfs through to Abyssos, all on the basis that it was 'less challenging to optimize'. Do you really think that releasing melee that actually lacks positionals on the basis of 'theoretical rotational complexity' is going to fare any better? No way.

If you want to play a sword job without positionals, then PLD, DRK, and GNB are all options. This is the first time that we're getting a standard longsword job on melee after waiting for 10 years, with dual wielding no less. It would be really nice if they could get this right the first time. In particular, I want to see them err on the side of unusually difficult, rather than going the RPR route and producing a job that everyone dismisses from the outset. I want to see higher than average positional counts, higher baseline speed, higher weave counts, more intricate combos, and more nuanced movement actions.

If not, I suppose I'll just have to wait for them to bring out an Thunder God Cid-inspired greatsword spellblade to get a proper sword job on melee.