"Positionals Are Bad Because Other Players Can Impact Them"

[Amh_Wilzuun]

In a game where you resolve most mechanics by moving around and positioning, it’s crazy that people don’t think positionals don’t fit into the game naturally

[kashi11]

Or, because the game is highly based on movement and proper positioning it fits perfectly. Should we remove cast times because the game requires lots of movement?

No.

We have things like swift casts and instant casts for free movement.

Melees have True North to deal with these situations and ranged skills or skills. Rotations can be adjusted, new starts can be created, tanks can have an extra layer of efficiency to help their melees maintain uptime (pointing the rear/flank change point towards the safespot during a stack for instance) etc.

Positionals add more to the game and not just for melee DPS themselves.

Edit: sorry I misread your comment. But I agree with you and my points above should help explain the situation to those that disagree with us.

[Taranok]

In a game where you resolve most mechanics by moving around and positioning, it’s crazy that people don’t think positionals don’t fit into the game naturally

Eh, not that crazy. If we think about it from a design perspective, as well as community pressure, we can see 2 specific and core problems created from positionals.

1, the community attempts to keep the boss centered and static as much as possible. This is boring as sin for a whole host of reasons, I won't get into it. 2, the devs know that players want to be able to hit positionals, and so start to design bosses that are less likely to turn, jump, spin, or otherwise make it unduly hard to nail positionals.

A secondary consideration is that the devs forgot that they can do things like melee outs and jump the boss around. You don't see fights like neo exdeath anymore, and it represents one of the best-designed fights in the game, all without positionals.

More to the point, in a game where movement and positioning matters for hitting the boss, bosses are remarkably static in FFXIV. Rarely turned, rarely jumped, rarely moved. Most of the time they're kept in the middle of the arena facing north. Wow, riveting boss and strategy design. For the few times that a boss is moved, such as P5S, well, true north exists. Then it's back to middle facing north for ye!

Frankly, I blame the playerbase's lack of imagination for failing to understand just how mobile bosses can be when melee positionals don't exist. Even things like Shiva's party cleave could start coming back, or wall bosses that leave and come back to the arena on a different spot. Hell, the best fights in my mind come from BA or DRS, where there are 0 positionals. And they tend to have decently mobile bosses with mandatory downtime. Be it running around the boss or just dragging the boss to new safe spots.

The fun thing about this style of design is, when the boss is mobile, you can actually make mechanics that are harder for melee or phys-ranged (range-based baiting) while turret casters can just happily sit still until a mechanic that challenges them more specifically shows up later, giving better fight design and pacing as well. Case in point, neo exdeath leaving the arena and coming back across it.

My personal stance is, was, and will continue to be that: When you start adding mechanisms for ignoring or maintaining a given mechanic, you should seriously consider removing that mechanic. As soon as true north was added to melee DPS, the entire concept of positionals should have just been deleted. Bar space that can be used for literally anything else.