"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.

[Post]

Tanks are the least affected of all roles by healers not healing in 99 of 100 cases, even less than healers.

Other jobs dropping mechanics on them doesn't seem to be role related, as all roles are equally affected by this. Except, you know, tanks again are least affected, having more passive health and defense, and extra mitigation tools that they can throw at this. In fact, tanks have stacked mechanics historically in e.g. Zurvan EX or even some Ultimates using their invulns to make the fight easier.

As for other tanks not swapping correctly, you have a point there, but at least Shirk invalidates this once every so often so long as the other tank remembered to put their stance on. And they're in the same party as you.

Anyways, side point to the thread, just thought it was worth mentioning.

I think friction between players comes with the territory of being an MMO and is OK. I would prefer FFXIV take a page out of hard games like Celeste where they make failure very, very quick to recover from and try again instead of just give the players the expectation they will never fail.

Things like refreshing cooldowns on reset or shortening dungeon wipe-runs back to boss help this, as do things like making bosses have less HP and shorter periods of downtime if the mechanics the boss uses don't require most players to stop dealing damage as this resorts in quicker fights (both to complete AND fail and retry) overall.

Positionals are a cool thing unique to FFXIV's battle system and I think it would be a shame to see them go. I think it's odd they were always associated with MNK and yet they're largely gone from MNK (I think DRG had more as a % of total actions in EW) while a new job has em all over again. Of course this would lead to friction between players that wanted it to be something it's not, on both sides now that it might get changed.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

If they added a cool floating text/SFX to hitting a positional correctly I bet way less people would dislike them

[Neoyoshi]

Positional damage has always been there for people who wish to maximize damage output and is always going to require the whole entire party/group to plan and optimize accordingly. it's not there for casual or even normal gameplay, and folk can comfortably complete content without it; it's meant for content that requires high skill gameplay, and probably at most then it's likely not even that necessary if groups can play well, hit mechanics and avoid damage down penalties.

They either need to decide to just leave positionals alone and let players decide how to make use of them, or outright remove them and stop beating around the bush.

[Engaru]

Remove positionals, problem solved. It's an outdated system that should have been removed years ago and, hopefully, be replaced with something more interesting.

[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.

[Mikey_R]

Remove positionals, problem solved. It's an outdated system that should have been removed years ago and, hopefully, be replaced with something more interesting.

Why is it outdated?

What would you propose instead that fills the same niche? Considering most enjoy positionals as it is an extra layer you have to think about when positioning whilst dodging AoEs.

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.

We try and keep the boss as static as possible so that melees can have an easier time hitting positionals, this is teamplay. Though I would be curious as to your reasoning as to why it is boring.

You don't need a boss to spin or jump to make positionals more interesting, that can be done via fight mechanics.

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.

That is an issue with fight mechanics, not positionals. Also, Neo Ex-Death is a wall boss, should all bosses be wall bosses as that is how the best designed ones are?

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!

Again, this is fight mechanics. Tanks have wanted more control over boss positioning for many years now. This doesn't impact positionals though.

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.

Boss's failing to move has nothing to do with positionals. It would, infact, make positionals more interesting. It also isn't fair to compare everything to BA/DSR when everything has no positional requirement, so tanks don't have to take this into consideration when positioning. Again, melee's will enjoy dancing around mechanics to hit those positionals.

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.

Doesn't stop positionals from being a thing.

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.

Should we get rid of cast times as we have Swiftcast o deal with them?

[Ramiee]

Remove positionals, problem solved. It's an outdated system that should have been removed years ago and, hopefully, be replaced with something more interesting.

I've heard this so many times yet I've never heard why positionals are outdated and what the theoretical more interesting system that could replace it is.

[Engaru]

I've heard this so many times yet I've never heard why positionals are outdated and what the theoretical more interesting system that could replace it is.

Outdated because they don't do anything anymore aside from slightly increasing the potency of ONE skill in your core rotation. They used to interact with other skills but that has been long gone now. Moving slightly left or right around the bosses hitbox for a marginal damage increase is not something I would consider exciting, not to mention you can ignore all that a lot of the time by using true north, which could be removed if positionals weren't a thing, alleviating the oh so terrible button bloat.

Something more interesting could be, for one, giving more jobs DoTs to keep up, or more OGCDs to compensate for the potency loss, or more proc based skills similar to what dancer has. They could experiment with giving classes more varied uses of their job resource, like giving samurai something besides shinten spam or giving paladins the ability to use their resource offensively.