On the Removal of Positionals

[Galvuu]

I feel like the healer strike was proof that what's on these forums and reddit means nothing to the actual player base. In game it's just as it's always been, with tanks typically being the most in need role, healers second, and the occasional rare dps in need for alliance raids. PF seems to be in the same boat in my experience.

Completely off-topic, but healer has been the most scarce role in both EU DCs in the pf since Abyssos. It's not even close. Even if you go ingame right now and check, it's always healers missing on 9/10 parties.
AIN doesn't actually reflect the numbers on the queue either (not gonna derail the topic to explain how that thing actually works, but the short version is that if a single party needs a tank, it stops there and slaps tank as AIN even if 20 need a healer or dps).

[Eudyptes]

I can't speak for EU, just my own data center in NA. Healers have never been any more scarce than tank roles in general. You tend to get ebb and flows for which of the two is in more demand, but healer is my second most played role and generally speaking it's the one waiting longer in DF and filled up first in PF of those two specific roles. But not by crazy amounts or anything.

[CKNovel]

I can't speak for EU, just my own data center in NA. Healers have never been any more scarce than tank roles in general. You tend to get ebb and flows for which of the two is in more demand, but healer is my second most played role and generally speaking it's the one waiting longer in DF and filled up first in PF of those two specific roles. But not by crazy amounts or anything.

On EU Healers are scarced, in PF it's very difficult to fill the healer spot and the physical ranged spot.
It's been also mentioned in Japanese datacenter when Abyssos released. If I remember well they called it the "drought of the green river" or something similar.

[Mikey_R]

that's about it, that's why I don't main melees in serious content.

So you weren't a main target for my comparison, which is fine. You don't care about positionals, so, in theory, you don't care whether they stay or go, just more visual/audio feedback would be nice.

The problem with your analysis is that it's trying to paint people in a bad light by immediately labeling them with "a lack of skill" (your words), and an inability to cope with failure (missing a positional) as soon as they don't like them. Moreso, the vibe that this actually gave me is that you're trying to go for the overused "players with limited skill trying to lower the ceiling because they can't accept that they're not performing at the top otherwise". Don't get me wrong, I'm sure those exist (I actually have a certain someone from those very forums in mind...), but painting everybody that doesn't like positionals into that category feels a little bit insulting.

I do admit, skill wasn't the best word to use, but I used it in lieu of a better word to describe what I was trying to articulate. However, I never said that they couldn't cope with failure. I sad they put too much emphasis on how much positionals affect damage and, as a result, they think the are doing much worse than they actually are. So, they want to make the game easier, take away that bit of extra thought, just to satisfy that need. And yes, I am using the old, 'players with limited skills etc.' as that is what it is. It is players blaming the game for their own lack of ability rather than looking to improve themselves.

However, what other group of people are there? The ones that just don't like them for no reason? Should we listen to them? I don't like Dancer, should you listen to me about changing Dancer? Should be obvious, that is an absurd notion. However, you don't try and say what other categories I might have missed? If I am missing something or someone, I need to know. They might have something to say, but we also need to keep in mind what jobs they do and don't play. No point listening to someone who has no intention of playing a melee at all.

There is a surprising amount of nuance when it comes to taking feedback, so the more information provided, the better it can be assessed.

[silentwindfr]

I do admit, skill wasn't the best word to use, but I used it in lieu of a better word to describe what I was trying to articulate. However, I never said that they couldn't cope with failure. I sad they put too much emphasis on how much positionals affect damage and, as a result, they think the are doing much worse than they actually are. So, they want to make the game easier, take away that bit of extra thought, just to satisfy that need. And yes, I am using the old, 'players with limited skills etc.' as that is what it is. It is players blaming the game for their own lack of ability rather than looking to improve themselves.

However, what other group of people are there? The ones that just don't like them for no reason? Should we listen to them? I don't like Dancer, should you listen to me about changing Dancer? Should be obvious, that is an absurd notion. However, you don't try and say what other categories I might have missed? If I am missing something or someone, I need to know. They might have something to say, but we also need to keep in mind what jobs they do and don't play. No point listening to someone who has no intention of playing a melee at all.

There is a surprising amount of nuance when it comes to taking feedback, so the more information provided, the better it can be assessed.

honestly i don't like how positional is a thing for every melee dps job....what define the melee dps job is not positional. some of them don't even make sense actually, a sam attacking in the back? a monk trying to get the hit on the side or the back only? that the point that bother me. identity and diversity of each job.... positional at this date feel forced on the job and for some don't bring anything really interesting. do it make the job harder? honestly, not really. do it bring anything interesting to the job? clearly not.... do it's fun? nope... it's a mechanic that feel outdated for many job.

with the removal of positional of most of the skill or the fact that more and more boss don't need to care about positional it's question the utility of the mechanic. like i have said i'm advocating that positional must be the identity of a job... not of a role. it's like saying every dps must have dot... make no sense. like this they can focus on more diverse gameplay and develop stuff that will be really different and make every melee job really have them own identity.

[Mikey_R]

honestly i don't like how positional is a thing for every melee dps job....what define the melee dps job is not positional. ...

With most people who do want positionals to stay, they also reflect the sentiment that there should be a range of positional requirements, including none at all.

We understand that some do not like them, so we are happy to have a job that has no positionals. However, the caveat there should be that, for those of us that do, we should have a job that caters to that need, then filling out the spectrum between with the rest. Since we have 6, we could even split it between 2 heavy positional, 2 in the middle and 2 with none.

Just to look at it from the other side, the ones who want positionals gone tend to want them gone on every job, they don't want the compromise, which tends to be why there is such a hard wall as resistance for getting rid of them completely.

[Eudyptes]

It is players blaming the game for their own lack of ability rather than looking to improve themselves.

However, what other group of people are there? The ones that just don't like them for no reason? Should we listen to them? I don't like Dancer, should you listen to me about changing Dancer? Should be obvious, that is an absurd notion. However, you don't try and say what other categories I might have missed? If I am missing something or someone, I need to know. They might have something to say, but we also need to keep in mind what jobs they do and don't play. No point listening to someone who has no intention of playing a melee at all.

So here's the thing, anyone who says positionals aren't fun are equally as valid as those who say it is fun. On this point it's moot. So when asking whether they should exist it comes down to more logical reasoning. I've mentioned before in this thread that it's really not a skill issue anymore. Any melee who is good enough to get the rotation down is more than good enough to hit positionals. However, no matter how good you are there are many mechanics that make it actually impossible to hit positionals, and many more than make it possible but not fully predictable to hit them (i.e. you know a boss is about to turn to cast something, but not which specific direction). I also have to wonder how often while bosses/you are moving and you are cutting it close how often latency causes the snapshot to be not quite on the proper position. TN isn't this almighty savior skill either. It helps, but it's still limited. I mean look at the 3rd raid boss right now. He spends more time with half his hit box out of bounds for longer than you can TN (and as far as I could tell he doesn't have the new ring, though the 4th boss does when doing a similar thing). Not to mention all the other general movement mechanics. I actually really feel like he highlights the issues with positionals very well.

To me it's just nonsense to lose damage for no reason when by rights you shouldn't. Or worse, because you are otherwise doing the fight properly. I've yet to hear a good reason why that should even be the case. the "best" argument is that "you don't lose that much so it's not that big a deal". Ok, well then if it's not that much it shouldn't be that big a deal if it's gone either. But I also think that many people who want positionals want much of the older versions and mechanics as well, which do make it a big deal, and that bigger dps loss is why SE has been redicing and removing them periodically, so that melee can keep up in more mechanically advanced fights.

[Lyth]

I think that it's important for fights to always offer a degree of skill expression. One of the unique features of melee gameplay is your spatial dependance on the boss' position. On ranged jobs, the only thing that matters is your character's physical position. In a melee job, what matters is your relative position to the boss. So fights become less a temporal sequence of button inputs and you have to think in more visuospatial terms. That's central to the fun.

Positionals expand on this further. It's a similar case to where boss AoEs limit your access to part of the hitbox - the game designers are placing a further constraint on which spatial locations you can attack from. In turn, this may make you adjust the timing of your positionals, or make decisions around burning off a TN use. As you progress through the fight, you refine this further. This is especially important to keep raid progression enjoyable. You could be waiting on someone else to get a mechanic down, but you still have little things that you can improve on in every pull. I'd actually argue that perfect setups where you don't have to miss positionals or lose uptime are less interesting, because there's always that split second extra that you could refine on the timing to get even an extra auto off. If thinking about this sort of gameplay decision doesn't excite you, then you're probably not a melee enjoyer. And that's okay.

There are probably a lot of people who like the idea of being melee in theory but don't like the effort involved. That's fine, there's a job out there for everyone. If you want to play a more-laid back melee range job with high survivability, self-healing, and no positionals, play tank. If you want to relax and not worry about your spatial position relative to the boss, there are plenty of ranged options. If you want to take your time and really think about your next action more deliberately, then you can play a caster job. There are jobs that play at above 50 APM. There are also jobs that play at less than 30. There's something for everyone.

I think this idea of catering every role and every job for every player is a bad idea, because you end up with an insipid game experience that is tolerable for everyone but fun for no-one.

[AddictedToWitches]

My opinion on positionals for a while has just been to remove them.
Back in ARR, there was no true north, and DRG used to HAVE to hit their positionals to continue their combos, then they changed that.
When true north was added, it felt like a bandaid fix for an existing huge problem. I recall when they got rid of TP, and then got rid of enmity management for DPS, I feel like positionals should be the next thing to go for the game.
The thing is, fights just become a lot more fun and less stressful without positionals. P2S is one of my favorite savage fights in the game because the boss has 0 positional requirements, and when a boss has 0 positional requirements you can actually do some cool stuff with boss mechanics.
It's just an archaic system at this point. There are ways to make melee jobs more technical without needing positionals, hell many melee jobs are still very technical even if you ignore their positionals entirely.
Though, in my honest opinion, if we want a compromise, just fold all positionals into counting for both flank AND rear, but not front. Encourages DPS to stay behind. Maybe add more cleaving autos to bosses again! That'd be fun.

[Burningskull]

IMO Positionals just allow people that do them to feel they are better than people who don't do them even tho you could probably clear everything outside of MAYBE Ultimate's without doing them. Granted I don't do Ex Trials or Savage Raids but I haven't gone out of my way to do positionals on a melee since Shadowbringers and we always clear Dungeons, Trials, 24 mans and 8 mans just fine. Besides 50% of those are omni direcitonal bosses anyway and if you are using True North (which I don't even have on my crossbar, yes I'm bad sue me) then what's the point of even having them if there are just band-aids everywhere for them?