On the Removal of Positionals

[Zerovii]

Seeing some mention that "losing dps out of your control is bad game design" and I want to throw in my 2 gil.

Most =/= all. That is my entire point. If you miss so much as one, you have a dps loss. That is the objective argument you seem to be unable to comprehend. And the point of me bringing it up is that when you objectively lose dps for something not within your control, it is bad design.
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The back-and-forth is rife with miscommunication because an objective fact ("you will lose DPS due to factors out of your control") is being conflated with a subjective judgement ("losing damage in this way is bad game design"). The latter is what's causing this disconnect: what you consider bad game design is considered by others to be a source of engagement. Your view that it is bad game design is obviously a valid one, but please do not treat it as a universally accepted fact.

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A big problem with this game's design direction over the past few expansion is that the devs have overly catered to players' insecurities around not playing perfectly. They keep lowering the bar over time to hide skill differences between players. But that discomfort is important as a stimulus for growth and retains player engagement - if you've mastered everything perfectly then there's no incentive to keep playing. Players want to feel rewarded for their efforts, but it also has to be earned for it to be truly satisfying. It's fine to adjust the skill floor to make jobs more accessible, but don't touch the skill ceiling if you want to retain your players in the long run.

Agreeing with this, and speaking more broadly (not taking aim at anyone in this thread specifically--just something I've noticed over the years) there's often talk about how positionals are supposedly holding back fight design, but I don't think positionals are at fault. I think the blame lies solely with the playerbase and their neurotic desire to execute everything perfectly. We could have a fight where the average person is only able to hit 50% of their positionals, and it would be totally fine as long as the DPS check properly accounts for this. But the problem is we have too many players--casual and hardcore alike--who get upset when they're forced into situations where they can't do 100% of their damage. We got full melee uptime fights in Endwalker because people couldn't handle forced disconnects. Fights with dynamic timelines (like O7S) are a no-go because people were complaining about Dada vs Biblio opener uptime differences. Look at E4S and P8S - both are fights with TWO (2) potential timelines, yet people still complained. And fight design is not the only aspect of the game that suffers from this; just look at the state of some jobs today.

Even though Dawntrail is a step in the right direction, the fight designers will always be held back by their need to appease the players that get mad and try to argue it's 'bad game design' when their perfectionist tendencies are challenged. Removing positionals is not going to change this. I fully believe the devs are capable of creating interesting fights/mechanics/jobs/whatever as Dawntrail is beginning to show us, but until the playerbase gets over their need to be 100% optimal in everything, there's no chance in hell we are going to see the full potential of what devs can offer.

Deleted and reposted as I forgot to include the quotes, my mistake.

[Eudyptes]

The back-and-forth is rife with miscommunication because an objective fact ("you will lose DPS due to factors out of your control") is being conflated with a subjective judgement ("losing damage in this way is bad game design"). The latter is what's causing this disconnect: what you consider bad game design is considered by others to be a source of engagement. Your view that it is bad game design is obviously a valid one, but please do not treat it as a universally accepted fact.

It IS bad game design. It is an objectively negative impact on performance outside of the player's control.

However, whether you like said bad game design or not, or just don't care about it is entirely subjective.

[W00by]

It IS bad game design. It is an objectively negative impact on performance outside of the player's control.

However, whether you like said bad game design or not, or just don't care about it is entirely subjective.

This take might make sense if positionals were ever "outside the player's control," as you insinuate. But this is not the case -- far from it. Positionals are almost entirely within the hands of the melee player (excepting when tanks are actively griefing, which I don't think should factor into optimized job design, since in an "optimal" environment where you're trying to hit literally every single positional, you wouldn't play with a griefing tank anyway).

Take, for example, Reaper. I'm gonna throw myself and all the other Reaper players under the bus here and just come out and say it; that job basically does not have positionals. If you hate positionals but REALLY wanna play a melee, play Reaper. I mean, sure, the positionals are there. But you have so much control over when you do them that they might as well not be. You do one every 10 seconds or so, and that assumes you're doing them on cooldown, which you are by no means forced to do. If you get 50 Soul gauge and can't hit a positional right then and there, you could always just...wait. You can wait by continuing your combo, or refreshing Shadow of Death. You can wait by using Enshroud, which has no positional requirements. You can wait by holding onto a charge of Soul Slice until you know you're gonna be able to hit that positional. You can save up 100 gauge so you can True North and hit 2 positionals in a row, which buys you another 20s without having to do positionals.

The only time you MUST do positionals on Reaper is after Gluttony, when you have two in a row. But even then, I'm gonna share the cheat code: just True North it. Literally. Just True North every Gluttony. I had this habit so ingrained into me during Endwalker that I sometimes still True North Gluttony on WALL BOSSES that literally don't have positionals. If you just True North every single Gluttony and use the techniques mentioned above to delay and manipulate all other positionals, then you will only miss positionals in the extreme upper echelons of the game, literally the hardest fights in existence. And even then, you might miss, like. ONE Gibbet. It's not gonna break the bank. And you can optimize even more if you actually plan True Norths well. Even in an unoptimized environment, if you miss a positional on Reaper, either your tank is playing Instant Transmission DBZ DDR with the boss, or you could have done something better.

Now, that's one melee, but what about the job I main now, which is Viper? That job has incredibly high positional frequency. There's an alternating one at the end of every combo, and Dreadwinder has two that follow it, with double weaves no less! Surely it is often just impossible to hit positionals on that job! Well, no, not really. Because, again, you have ample resources that allow you to manipulate when and where you do positionals. You can use Uncoiled Fury stacks to delay positional casts. You can Reawaken with one of your odd minute casts to have about 12s of no positional requirements. You can progress your combo until you're on a positional hit, then start Dreadwinder, True North, and do both Dreadwinder positionals AND your combo finisher positional under a single True North. Using techniques like this, along with Slither to move to people that are in position if I'm not fast enough, I can almost always avoid missing positionals.

And, guess what? Even in situations where hitting positionals IS prohibitively difficult, like Dawntrail EX2 where the boss is facing the player for an extended period of time, positionals are within your control. Because the question flips on its head. The question is no longer "How do I hit all of my positionals?"

Instead, it is "How do I miss as few positionals as possible here?"

If you play the fight well leading up to phases like that, you can enter with two True North stacks and whatever tools your job has to delay positionals. You can time these True Norths as well as possible to cover as many positional casts as you can, and squeeeeeeze into uncomfortable places to try just a liiiittle harder to hit that positional, and use your job's tools if it has any to do just a LITTLE better each pull. Or, if you know the boss is gonna turn at a certain time (which is easy to notice if you do fights repeatedly in a game with scripted fights like this--they almost never turn completely randomly), try to delay positionals from that spot or plan to have a True North up there. If you do it perfectly and you're on a flexible job, you can often get through these phases without missing any positionals at all, even when you thought it was impossible before. And, if you miss one or two, hey! At least you hit as many as you could, by working a little harder. And some jobs are more flexible than others, true - Dragoon has less tools than jobs like Reaper or Viper do. But if you want that flexibility, hey, just play Reaper.

Thinking the positionals are out of your control indicates that you aren't at a level where you're really engaging with them. And that's fine! None of the techniques I've mentioned are required to clear even the hardest content, like Savage raids and Ultimate fights. The game isn't balanced around everyone being at the highest level, and it's honestly great that there's so many ways to enjoy this game. But to call it objectively bad game design based on a misunderstanding like this demonstrates that maybe you shouldn't be talking about the mechanic. You are assuming that every player should be at the ceiling of their job at all times. But this is not the case -- in fact, next to NO ONE is ever at the apex of their job, there's almost always something that could have been done slightly better. You need to realize that part of the joy is getting as close to the ceiling as possible, not assuming that we are entitled to it. They say the joy is in the journey, after all.