On the Removal of Positionals

[Lyth]

It's worth noting that you do need to have a skill range in the gameplay in order to retain your audience. It's important to have a skill floor that allows entry level players the opportunity to participate. We have that. But you also need a high skill ceiling, to give those players something to aspire to, and incentivize content creation and viewership. It's a bit like watching Ongbal parry-counter Malenia at Lv.1 with a buckler and club without taking damage in Elden Ring. There's only a handful of people who are ever going to be able to emulate that feat, but it gets viewers excited about the game and makes them want to go back and try out the tech under less extreme conditions. It might even get someone who has never played before to try it out. It's a mutualistic relationship between novice and expert players, each motivating the other to keep playing.

It might seem like this sort of thing never existed in FFXIV, but there are a few moments of brilliance when you see someone doing tech that you never thought of. One of my most memorable moments of this game was observing someone else tank A7S under conditions of directional autos (strafe-locking into an interrupt on the heart as the active tank), and it made me go back and re-evaluate how I approached my own tanking in that encounter. But I think we're actively designing these moments out of the game in the name of accessibility. If you remove the skill differential, you lose that ambition to progress as a player. You lose both performer and audience alike.

Positionals are obviously not enough on their own, but it's the intersection with fight design that makes them interesting. I think it especially becomes exciting when you have more random or unpredictable mechanics. I think M2S will be really fun from that standpoint. I also think it'll be interesting to see how more movement heavy fights pan out alongside positional play.

I think they've got the accessibility bit down. What I want to see is them open up fight designs and job designs so that we can really showcase skilled play. Because that's how you really draw people into the game and get them to invest their time. You have to make them want to be better.

[Lorika]

Lyth you made a very interesting post but, it's too bad that a construtive player like you fail to see that postional are in the way of FFXIV evolution.

Most of people wanting positional fail to see that's the SE lazy way of a making a job a little bit busy (not hard, positional aren't hard) and to not brainstorm and search for way more interisting and fun gamepay mechanics.

The game, job and encounter design, are tied down by the positional.

Getting rid or completly reworking the positional will open a lot of possibilities.... People wanting more positional are just holding back FFXIV gameplay evolution.
You need to let go of them for good... They outlived their stay and just are an archaic bad system holding back the game. (and the lazy way out for SE not thinking : "the job is not busy enough what can we do?".... "Well like alwats. Copy-Paste positional code and they will shut up")

[Router]

While I generally like positionals, I think DRG MNK and RPR have legitimately terrible implementations of them. DRG and MNK positionals are just a task to check off a list. You can't really play around them or shift them around based on a mechanic, you simply have to do them when they pop up in the rotation. True North on those two jobs winds up feeling like a punishment. Oh, you're playing DRG and you have to hit a flank positional when the boss is cleaving his sides? Too bad! You have no way to delay that positional or work around it. Press True North, idiot. MNK is pretty similar.
RPR is on the opposite end of the spectrum where the positionals are so few and far between (and easy to move around) that it feels pointless to include them in the first place. I don't think anyone would even notice if positionals were removed from RPR.
The other three are fine though, I think.

[Aco505]

The other three are fine though, I think.

Only RPR and VPR have higher control over them. The other jobs must use them when they come but all of them besides DRG have certain ways of delaying them, particularly during burst.

DRG is the only one that cannot introduce GCDs to delay them when suitable, which is why they added the TN effect to Dragon Sight in EW. They'll likely bring it back for DT, since plenty of JP players are asking for it.

[Ramiee]

While I generally like positionals, I think DRG MNK and RPR have legitimately terrible implementations of them. DRG and MNK positionals are just a task to check off a list. You can't really play around them or shift them around based on a mechanic, you simply have to do them when they pop up in the rotation. True North on those two jobs winds up feeling like a punishment. Oh, you're playing DRG and you have to hit a flank positional when the boss is cleaving his sides? Too bad! You have no way to delay that positional or work around it. Press True North, idiot. MNK is pretty similar.
RPR is on the opposite end of the spectrum where the positionals are so few and far between (and easy to move around) that it feels pointless to include them in the first place. I don't think anyone would even notice if positionals were removed from RPR.
The other three are fine though, I think.

Uhm MNK and SAM have the same system. Most of your damage comes from special moves tied to your filler inputs and under the buff to do your special moves you have free action choice. SAM has to do more positional then MNK in this and they unavoidable, it's way more prevalant on SAM then MNK. MNK probably is the only melee that you can avoid pressing positionals during their burst phases of you want, if any melee does positionals well as a mechanic it's MNK. What you described MNKs positionals as is literally what all melees that aren't MNK have positionals as.

[Router]

Uhm MNK and SAM have the same system. Most of your damage comes from special moves tied to your filler inputs and under the buff to do your special moves you have free action choice. SAM has to do more positional then MNK in this and they unavoidable, it's way more prevalant on SAM then MNK. MNK probably is the only melee that you can avoid pressing positionals during their burst phases of you want, if any melee does positionals well as a mechanic it's MNK. What you described MNKs positionals as is literally what all melees that aren't MNK have positionals as.

Forgive me, for I am not a MNK main, but is it not true that when you have an orb you need to spend that orb? It's not like you can stockpile additional orbs i.e. like with NIN kunai, and MNK certainly doesn't have the ability to occasionally delay or rearrange positional GCDs like SAM can in filler. It's a rigid 1-2-3. Of course MNK even minute burst is mostly just opo spam with few positionals, but that's hardly the entire job.

[Zarkovitch]

Nah, main tanks need to use true north.

[W00by]

Forgive me, for I am not a MNK main, but is it not true that when you have an orb you need to spend that orb? It's not like you can stockpile additional orbs i.e. like with NIN kunai, and MNK certainly doesn't have the ability to occasionally delay or rearrange positional GCDs like SAM can in filler. It's a rigid 1-2-3. Of course MNK even minute burst is mostly just opo spam with few positionals, but that's hardly the entire job.

Piggybacking off of you, NIN and RPR and VPR all don't really do positionals during their burst (optimally anyway). NIN is too busy with Mudras, Ten Chi Jin, and Raiju, I think they do, like, one Aeolian Edge at the very start (sometimes, depending on combo placement)? RPR is enshrouded the entire time, and double Enshroud pushes Gluttony out of Burst this expansion (and even if it didn't #literally just true north gluttony every time RPR doesn't have positionals I promise), and Viper aims to be double reawakened, which, again, helps them avoid positionals every time.

MNK is absolutely not the only melee that can avoid positionals during burst. On the contrary, most of the current job's burst phases seem explicitly built so you DON'T have to do positionals during burst, with MNK, DRG, and SAM being just a little more positional intensive. Still quite manageable though.

That said, I don't think jobs having different positional implementations is bad (spoiler if you haven't read my posts: I'm very pro positionals). All roles should have a spectrum of difficulty and positionals accomplish this nicely. Some have to do positionals a lot during filler, some have to do positionals during burst while others ignore it, and some have to do positionals all the time and require a little bit more careful planning and positioning. But we don't need every job to be the same! It's not a bad thing.

[Zerovii]

If I wanted to not deal with positionals and faceroll into a mob I'm barely looking at I'd go play wow. Let the game have some identity and build around it more than trying to tear down one of the things making it unique.

[Ramiee]

Forgive me, for I am not a MNK main, but is it not true that when you have an orb you need to spend that orb? It's not like you can stockpile additional orbs i.e. like with NIN kunai, and MNK certainly doesn't have the ability to occasionally delay or rearrange positional GCDs like SAM can in filler. It's a rigid 1-2-3. Of course MNK even minute burst is mostly just opo spam with few positionals, but that's hardly the entire job.

The chakra burst is far more open, compared to samurais 55 cd ability. For example if you have no chakras but know that coming up is a bunch of cleaves that make it impossible to do positionals, you could do your positional heavy chakra combo then during the cleave phase do your chakra combo that has no positionals. Compared to SAM where no matter what you have to do a flank or rear it's far more open, if true north didn't exist monk would be the easiest job to do positionals on.