RIP Ninja

[Allyrion]

im trying to figure out how you missed that this is about POSITIONALS.

As much as I hate to support the completely no-positional side, the analogy is completely valid.
Positionals give bonus potency just like Combos do.
Missing a positional means you lose damage just like messing up a combo order would.


Any added positionals would be something you're expected to hit, and SE will damage our balance around it.
So it's not just some icing on the cake damage, though it'd be nice if they add potency bonuses to what we currently have.

Right now, there are 3 MDPS classes:

The Monk, which requires so many positionals per minute I wouldn't even know how to accurately quantify it other than a loose guess of 18 positionals per minute making the assumption of 3 out of every 5 abilities per 10 seconds is a positional, which is likely not correct but seems good enough for the purposes of debate.

The Dragoon, which requires a mere 5 positionals per minute (3 heavy thrusts and 2 impulse drives per minute).

And Ninja, which requires a mere one positional per minute. It happens to be the largest pass/fail positional in the entire game at the present, though the only positional we know that will be close to it in pass fail is the Warrior's perfect parry, interestingly enough.

When you examine this, people who love positionals already have a class in the MDPS archetype. People who are okay with, but don't enjoy too many, have the Dragoon. People who hate positionals but want a melee DPS class have the Ninja if they can begrudgingly accept a mere one.

You are basically telling anyone who hates positionals but loves melee DPS to play RDPS classes, which many people do not enjoy.

I covered this before.
Monks use around 28 positionals per minute. They have a ~2s gcd and all of their weaponskills are positionals except for Touch of Death which is refreshed every 30 seconds.
Hence 28.

DRG has 5, and NIN has 1.
I still don't see this as balanced though since MNK is so much higher than the rest.
It's already favoring a lack of positionals.
It shouldn't be about who likes positionals and who doesn't. It should be an even scale about how much you can handle them.
I also think it's like casters dealing with standing in place, everyone has a certain amount of mobility but still have to watch consider their movement to some extent.

That said, I understand some play NIN because it has no positionals.
Maybe it should've been added on to DRG more, but I really think they did this simply because they want positionals to be part of the nature of melee as much as standing still is the nature of ranged.
They added WM to BRD for this reason, and positionals to NIN for this.
So 1 positional per minute was never really going to fly, if that's their intended design.

I'm not going to repeat why I think NIN makes more sense to have positionals(yes, even non-rear positionals) than, at least, DRG.
But I do understand the sentiment that there's going to be backlash between changing the dynamic.
Then again, we don't know how many new positionals we're getting, so we'll see what that dynamic happens to be after.