Will they ever add melee DPS without positional attacks?

[Shiroe]

posionals or not, blm is still the most difficult dps in difficult end raids...

and the most difficult melee are not difficult cause of the positonals, but cause of the rota / timing / aligning of ogcds (Drg and Nin are the "difficult" melees in SB; which both are not as positonal heavy, as the "easier" melees Sam and Mnk are.. , well between Sam and Drg positonals, Drg actually has more, but its not the positonals that make it tricky, they are more predictable than Sams somehow)

imo Sam is probably the easiest melee, just seemed hard, till the community figured out its correct rota / ocgd usage..., mnk imo close 2nd or as "easy", once the positonals are a little bit in the muscle memory

whlie Drg and Nin, the most loved melee are the most difficult in SB.., seems fair .. want a "wanted dps, need to earn it" (imo in HW and ARR, Drg was the easiest melee ... and mnk was the hardest or one of the hardest, because of the positonals back then...the rotas of the others where "simple" compared to SB; when you reach lv 50 mnk and sam might seem hard, but at by the time you reach 60, they wont feel so difficult thx to the positonals routine)

[NotADps]

i don't get why people keep saying ninja is a hard melee...i mean on 3.x w/o a warrior ninja was kinda challenging if there was downtime/disengage mechanics, but now?it only has 1 dot that its now a combo finisher that you only need to do once every 3 combos, dwd is now 60sec cd, we don't need to align 90sec cds with b4b like before. the only kind of hard part is optimizing ninki usage on fights...also about positional, it does make the gameplay of melee harder if you're optimizing, because you're constantly losing damage with every positional you miss, and on endgame fights with bosses mechanics that often force you to even lose uptime, hitting your positionals is very tricky.

[TaiyoShikasu]

You see it as a buzzword 'cause you don't actually know what it means. There is nothing fun, interesting, or engaging about running from point A to point B and back to maximize damage on a target. Those things should come from the job itself and the encounter. If it doesn't make for good quest design, why would it make for good job design?

Casters and ranged have all kinds of things within their job to make them fun, interesting, and/or engaging on top whatever mechanics are being thrown at them as do tanks and healers while melee are shackled with something as unintuitive as positionals which is already a detriment in any solo and overworld content.

[Ryaz]

I don't know... I have a lot more fun with my melee jobs than I do with my casters. Seriously, what does rdm have that makes it fun other than it's jump in/melee chain/jump out (and pray that you don't jump into a boss AoE).

I personally don't find positional tedious or all that difficult to deal with.

And note, I'm not particularly for or against positionals. I just don't find them that big of a deal.

[Grimoire-M]

Personally I could see NIN adopt a DoT juggling/poison stacking playstyle (similar to ARR SMN) to replace its combo abilities. The only reason Gust Slash/Spinning Edge exist in the rotation is to act as filler. You could easily just remove the combo effects from their hotbar, add Mutilate back in on Gust Slash, then put the slashing debuff back on Aeolian Edge while balancing out the numbers and leaving the positional requirements as is. By staggering out the DoT/debuff/buff timers you could encourage a similar behaviour to combos where your DPS dips and spikes in short intervals while freeing the player to make decisions about what to press next at any given moment instead of "1-2-what do I do?" But I understand that kind of gameplay is also harder for new players to catch on to as the free-form nature of it makes it just as easy to screw up when you're unaware of how your kit works.

[Saber44]

I'm baffled that people believe positionals make for engaging melee dps gameplay. Quite a few other games with better combat have melee without positionals and still manage to be far more fun.

I believe myself that complexity in MMO combat should be in the boss mechanics, your rotation (easy to learn, hard to master), situations where your rotation allows you to adapt on the spot for extra damage, lining up dps cooldowns with boss phases where you have max uptime, making full use of all utility and so on. Navigating clunkiness like positionals on a spinning boss or animation locks isn't skill, it's artificial difficulty.

Positionals are just tedious sometimes in regular play too. For example as a ninja questing, you'll never get behind a mob for your finisher so you're always slightly gimped. Or trying to trick attack a SB A-rank while on the hunt deserves a medal if you pull it off more than half the time. These aren't necessary to play the game, but certainly don't make the combat feel smooth in day-to-day gaming.

This guy gets it

[Sylvain]

You can hope the BLU won't
After all, it's a "mage" so perhaps instead of positional it will have a few casted spells like Midare for the SAM.

I agree it'd be nice to have 1 melee without positional. NIN isn't so bad as it only has 2, and one of them is done scarcely.
So technically as long as you're behind, you only need to reposition once every 30s so it's not so bad.

[vVAstrAVv]

They did add melees without positionals. Theyre called tanks and samurai

[Kabooa]

They did add melees without positionals. Theyre called tanks and samurai

You literally lose the equivalent of 60 potency for every positional you don't hit on Samurai.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

They did add melees without positionals. Theyre called tanks and samurai

Missing a positional on Samurai is arguably worse than most other melee, you don't lose potency on the weaponskill, but the kenki you don't generate is roughly a 60 potency loss, ignoring it is pissing away a lot of damage for nothing.

A lot of people underestimate just how much that extra bit of kenki matters to your DPS and think that because its not a flat potency increase, it doesn't matter.