Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
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.
The concept of artificial difficulty seems lost on a lot of players. Clunky job design where you're battling yourself more than any encounter? Just like get good. Instances with horribly balanced mobs? Again, just get good. Encounters where the camera is a bigger obstacle than mechanics? Why haven't you gotten good yet?