Will they ever add melee DPS without positional attacks?

[Zojha]

The concept of artificial difficulty seems lost on a lot of players.

Well, the game "could" just play itself. Everything that you have to actually do as player is just artificial difficulty and tedium.

I see the term as more of a buzzword, truth be told. Like, boss mechanics? They're just clunky encounter designs where you're jumping around the arena more than playing your class. Totally artificial difficulty.

The actual questions are: Is it engaging? Is it interesting? Is it fun? All of them are subjective.

The way I see it, positionals are a decent enough class mechanic in trinity combat design where bosses focus their attacks on the tank and therefore only move as much as the tank himself. It's not much, it's not particularly interesting, but it's "something" to breathe some engagement into trinity design. A lot of class designs exist just for the purpose of making the trinity not boring by making you "fight against your own class".

The further you stray away from the trinity, via attacks that flat out ignore the tank and bosses that fly and jump around the arena and bombard it with all kinds of AoEs and mechanics, the more these things become superfluous and frustrating. You got other things to focus on and you'll miss a lot of positionals through no fault of your own, or lose your Enochian, stacks, or whatever due to jumps, invuln phases or plain movement.

That said, they might actually add a melee without positionals at some point. I wouldn't even preclude that they get rid of positionals altogether if their encounters become even less trinity-like, because then positionals will become more and more detrimental. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

[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.

[AlexRaines]

Its funny how people say "go play warrior" (and also getting lot of likes too). Either they are trolling or.... dunno what else to say?

I get it, lot of people like the positional gameplay... but do we really need to have it in every single melee DPS job?? People who like positional attacks on melee already have lots of job to chose from...

Honestly, without positional, melee dps is really boring. I was actually amazed when I started playing a ranged dps because there are so many more mechanics that they have to deal with than melee does. As an example, in ifrit ultimate, the ranged have to position the eruptions in the right places while maintaining their damage output. Melee during that phase need to keep attacking things.

This is actually pretty widespread throughout so many fights. While positional can be annoying, they actually allow melee to do something rather than simply standing behind the boss the entire time hitting the same rotation over and over again.

[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.

[Aloy]

That's not really troll.
This is because Warrior has always be known as being the dps-like tank.
That's all.

I know that Warrior has more DPS than other Tanks, but I cannot have the role of dps as a warrior.. I cannot que for dungeon or raid as Warrior DPS...

[Aloy]

Personally I find it boring hitting a bosses backside throughout the whole fight, the Positional thing is ridiculous in this game.

I mean it's just not epic in any shape or form, oh look I'm hitting the bosses big ol'l butt for the next 10 minutes!

You must confuse FFXIV with wow... in FFXIV you cannot stay in boss butt for 10 minutes.. with all the mechanics and avoid you have to do... So your scenario that you stand still for 10 minutes in the boss butt is either imagination or from another game... but even in that case, you know.... no one stops you from moving to flank... if that makes you feel..... better

[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