Should they remove positionals at this point?

[zeth07]

This isn't anything new, but the new EX fight (last half) really drives the point home about how hard it can be to properly hit your positionals on a melee class. So much so that the only adjustments made to MNK were in regards to more damage for NOT hitting your positionals and a shorter cooldown on True North, because the difference in doing so was much larger. They clearly acknowledged that it was a problem, in fact the addition of True North itself originally should be the obvious example.

From a learning perspective players have to learn their rotations + fight mechanics and then there's the added degree of difficulty with positionals for the fights with the only benefit being you do more dps. With DPS checks being a thing, with the above changes to MNK, and with the design of these recent boss fights it feels like they are basically accepting the fact that you aren't going to hit positionals every time.

To me this is either bad game design or bad boss/es design. You have a skill set that promotes a higher learning curve that separates good players / bad players, then purposefully design fights that take that a step further and say good luck trying to land them OR here is a fight where you can ignore them entirely. That's really what makes me question why they exist.

I would also say the positionals of the boss are still important to learn, so I don't think it should just be a plain targeting circle even if it no longer applies to player's skills. Not getting hit by a cleave cause you are standing in front of it for example. In fact I wouldn't even mind a slight resign to make the flank more distinct if it stays.

There is also the issue when soloing which isn't hugely important given how easy it is, but you are basically stuck with True North or hoping they just so happen to cast long spells while you just so happen to be on your positional gcd. Prior to the TN cooldown change, you didn't exactly get to do it that often and even now 90 seconds isn't exactly a short amount of time. Thankfully everything dies before you can even go through half your rotation anyway so while the point is valid it is kind of moot at the same time.

Additionally I should bring up Eureka and Deep Dungeon. For whatever design reason they thought it was ok for none of these mobs to require positionals. Why is that? The mobs and bosses are effectively the same mechanically if not easier than usual, so why was it worth it to remove them in this case and not throughout the game? Someone put actual thought into it for a reason.

Given the above, I don't think removing positionals would make the those jobs "boring" because:

1) Hard fights are mechanic heavy and either make it nearly impossible to maintain full uptime + positionals anyway OR remove the need for them entirely given the nature of the boss.
2) You don't even effectively use them half the time when soloing.
3) They are removed from content where it doesn't even matter anyway.

The benefit of having them is:

1) Making a job slightly harder / more in-depth to play.
2) Allowing a distinction between bad, good, great players (which I think they were trying to get away from anyway, thus the changes)

[Transient_Shadow]

the same could be said for cast times with fights and heavy dance mechanics. I'm not an expert on melee classes but I have a feeling that positionals balance things out with how mobile and fast acting melee dps are.

[Nora_of_Mira]

Additionally I should bring up Eureka and Deep Dungeon. For whatever design reason they thought it was ok for none of these mobs to require positionals. Why is that? The mobs and bosses are effectively the same mechanically if not easier than usual, so why was it worth it to remove them in this case and not throughout the game? Someone put actual thought into it for a reason.

My tinfoil-hat theory is that the possibility of having 144 people attacking the same target is too much for their servers to calculate positioning and the bonuses that apply.

I share the pain in Seiryu Ex bc I run on both SAM and DRG and I just eat the loss of positionals. However, I would still prefer them to stay.

[Cetonis]

Not without some significant changes to melee job kits.

One of the things FFXIV has to contend with, with its highly scripted battles, is the threat of becoming a "rhythm game". That is to say, once the mechanics of a fight are learned, the game should still be more interesting than just pressing a sequence of buttons.

Machinist suffers from this - it has no positional or movement concerns to worry about, and its rotation is a fairly exact 60s script, so once you learn the job any fight that's not mechanically unfamiliar is going to be quite boring to a lot of folk. All you do is press your buttons in order.

Bard is made interesting by demanding that the player manage procs, DoTs, a song cycle, MP, party buff snapshotting, etc. This is all to make up for its lack of fundamental concerns. With casters, it's optimizing movement and also some proc/priority stuff in their kits that creates replayability; with healers it's cast times plus juggling survival and dps; with tanks defensive cooldowns and melee range.

Melee have generally well-determined skill usage - little about their timings or sequencing is random or heavy on priority management - but their gameplay is spiced up by the need to not only be in melee range but also hit some positionals.

Absent positionals playing melee would get very snoozy once familiar with a fight, as we've seen in complaints about O6S. There would need to be a big re-think on melee kit design in order to be able to shed positionals without introducing this problem.

[Brightamethyst]

I don't think positional should go away entirely, but I think they should be downplayed more. Keep it on the finishers (Chaos Thrust, Snap Punch, Aeolian Edge, etc) but remove it from the rest. There are just too many situations where you can't reliably hit everything, even with the now shorter CD on True North (and solo you'll NEVER hit most of them.)

I also think they should disable positionals while solo.

Additionally I should bring up Eureka and Deep Dungeon. For whatever design reason they thought it was ok for none of these mobs to require positionals. Why is that?

Because those are designed around not requiring a tank, and therefor not having guaranteed aggro control.

[ElHeggunte]

Eureka and Deep Dungeon have position-less mobs because it’s expected that you may spend a lot of time solo. Melee, especially Monk, would take a huge hit in performance otherwise.

Edit: Good point about the potential lack of a true tank too.

[Seddrinth]

Disable positionals when solo. That I support 100%. But, no, they should not disable positionals for raid. It separates good players from bad players. Bad players like myself couldn't hack it playing melee so I went ranged. Good players should be rewarded with higher deeps that they deserve.

[Shurrikhan]

Disable positionals when solo. That I support 100%. But, no, they should not disable positionals for raid. It separates good players from bad players. Bad players like myself couldn't hack it playing melee so I went ranged. Good players should be rewarded with higher deeps that they deserve.

I'd offer a slight adjustment to this:

Make positionals easier to pull off when solo. They're already technically doable. I do them consistently. It just looks really stupid because you have to stand some near-infinitesimally small distance from the enemy's center of hitbox, move and instantly strike, repeat. (May be more difficult at higher latencies; my latency is low, as if to compensate for inane packet loss.)

All that needs happen to both smooth positional use in content now that our more flexible skills by which to avoid positioning (Mutilate, Fracture, Touch of Death, etc.) have been removed is to check twice for positionals -- once at queue initiation and once early in the animation -- and take the "best of".
Add to this a more natural turning speed to mobs so they're not spinning like tops, and solo positioning can be fun rather than feeling like an exploit just to get off properly.

Or heck, bring Defense into the equation instead, such that the benefit varies with mob level and perhaps even type. As a side-effect, rampant damage scaling is curtailed a bit, level sync procedures facilitated, cleaves given a natural mechanic for gradual damage reduction (cumulative mitigation across Defense), and so forth.

[Seraphor]

Change True North from a cooldown to an MP/TP cost, and extend its duration a little.
Have it about as costly as spamming AoE attacks. Then its not something thats completely ignored, but bypassing it becomes a mechanic in and of itself

[Burningskull]

As a melee player, I would love for positionals to be gone. I don't see SE doing that sadly.