No, you're ignoring the context.
The fastest way to change positionals is a straight path perpendicular to the flank/rear boundary line.You were refuting the having to move in archs and that you only need to stay at bosse's corner to move between rear and flank.
I brought up the fact that you do need to move in archs in certain situations such as boss moving around, tank moving around, aoes, and other situations.
If your goal is to maintain a certain distance from the target's center -- that is, to stay on, just inside, or just outside the target ring -- the fastest way to change positionals is a straight line to the nearest rear/flank boundary at your chosen distance. Circling around the enemy requires moving a longer distance.
An arc from point A to point B is longer than a chord from point A to point B by a factor of x/(2sin(x/2)), where x is the central angle between the two points. This follows from the chord length formula a=2Rsin(x/2) where a is the chord length, R is the radius of the circle, and x is the central angle between the two points; and the arc length formula s=xR, where s is the arc length, R is the radius of the circle, and x is the central angle between the two points.
If you have to change positions while avoiding puddles, straight line paths (or paths made of straight line segments) will still be your fastest option except in the case that the puddle is centered on the target and is large enough to obstruct your straight line path.
Your analogy is irrelevant. Hotbars have nothing to do with movement. If you are using standard movement, you move in the direction you're facing. There are many AoEs that you just absolutely cannot dodge while backpedalling, so that's not an option. You have to turn away from the boss to dodge a PBAoE, but using an action on a target requires you to face the target. This means that there are two possible outcomes when you are forced to dodge a large AoE.As for the moving away from aoe in standard movement. Ask a similar question to controller users having to swap around xcross bar to execute skills. It's a matter of skill, some people are able to take advantage of certain settings while overcoming their shortcomings; a foreign concept to you it seems.So either you're racking up avoidable downtime by not attacking or you're taking avoidable damage by not dodging. If you can somehow manage to avoid the PBAoE and maintain uptime, via immaculately timed camera movements, congratulations but:
- You have to stop attacking while you dodge, because you cannot face away to dodge while simultaneously facing the target to hit it with an action.
- You will stop dodging while you attack, because you cannot face the target to hit it with an action while simultaneously facing away to dodge.
It doesn't matter how good you think you are with standard movement. The truth is that even if you can play well with standard movement on, you are making things harder on yourself. The extra effort of trying to reconcile your character's facing so that you don't rack up downtime and you don't take unavoidable damage is unnecessary effort that you would not have to spend energy on if you just used legacy movement, which means you could spend that cognitive effort on something else like mechanics or rotation optimization if you switched to legacy.
Maybe dust off your math books instead.*dusts off his Razer Tartarus Pro*