Positionals

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

You hit as many positionals as you are able, if you are unable to hit the rear/flank for any reason, you can use True North, that's what its for. If True North isn't up and you can't hit the rear/flank, that's cool, just try get it next time, missing a few positionals isn't the end of the world.

You are suggesting they remove an entire gameplay element because it's mildly inconvenient to you, but for me and a lot of players who actually enjoy melee, they are what really make the difference between a good player and a great player, I see plenty of melee ignore positionals as it is, the game would only stand to lose from their removal, they wouldn't add anything in its place, so it would just make the melee less engaging because now I can just stand there stringing my combo along without any thought whatsoever, having to reposition for my attacks adds depth to the role.

Also in big pulls, there are no positionals, you mostly just clump as many enemies together as you can so they can hit everything, melee can stand in AoE during big pulls and heal it off with bloodbath if necessary.

[Satarn]

Yes as a tank main and with tank changes in 5.0 the vast majority are terrible and can't even use mitigators let alone position the boss for melee so thats also a huge problem.

Removing any remotely difficult mechanics from tanks just because the lowest common denominator can't handle them, is the exact reason why tanking in 5.0 is such an unengaging garbage. You barely need to position as it is with all the teleporting and auto-facing bosses and you would like to dumb it down even further?
Lowering the skill requirement for tanks yet again isn't going to make the general playerbase any better - they will just drop to whatever new bare minimum you set, just like how plenty of tanks keep failing now, despite tanking being so much easier in SHB than ever before.

What's worse, you'd like to make tanking easier by taking away a mechanic from melee DPS. Making sure you can dodge everything while hitting positionals is part of melee optimization, just like keeping your melee uptime. Sure, there are some fights in which it might be sometimes impossible despite using tools and the tank positioning well, but that's on devs to design fights better(btw teleporting and locking bosses in place to "help" tanks is actually making it worse) and honestly losing melee uptime entirely due to fight's design is usually more likely than missing positionals. Does that mean all attacks should become ranged then?

Also it's funny how you bring up a dungeon boss, as if missing positionals was even remotely close to making or breaking a fight in casual content. Missing a couple isn't even going to matter whatsoever in savage.

[CKNovel]

[...]Ff14 is based around dodging aoes[...] Take the second boss in dohn mheg for example. [...] positionals in a game that clearly doesn't support it [...]. As a caster I can slam everyone and everything from any angle but melee [...] In big pulls [...] Please get rid of positionals, they're garbage.[...]

Yes, officer. This one, right here.

Dungeon content is not designed for optimal play but more for fun and learning at your own pace.
Plus, in "big pulls" as you say, you have AoE combo that doesn't have positionnals. And if you mono-target combo in a big pull, I'm calling the police.
Plus, you have this neat action called True North that allows you to strike from any positionnal and getting the highest potency.
Plus, you are talking about dungeon content. You can easily take an AoE or two and survive. You even have Bloodbath to get some healing during "big pulls". MCH has to stand in some AoE due to Flamethrower requiring the player to not move at all. And your healer won't even have to care about you.

This is a git gud situation. No offense, but you lack experience in content and using dungeon content as an example for removing positionnals is like removing a rule in football because juniors struggles with it.
I never heard of that so far, you can imagine if we would balance sports based on juniors experience, it would be absolute chaos.

The game supports very well positionnals, it's just that (no offense, again) yourself can't support it.

[ItMe]

Dungeon content is not designed for optimal play but more for fun and learning at your own pace.
[...]
This is a git gud situation.

Most definitely.
Like, the necromancer and water-boy minibosses have def helped me step up my tank game as far as practicing keeping-the-bosses-ass-pointed-at-the-DPS is concerned.

[Payadopa]

You hit as many positionals as you are able, if you are unable to hit the rear/flank for any reason, you can use True North, that's what its for. If True North isn't up and you can't hit the rear/flank, that's cool, just try get it next time, missing a few positionals isn't the end of the world.

Yep. I see it as something I can strive for to do better. Please don't make the combat more boring. I mean, what would change if you aren't using your positionals correctly? The boss takes a few minutes longer. Who cares.

I propose, everyone who wants something removed must also add something the achieve cosmic balance. lol

[george357]

why not leave markers for the jobs that uses this so they know the best point of attack meaning they only see the markers meaning left and right flanks or rear as applyede.

[Satarn]

why not leave markers for the jobs that uses this so they know the best point of attack meaning they only see the markers meaning left and right flanks or rear as applyede.

The targeting circle already does that though. The open part of the marker is the back, front is the arrow and a bit around it, what's left is the flanks. Omni-directional enemies(all positionals apply regardless of side), like bosses stuck outside the arena or mobs in Eureka/Deep Dungeons have a simple, full circle with no arrow to mark them as such. You don't even have to be outside of the circle to hit positionals(or stay "in front" as a tank), as long as you're on the right side within the target circle.

[Fendred]

Positionals worked back in 2.0 because the bosses were designed with the limitations of the melee jobs in mind. This unfortunately made things very bland, so they gave up on that design relatively quickly as we went into Heavensward. The hardest hit by this is the monk due to its speed and omnipresent directional requirements.

Even within the raiding community, their own combat metrics websites like FFLogs show that the least played jobs among raiders are monk, black mage, and bard. The melee jobs most common among the raiders are the two most straight forward with the least directional requirements: Samurai and Dragoon. This is the same even after the monk rework.

Being fast and having omnipresent directional requirements means the monk will always lose damage the second the boss moves. This isn't the same for other melee jobs. On top of which, the speed at which it attacks assures more missed damage. Boosting monk's overall damage to compensate will just make them incredibly swingy.

Given how people seem to fair okay with samurai and dragoon, I'd say directionals should be limited to two per class at most. Something like ninja probably doesn't need them as it already has mudras to reward/punish the player.

The positionals are one of the aspects of playing a melee dps that makes it fun. Some people like thinking about creative ways to stay within boss attack range and adjusting for the boss turning, and tanking is also more fun because you can think of ways to make it so that the boss turns as little as possible.

That being said, I wouldn't be opposed to a melee dps that doesn't have positionals since I'll always be an advocate for offering a healthy range of jobs with varying degrees of difficulty to optimize. coughs in Shadowbringers Healer changes

Well, yes. However, too much of that is not good, and the person still needs to be able to reposition themselves before the ability is up for use again. Most people complaining about directionals are coming from the perspective of the monk, who even after the rework is one of the least played jobs.

[IruruCece]

The most directional requirements a job should have is at best two.

Hard disagree. Play jobs with fewer positionals if you don't like them. They already exist within the game, and Monk, much less ANY OTHER JOB IN ANY OTHER ROLE, does not need to conform to a set template like this. If Monk becomes "Dragoon, but PUNCHES", then they may as well delete the job at that point.

We've already seen that homogenization of the tank and healer roles has not resulted in better job design overall, nor has oversimplification changes some of the very basic issues people have when playing with others in this game: some folks are just bad at their roles. But just because a bad griefer of a tank moves the boss all over the place like a jerk, or the boss moves on their own, doesn't mean that positionals need to go or be reduced. Just like how the solution to healing being a challenge shouldn't have been to strip away so much of each healer's flavor (so those things could potentially find their way back into the game with Mobile Healer Gundam Funnels).

A major flaw with your FFLogs parse numbers argument is that we've already seen that giving players the means to ignore positionals for a solid minute, on command, didn't change Monk's population for an appreciable amount of time. We already know that turning GL into a trait hasn't made more people put in more parses into FFLogs than Samurai, Ninja, Dragoon, OR Black Mage. We also know that when Monk WAS outparsing other melee DPS earlier into ShB, that wasn't changing the population either.

Monk's problems go far, far beyond being asked to move to the left or right of a target sweet spot behind a boss in order to land positionals. Over-simplification, specifically to appeal to people who do not want to engage with the game's mechanics, much less the individual mechanics of the job they're playing, is not and never will be the best solution for this. If you're going to use the numbers of parses to justify changing something about a job, why are BLM's more or less as is? Fewer people are playing them, right? Why not overhaul them, make them more like, I dunno, Red Mage! Why are SMNs complaining about anything? Thousands more raiding SMNs are putting up their parses over most other jobs in the game!

[Fendred]

Hard disagree. Play jobs with fewer positionals if you don't like them. They already exist within the game, and Monk, much less ANY OTHER JOB IN ANY OTHER ROLE, does not need to conform to a set template like this. If Monk becomes "Dragoon, but PUNCHES", then they may as well delete the job at that point.

We've already seen that homogenization of the tank and healer roles has not resulted in better job design overall, nor has oversimplification changes some of the very basic issues people have when playing with others in this game: some folks are just bad at their roles. But just because a bad griefer of a tank moves the boss all over the place like a jerk, or the boss moves on their own, doesn't mean that positionals need to go or be reduced. Just like how the solution to healing being a challenge shouldn't have been to strip away so much of each healer's flavor (so those things could potentially find their way back into the game with Mobile Healer Gundam Funnels).

A major flaw with your FFLogs parse numbers argument is that we've already seen that giving players the means to ignore positionals for a solid minute, on command, didn't change Monk's population for an appreciable amount of time. We already know that turning GL into a trait hasn't made more people put in more parses into FFLogs than Samurai, Ninja, Dragoon, OR Black Mage. We also know that when Monk WAS outparsing other melee DPS earlier into ShB, that wasn't changing the population either.

Monk's problems go far, far beyond being asked to move to the left or right of a target sweet spot behind a boss in order to land positionals. Over-simplification, specifically to appeal to people who do not want to engage with the game's mechanics, much less the individual mechanics of the job they're playing, is not and never will be the best solution for this. If you're going to use the numbers of parses to justify changing something about a job, why are BLM's more or less as is? Fewer people are playing them, right? Why not overhaul them, make them more like, I dunno, Red Mage! Why are SMNs complaining about anything? Thousands more raiding SMNs are putting up their parses over most other jobs in the game!

My point in the above post is that monk having omnipresent directional requirements and a massive haste buff is counter intuitive. Given their speed, they're already losing dps from having a shorter window to reposition and keep track of their buffs. So adding yet another button, which adds yet another buff to keep track of on top of all that, does nothing to dismiss the issue whatsoever. It just exacerbate the issue.

Dragoon works because its a single long rotation, so at some point you just know what to press. Samurai is about building up burst DPS. Monk's key feature is being fast, so lessening the number of positional requirements does not detract from the job's character. It just makes it more balanced with the other melee dps. Otherwise, what is SE going to do? The only thing left besides eliminating positional requirements would be buffing its raw damage through the roof so that it matches the performance of other melee in hard content, and make it an utter god in all casual content.

Edit: Another perspective is that its the speed of the monk that weighs more negatively on the job, because each button press represents a decision, an expenditure of mental resources, from the player. So the monk has to perform more button presses than a dragoon or samurai to achieve the same result. Forcing directionals on top of that just adds more human resource consumption to each button press. So it wears out players faster, and then performance degrades. It's a significant issue in FFXIV because of how long some boss fights take.