Positionals

[Gruntler]

True north and positionals should be scrapped entirely.

the devs consistantly dumb down and simplify jobs in ways that make them even more dull and boring yet they insist on keeping te stupid positionals system that is boring and pointless they add nothing to gameplay.

If you do hard content, you know that balancing positioning and use of true north for mechanics and positionals for pushing damage is very much a non-trivial part of gameplay, just as managing instant casts/procs is for caster movement to deal with mechanics.

That's adding to gameplay. That adds to depth in this game's combat.

[Marxam]

If you do hard content, you know that balancing positioning and use of true north for mechanics and positionals for pushing damage is very much a non-trivial part of gameplay, just as managing instant casts/procs is for caster movement to deal with mechanics.

That's adding to gameplay. That adds to depth in this game's combat.

This guy gets it. Removing positionals will lead to bad tanking habits and bad dps habits. You only need to go into to CLL and see people spinning the boss around the entire time they are tanking. Positionals are also required to identify front, flank and rear through UI elements which also helps with strategies that involve boss relative. Positionals NEED to stay because it ADDS to the gameplay. We don't need another dumb decision like removing TP but keeping MP because apparently physical players are incapable of managing their resources? or maybe they want to punish casters more harshly when they die by making their MP 0 but I digress.

[Kolsykol]

Positionals have already been made more forgiving multiple times, at this point it's not a big deal if you miss them occasionally and if you know that it's going to be a thing like in Dohn Mheg then you just save True North for that.

Tanks that don't take it into consideration at all are annoying tho, especially when they jump around in circles spinning the boss 360 but it's very rare.
When it does happen it does make me want to strangle them tho.

I kinda reject the notion that Casters somehow have it easier tho because considering how much movement there is in this game Casters have more to contend with in that regard and their damage is harmed more by it than a missed positional.

[Dogempire]

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

[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.

[IruruCece]

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.

Positionals, even right now, are straight up not hard to land and never have been. They have never been hard to perform beyond whatever stuff SE makes a boss do, and they've even given us extremely handy, omnipresent markers at the boss' feet to let us know if we are or aren't flanking a target. If you position yourself correctly, you will NEVER have to travel very far to switch between positional requirements, even with the current speed we're permanently set to at 80.

The challenge isn't in performing the action, it's in responding correctly to what the encounter is throwing at us. You can say that about every single job in the game. That's where the challenge and depth come from. For BLM, the solution to fights that demand movement that interrupts their DPS cycles is not and should not be "complain on the forums that a fight is hard to cast in and should be changed to suit their job better." What it is, and should always be, is something that a player can work their way through using the tools at their disposal, and a little effort on their part to learn the fight and play better with every attempt. Furthermore, pretending that Monk is unique in player stress just because it's fast ignores the vast array of challenges faced by every other job in the game.

If you don't want to play jobs with positionals, play the jobs without them. There are plenty. I do not want Monk to be more Dragoon-like or more Black Mage-like. I want it to be Monk, and like it or not, positionals are and have always been part of that. The continued lack of interest in playing the job in raids among the community suggests that simplifying the job while once again failing to resolve long-standing issues with its kit was the wrong call to make. The answer to that shouldn't be to make it even easier to play, and if the devs do decide to lean in that direction, then whatever they do come 6.0 needs to be a rework that makes what happened to Machinists look like a minor button cull, while also being liked after the fact.

Until SE proves otherwise, I expect little and less from them in regards to making MNK better, and for me it's staying shelved until that mythical time allegedly approaching us all come 6.0.

[VentVanitas]

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.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand what MNK is and what's actually wrong with it. Their multiple positionals and GCD speed are one of the few things left on the job that still has synergy after SE has stripped it of everything. Asking players to keep track of these things with a less than 2 second GCD isn't counter-intuitive, it's called expecting some level of skill when playing the job and there's nothing wrong with that. IruruCece is right, if you want to remove MNK's only engaging thing it has left, then just play SAM or DRG.

I'm also going to be honest, if you struggle to hit positionals as MNK, it's either because a mechanic is preventing you, or you're simply not good enough. It is not that hard to keep track of once you play the job long enough, especially when it's literally the only thing you have to do on MNK at this point. (As well as the copious amounts of positional mitigation that other melee wish they had, even if Riddle of Earth is bad)

[Kolsykol]

I really want them to just merge the fist stances tho, like why does Ninja have a passive for faster movement speed when they barely have to move at all in their rotation ( they can just sit at the back and only need to hit the side to refresh Huton ).
On a thematic level it makes sense for Monk too.