Positionals

[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.