Positionals

[LeonKeyh]

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.

I've admittedly only leveled MNK to 80 then set it aside, but I only remember Back and Flank positional requirements which, if you're close to the transition area, 1.5 seconds is more than enough to move between. Also, even a MNK not hitting positionals or hitting positionals sporadically would do good DPS. The fact that there are so many positionals give them a higher skill ceiling which is great for players that are looking for a complex melee class.

Also, the MNK rotation may be a little complex, but it was fairly easy to get into a rhythm with the positionals and it _feels good_. You brought up Dragoon and that has something that I would like to see with MNK though. MNK has very little visual indicators on whether or not you're actually hitting positionals (bigger numbers, if you know what the numbers should be). Whereas Dragoon has 1 ability that I'd love to see at least on MNK; Raiden Thrust. It replaces the combo starter with a slightly higher potency ability if you hit your positionals. It'd be great to see something like that because it's a nice visual indicator that pops up and says "Good job!" Having Dragon Kick replacing Bootshine with another ability if you hit the positional would be more interesting than the current Leaden Fist (double Bootshine potency) at the very least.

Maybe it's just me though