Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Given this, I'd like to ask four quick questions:
  1. What do you like about positionals, if anything?

  2. What do you dislike about positionals, if anything?

  3. Might there be a way to mitigate what you dislike without diminishing what you like or increase what you like without adding onto or introducing things you'd likely dislike?

  4. View the quick A/B or A/B/C comparisons below for Monk, Dragoon, and Samurai. Which among those choices do you prefer?
1: Like you, I preferred the increased activity of Monk on a moment to moment basis. Positionals played a role in that, as did the OGCDs we had and lost over the expansions. A shame that they got recycled into animations I still don't get to see unless I sync down.

2: Similarly, I didn't like missing them due to mechanics out of my control. At the same time, I'm sure Black Mages don't like being forced to interrupt a cast due to mechanics outside of their control. Like Monks, they have some means to deal with that. More than Monk does by 90, if I understand correctly.

3: The thing is, SE already introduced something to ALL melee jobs to help ignore positionals, it's just that for Monk this was far more meaningful as we had so many. This, in addition to RoE, meant that we could ignore them for a considerable amount of time in Shadowbringers. Probably too much, but for me these WERE the 'leniency' mechanics you discuss later in your post.

4: My only real interest here is in Monk and Samurai, so forgive me if I don't address the Dragoon here. Maybe I ought to give it another whirl this time around.

Of your Monk options, I would choose a modified C. All positionals restored, ignore the whiners, they have other jobs that cater to them as is. The real kicker is to remove True North from the game as a whole, boost positional potencies for all jobs that have them to serve as an actual reward for landing them. I think players need to be forced to accept that they can't always land everything at all times, but that it is something worth striving for, rather than something we can math out to say proudly that we ignore 99 percent of the time because the damage increase outside of Bootshine isn't significant enough.

RoE is our leniency mechanic, Monk uses this to maintain optimal dps on the boss at the risk of eating boss mechanics. Risk vs. Reward, choosing safety or going all-in when necessary offers greater engagement to a boss encounter for EVERYONE in the group. How far can we push things to the razor's edge before failing or pulling off the kill? How far can we stress available healing resources before it's too much? That sounds legitimately exciting to me, and its the sort of thing that drives players to exploit every possible advantage, to optimize as much as they can.

Finally, introduce something to other jobs with positionals to serve a similar role without necessarily working exactly like RoE does. Maybe there are different conditions involved, maybe it could work like some of the leniency mechanics you discuss, but it should definitely be something that is player controlled. We should decide where and when we want to push, or when we want to play it safe.

With Samurai, I'm still fairly early into leveling it, but it doesn't feel all that different to me from ShB, and that's probably for the best. Option A's fine enough, we'll see how I feel later.