Positionals..

[Picker]

I like positionals, it’s an interesting way to keep melee engaging, otherwise you’re just a caster in melee range. Back when monks had them, the difference between good and bad players was large, and something they could take pride in. Now you just stand at rear and true north snap punch. I guess now that there’s no more hitboxes or tanking it’s become irrelevant

[Brightamethyst]

I like positionals, it’s an interesting way to keep melee engaging, otherwise you’re just a caster in melee range.t

Are positionals actually fun, or do we just not know any better because that's the way it's always been?

Every time the question of positionals comes up I always think about Cleric Stance. Cleric Stance was fun. It put an interesting twist on healing and added a level of complexity and skill. I enjoyed it and was proud of my stance dancing skill. Then Stormblood came, along with the announcement that Cleric Stance was going away. "What!?", we all cried. Wouldn't that make healing super boring? Well, no, as it turns out.* Despite how engaged I was with the system at the time, we've now been without for almost six years and I don't miss it in the slightest.

I feel like positionals are a similar situation, and if removed we'd forget about them and move on almost immediately.

(*Healer DPS did become a kind of boring mess later on, but that was for reasons unrelated to Cleric Stance.)

[Ransu]

Are positionals actually fun, or do we just not know any better because that's the way it's always been?

Every time the question of positionals comes up I always think about Cleric Stance. Cleric Stance was fun. It put an interesting twist on healing and added a level of complexity and skill. I enjoyed it and was proud of my stance dancing skill. Then Stormblood came, along with the announcement that Cleric Stance was going away. "What!?", we all cried. Wouldn't that make healing super boring? Well, no, as it turns out.* Despite how engaged I was with the system at the time, we've now been without for almost six years and I don't miss it in the slightest.

I feel like positionals are a similar situation, and if removed we'd forget about them and move on almost immediately.

(*Healer DPS did become a kind of boring mess later on, but that was for reasons unrelated to Cleric Stance.)

Personally I don't really think they add anything to the game or any rotation. They are just kind of there and more than half the time I'm pressing true north to ignore them anyways which is why I said earlier that I'm kind of indifferent on if they stay or go. I personally don't see what people like about them either. Oooo look I stepped 1 inch to the side and then stepped one inch back to the rear of the circle....woo...

I dunno lol. Its all subjective honestly. Like I view stance dancing in a completely different light than I do positionals.

[Alice9]

I think they are actually fun, personally at least. I agree that it is an easy and simple way to keep melee engaging and unique from other roles. It is something I constantly and consistently have in mind when playing a melee job, and making sure to hit them have never slipped my mind. I enjoy having to think about that little extra aspect when playing melee.

I also feel its pretty easy to test-drive not having positionals, we already have fights and jobs without them. Melee jobs are built with positionals in mind, and in cases of playing melee jobs on bosses without said positionals- I find the gameplay notably less engaging.

I'm not going to pretend that positionals are some sort of amazing gameplay mechanic- but they are engaging at least to the degree that I would definitely not just forget they exist if they were removed. Removing them without adding something in its place would be, in my mind, another rather drastic and unnecessary simplification of the combat system during a period in which we are already experiencing a series of rather unnecessary and pervasive simplifications of gameplay.

[VentVanitas]

I'm just going to parrot what Alice9 has already said because I share their sentiments: positionals aren't necessarily groundbreaking as a gameplay mechanic, but I personally find them fun and it was a small feature that went a long way in making MNK more unique from the other melees prior to EW. Figuring out when it was best to use old Riddle of Earth and True North in fights like E9S and E11S was a tiny extra layer to optimization I enjoyed, even if it wasn't particularly "complex." While I despised ShB Bootshine, (because of how much potency was frontloaded into it) it was satisfying to have actual visible feedback for hitting a positional via Chakra.

The state of job design right now is in a very delicate position, asking for more things to be removed by the same team of developers that have given us a long history already of removing skills/mechanics from jobs whilst replacing them with nothing will only serve to alienate those that enjoyed that particular thing. It would be, in my opinion, better overall if the game was changed to better accommodate positionals by giving us proper feedback (via old ShB Bootshine crit proc, ShB DRG Raiden thrust, or just having a sound/visual tick play when they're landed, etc) for hitting them instead of outright removing them.

[Vinal211]

The state of job design right now is in a very delicate position, asking for more things to be removed by the same team of developers that have given us a long history already of removing skills/mechanics from jobs whilst replacing them with nothing will only serve to alienate those that enjoyed that particular thing. It would be, in my opinion, better overall if the game was changed to better accommodate positionals by giving us proper feedback (via old ShB Bootshine crit proc, ShB DRG Raiden thrust, or just having a sound/visual tick play when they're landed, etc) for hitting them instead of outright removing them.

so giving us something like when we land a combo? because there is a little visual and sound indicator that says you hit the next button in your standard rotation...it is pretty bad though considering you'd have to staring right at your character and turning all other sounds down during a raid...actually why haven't they made that more obvious? nothing incredibly obnoxious, but maybe a semi-loud "ping!" noise that you can hear clearly without, you know...drowning out anything else in a fight.

[Nobuyuki_Sanada]

I wonder if positionals would be more fun if they were not mandatory. So instead of having to change positionals in your normal rotation you can choose which skill to use depending on the situation. So you would either do a 1-2-3 combo or 1-2-4, skill 3 would do more damage from front/back while 4 does more damage from the flank. 3 and 4 both do the same potency so there is no benefit to using one over the other. Leave it up to the boss to force you around the arena and up to the player to use the appropriate skill according to their forced position. This keeps the intended skill check for the role while not making it feel janky by being forced to move even though the enemy is not moving or doing anything to force you to move.

[dspguy]

It doesn't make sense to me that MNK wasn't allowed to keep its positional-heavy gameplay. There are a lot of people who don't like positionals, but there are also a lot of people who do. One of the beauties of FFXIV's job system is choice, so why isn't 1 melee job allowed to be positional-heavy for the players that enjoy that? We should have 1 positional-focused melee job, namely MNK, 2 that have light positional elements, similar to what we have now, and the other 2 have no positionals at all. You can then either remove True North as a role action since not every melee needs it and reintroduce that aspect as specific tools for the ones that do, or just leave it as is and people who play the two without positionals don't need it on their hotbars like how BLM ignores Lucid Dreaming.

By changing other jobs to have less positionals but keeping MNK as heavily-reliant on positionals, they'd have to provide balance due to the more difficult gameplay. If that's more DPS, then other jobs would probably demand positionals back. When it comes to balance, DPS is king. BLM seems to always be at the top DPS-wise due to the difficult nature of maintaining uptime while doing mechanics. If they got rid of cast times entirely, should BLM still be at the top? Then they'd just be a MCH essentially.

[ty_taurus]

By changing other jobs to have less positionals but keeping MNK as heavily-reliant on positionals, they'd have to provide balance due to the more difficult gameplay. If that's more DPS, then other jobs would probably demand positionals back. When it comes to balance, DPS is king. BLM seems to always be at the top DPS-wise due to the difficult nature of maintaining uptime while doing mechanics. If they got rid of cast times entirely, should BLM still be at the top? Then they'd just be a MCH essentially.

So what? You have some jobs that are harder to play and have higher highs but lower lows. Others are easier and are more consistent across the community. That's literally the ABCs of class systems.

[Ransu]

Positionals don't add any kind of difficulty to a job... Either way, the person you quoted has a point. The devs want every job to be accessible.