Removal of Positionals

[Ransu]

No thanks! I'll take positionals over hit and forget oGCDs like old Elixir Field/Tornado Kick because 5.4 MNK was dogwater.

So you like boring and slow combat? Because that is what current mnk is with the majority of its actions being the standard combos as all their oGCD's got moved to the blitz attacks. Moving around with positionals to mask that isn't a good thing. oGCD's are also not "hit and forget." If you feel that way about them then you're not doing proper rotation management and are just mashing buttons.

[Powercow]

Realistically positionals add nothing to the game. Sitting at the corner of the circle and moving 1 inch left or right is not skillful, its not fun and its completely pointless considering whenever there is a mechanic that disrupts the ability to do that we have true north to compensate it making the entire design pointless. If true north didn't exist you would have a point, but as it stands positionals are meaningless and add nothing to the combat which is why I really don't care if they stay or go. They don't add or take away any kind of difficulty, so if they stay then whatever. If they go, nothing changes other than the fact a spot on my hotbar opens up.

So during a combo, you have to hit a button to do additional damage that's in addition to oGCDs and your GCDs, that sometimes require you to know the fight in advance to know to pre-position in case the boss turns or has a mechanic where certain areas are inaccessible, where a skilled player can greed out extra damage if they're willing to be risky and/or knowledgeable.

And that somehow adds nothing to the gameplay? What DOES add gameplay then? Certainly not GCDs or oGCD attacks, certainly not cooldowns. Because those have either the same amount of requirements to use optimally or less. So what's even left at that point? How are positionals not the purest form of actual gameplay? (Meaningful feedback notwithstanding. Make whiffing a positional do less than half of its damage and add a pathetic sound effect and I guarantee people will look at them more favorably as a gameplay mechanic.)

And yeah, remove True North. It was a stupid skill to begin with and it should never have existed.

[Ransu]

So during a combo, you have to hit a button to do additional damage that's in addition to oGCDs and your GCDs, that sometimes require you to know the fight in advance to know to pre-position in case the boss turns or has a mechanic where certain areas are inaccessible, where a skilled player can greed out extra damage if they're willing to be risky and/or knowledgeable.

And that somehow adds nothing to the gameplay? What DOES add gameplay then? Certainly not GCDs or oGCD attacks, certainly not cooldowns. Because those have either the same amount of requirements to use optimally or less. So what's even left at that point? How are positionals not the purest form of actual gameplay? (Meaningful feedback notwithstanding. Make whiffing a positional do less than half of its damage and add a pathetic sound effect and I guarantee people will look at them more favorably as a gameplay mechanic.)

And yeah, remove True North. It was a stupid skill to begin with and it should never have existed.

Here's the problem. Remove true north and now you bring in another problem which is restriction on how the boss can move. There are some fights where a boss essentially goes outside of the arena and you cannot attack the rear or just the entire fact that a boss will randomly spin. This is why true north was added to begin with, so either you keep a boss static and have it basically never move, or you make the ring on the boss change depending on where it is at so that positionals are disabled when they go to an area that a flank/rear attack isn't possible.

So yes, positionals as they are now are beyond pointless, and making changes to make missing positionals more punishing would heavily limit boss fight designs. The better alternative is to remove positionals which allows the team for more creative boss fights. We're already seeing that anyways with a lot of boss fights being full circles and disabling the need for positionals.

I personally see zero positives to positionals. They do not create any form of good engagement.

[ZiraZ]

Here's the problem. Remove true north and now you bring in another problem which is restriction on how the boss can move. There are some fights where a boss essentially goes outside of the arena and you cannot attack the rear or just the entire fact that a boss will randomly spin. This is why true north was added to begin with, so either you keep a boss static and have it basically never move, or you make the ring on the boss change depending on where it is at so that positionals are disabled when they go to an area that a flank/rear attack isn't possible.

So yes, positionals as they are now are beyond pointless, and making changes to make missing positionals more punishing would heavily limit boss fight designs. The better alternative is to remove positionals which allows the team for more creative boss fights. We're already seeing that anyways with a lot of boss fights being full circles and disabling the need for positionals.

I personally see zero positives to positionals. They do not create any form of good engagement.

Current fights are the opposite of being creative so I guess that completely disproves the entire point.
STOP ASKING TO REMOVE THINGS THEY WONT GIVE BACK ANYTHING IN RETURN

[UkcsAlias]

I personally see zero positives to positionals. They do not create any form of good engagement.

Thats just you then... and the recommendation is to not play a melee dps then. There are multiple jobs for this very reason.

Positionals are one of the best features because they enable skill diffirences to be shown through numbers. More skill on a melee dps means more damage. Even if you cannot see the numbers, you can still notice a boss getting killed just that little bit faster (which on savage/ultimate means more enrage timer remaining).

You are asking for something on a similar level to removing headshots for a sniper in a shooter. A weapon type thats all about accuracy. The melee dps in this game is just like that, and therefor has those gimmicks.

The moment positionals are removed, you essentialy removed the entire need for the melee dps job to exist in its entirety. The ranged dps damage penalty at that point becomes irrelevant since a melee dps has the same uptime (otherwise you can remove ranged dps entirely). Positionals enable situations in which melee dpses shine, and situations in which they dont. But on average, they are just balanced.

Variety in a game is good. Otherwise just keep playing de_dust2... as then you know nothing will ever change.

[OceanicSky]

I'll give you the hitbox thing because it actually matters in terms of fight mechanics and figuring out ways to maintain uptime optimally, but the take on positionals is pretty dumb. Realistically positionals add nothing to the game. Sitting at the corner of the circle and moving 1 inch left or right is not skillful, its not fun and its completely pointless considering whenever there is a mechanic that disrupts the ability to do that we have true north to compensate it making the entire design pointless. If true north didn't exist you would have a point, but as it stands positionals are meaningless and add nothing to the combat which is why I really don't care if they stay or go. They don't add or take away any kind of difficulty, so if they stay then whatever. If they go, nothing changes other than the fact a spot on my hotbar opens up.

I personally just don't get why people like them. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Do people not sit at the corner and intentionally make things harder by going all the way to the flank/rear instead of using the edges of the positinals? That's the only thing I can think of because, again, positionals do nothing for combat.



I level up mnk alongside my sam every expansion. I've never felt that positionals make mnk unique. I want mnk to have more things to do like near the end of the ShB expansion where the opener was fun as hell over worrying about pointless positionals. Make mnk faster and give me more things to press(more oGCD's) and more CD's to manage. That is way more interesting than stepping 1 inch to the left or the right in a game where the boss is static 90% of the time and the other 10% true north is always available.

You absolutely cannot say that you find that monk has nothing unique about it and then in the very next sentence praise the patch that removed monks most unique mechanic, Greased Lightning. What you want for monk is to just faceroll your keyboard with OGCDs when OGCDs are already a huge problem with monk since its impossible to every double weave anything thanks to the already extremely low GCD time. Tornado Kick rotation monk is and always will be the best iteration of monk where it was at the peak of its own class design.

[Shurrikhan]

You absolutely cannot say that you find that monk has nothing unique about it and then in the very next sentence praise the patch that removed monks most unique mechanic, Greased Lightning. What you want for monk is to just faceroll your keyboard with OGCDs when OGCDs are already a huge problem with monk since its impossible to every double weave anything thanks to the already extremely low GCD time. Tornado Kick rotation monk is and always will be the best iteration of monk where it was at the peak of its own class design.

While I'll agree that TK Monk was the job's peak, it was also the only time Greased Lightning was an actual mechanic, rather than merely a wind-up cost incurred once per continuous fight with a partial compensation likewise once per (continuous span of) fight. In T9 and a couple Extremes (Leviathan, etc.) that challenge was at least interesting, but it took all of a Tornado Kick bug giving it 30% more damage than was intended, old Riddle of Wind, and a less absurd CD on Perfect Balance for it to actually be a resource that offered the job additional agency.

Without that context, honestly Blitz's little rotational adjustments made possible offers more nuance than Greased Lightning itself ever did. That's not to say that Blitz is great, only that forming job identity solely as a penalty/constraint, rather than anything leverageable or even anything sufficiently compensated for, is rarely a good idea. More so even than positionals, Greased Lightning required appropriate surroundings to feel like a real job mechanic (whereby you might time a speed-drop in such a way as not to waste [de]buff uptime, or knowing that there's raidbuffs enough to compensate, or because you really do need the burst then and there more than you need total damage, etc.).

It still ticks me off that they didn't go deeper into the elemental and mini-burst-heavy route of late Stormblood, though. Small issues aside in terms of polish and some skills being left lackluster for the time (The Forbidden Chakra, especially), it was such a good direction.

I'd rather they had double down on the stance-based Riddles, actually made the stances themselves worthwhile and/or replaced filler-APM The Forbidden Chakra with a couple stance-dependent skills each with additional effects and able to spend 1-7 Chakra per cast instead of the fixed 5 with no bankability (or a single button, but the action depends on the number of Chakra spent).

Of course, would I still take a (more varied) Blitz system atop that? Sure. I want my Phantom Kick, Suplexes, Flint Kick, and Phantom Rush all (rather than good animations going to waste, replaced with level). I likewise wouldn't have minded seeing a take on the Dark and Light Chakra concept, especially as that seems about the only way Elixir Field would ever make any sense.

[VentVanitas]

snip

With how PB/Blitz currently functions, old Tornado Kick/GL would've legitimately worked better with each other. I would've taken that synergy over the pure oGCD filler that is Chakra. 2 charge 45s cooldown PB with GL3 would have been amazing to have and it pretty much would have solved almost all of the problems ShB MNK had with GL. (I say GL3 because the 4th stack never should have happened let's be real.)

Alas, we could only have one of them... despite Blitz in its current form not really doing anything that would have conflicted with GL.

Absolutely not lmao.

What is, then? Sure as hell wasn't the colossal failure that was ShB MNK.

[Ransu]

Tornado Kick rotation monk is and always will be the best iteration of monk where it was at the peak of its own class design.

Absolutely not lmao.

[VentVanitas]

Monk should have kept all of its positionals. There's no reason why it shouldn't have, there's no problem having only one job in the entire game with that playstyle for the people who enjoyed it.

People against positionals don't even goddamn play Monk anyway.