Removal of Positionals

[Payadopa]

To be honest the notion that positionals get in the way of parses is really silly. Anyone that cares about parses and is competent at their job should be happy to have ways to display skill expression and set themselves apart from other players within the same job. Although the current trend in noth fight and job design seem to be going the complete opposite direction. :shrug:

I agree. Everyone complains about SMN being this boring in terms of rotation/optimisation (I love the concept, though) but people here are asking for all jobs to essentially turn more and more into it, funnily enough.

Removing systems is not the answer to stale design.

[UkcsAlias]

Removing systems is not the answer to stale design.

Removing systems makes things more stale. As any removed system makes things more of the same.

Great for those who dont want to learn, variety, min/max or specialists. But bad for those who want to be able to do a lot of things.

Positionals in the current state do feel lackluster, but thats mostly because the other roles are even more lackluster. If the other roles also get a positional based system, this could be improved. Especialy ranged dps jobs could still feature a positional system, and maybe even with extra factors. And surely, initialy they will also feel lackluster, but you need a good start to expand things.

Reaper already shows that on a melee dps positionals often arent realy needed, except for chaining certain effects. And for ranged dps, even if its this simple, it can do a lot. Once they get positionals, the melee dps's can get additional ones with more effects.
And yes, it often will still mean making small steps towards a side, but that is caused by a diffirent issue: engine and latency limitations.

As the server framerate often ends up being low, there arent a lot of boss positional changes. Because each move now already suffers from that latency issue, so you dont want them too often. If this part becomes more reliable, that no longer should be an issue. And that allows more to be added.

[ForteNightshade]

I agree. Everyone complains about SMN being this boring in terms of rotation/optimisation (I love the concept, though) but people here are asking for all jobs to essentially turn more and more into it, funnily enough.

Removing systems is not the answer to stale design.

There is a pretty massive difference between the redesign of Summoner and positionals. As it stands, positionals have little interaction with the overall job and don't necessarily make it more engaging (subjective, of course). The complaints regarding Summoner, meanwhile, derive entirely from its rotation being so incredibly straight forward it can be condensed into a single button macro. Ninja wouldn't change if positionals on Aeolian Edge and Armor Crush were removed. In fact, Dragoon would be better off losing one of its positionals given the long string combo makes it cumbersome to manage.

[Shurrikhan]

Wait, how the heck are DRG positionals "cumbersome to manage"?

You move twice per 10 GCDs, from rear (WT) to flank (F&C) after the 4th and from flank to rear any time between the 4th and 10th GCD (WT2).

Two movements, just 1 way each, per 25 seconds pre-Haste.

Number of positionals =\= amount of repositioning required.

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Note: If Chaotic led into F&C before WT instead, DRG would have the same number of positionals, but double the movement (any, any, rear, flank [1], rear [2], any, any, flank [3], rear [4]).

That's not to say that would be for the better, but there the difference between DRG's current 5 positionals per 10 GCDs and MNK's old 100% positional skills wasn't just a factor of 2. It was nearer to a factor of 3 with a typical Monk rotation, as Monk would only stay in place on DK-Twin-Snap and (True)-Demo-Boot along its sliding rotation.

[Arkdra]

I think positionals are ok. I play Reaper though so it's not like I have a lot and I did hate them while I was leveling monk. That said, there's 0 point to having positionals on overworld monsters outside of like, A/S hunts so I wish overworld monsters didn't have them but don't want them removed from instances.

[ZiraZ]

Well which is it? are positional cumbersome to manage, or are they faceroll and boring and anyone can totally land them all in P5s ezpz(still has not provided proof btw)
Getting mixed signals from these trillion posts people that think they know better about jobs they don't even play.

[Silver-Strider]

Well which is it? are positional cumbersome to manage, or are they faceroll and boring and anyone can totally land them all in P5s ezpz(still has not provided proof btw)
Getting mixed signals from these trillion posts people that think they know better about jobs they don't even play.

It's all subjective.
Some people find Positionals fun and engaging as a mechanic since anyone that cared about optimizing now had a skill ceiling for improvement.
Some people don't care about positionals at all and found the mechanic cumbersome and unintuitive.

Personally, I'm in the former camp as I found MNK to be incredibly engaging due to having such a constant need to reposition for its rotation and getting better at landing those positionals was the primary difference between a good MNK and a bad one. Now, you can Dragon Kick your way into a Purple parse with very little skill actually required and it STILL has the lowest population out of all Melee Jobs. The only time that positionals might have been cumbersome was back in ARR where missing a positional meant missing out on your DoT/Buff but that was a long time ago.

[Aco505]

Well which is it? are positional cumbersome to manage, or are they faceroll and boring and anyone can totally land them all in P5s ezpz(still has not provided proof btw)
Getting mixed signals from these trillion posts people that think they know better about jobs they don't even play.

To be fair, P5S isn't the worse fight for positionals even if it is the one in this tier. Could just challenge that person to try and get all positionals as DRG in Titan UWU instead

Two movements, just 1 way each, per 25 seconds pre-Haste.

Number of positionals =\= amount of repositioning required.

In full uptime, yes. When movement and rotation of bosses is involved, things become quite a bit different and particularly when there's two targets as then 60% of your GCDs are positionals with 2 out of 3 being rear ones.

Allowing FnC or WC to be used in any order after the 3rd GCD would mostly be for comfort in any situation where it could help. Overall, most DRGs will stick with the usual order unless a specific encounter favored otherwise.

Sadly, I suspect they'll remove the positional requirement for CT/CS but I hope they keep it. We'll see!

[Shurrikhan]

In full uptime, yes. When movement and rotation of bosses is involved, things become quite a bit different and particularly when there's two targets as then 60% of your GCDs are positionals with 2 out of 3 being rear ones.

Allowing FnC or WC to be used in any order after the 3rd GCD would mostly be for comfort in any situation where it could help. Overall, most DRGs will stick with the usual order unless a specific encounter favored otherwise.

Sadly, I suspect they'll remove the positional requirement for CT/CS but I hope they keep it. We'll see!

To be clear, I'm not asking for F&C and WT to be even easier to position than they are now, though I wouldn't mind being able to order them at will for the simple reason that having the two separate buttons is solely button bloat (though, I could say the same for every "combo" step past True/Raiden Thrust or Doomspike, or indeed XIV's "combos" on any job).

Rather, there's a difference regardless of context between positionals being consecutively performed from the same position vs. requiring different positions. Until a mob has significant net change in angle as least as often as your GCD, the movement required is only when the position changes, not merely when the position is required.

As such, it seemed a hell of a stretch for anyone to say that DRG's 5 positional GCDs per its 10-step sustained combo (as you only ever alter from that ST combo against precisely 2 enemies) amounted to a "cumbersome" requirement in movement, when they can be done with literally just two bumps of the joystick, or a single dash each of [A] and [D] strafes, per 10 seconds.

Positionals engagement is hugely positional, of course.

• Take T11, for instance, back in ARR: There you had an interplay between when the boss would angularly cleave, your GCD speed, tiny (e.g., a fifth of a GCD) delays when such would be enough not to clip your ToD/Fracture/Demo ticks, that movement, and rotational choice. Heck, had Fists of Wind carried a burst of speed upon swap, you'd likely have seen that play into the total system of considerations as well.
  
  
• But if you through a modern Monk into even in that context (minus Fracture and ToD, obviously), there'd be little interplay possible, because of the low relative weight of those positionals and just how few GCDs still even have a positional attached (along with, counterintuitive as it might first sound, the ability to avoid those positionals at variable cost via Touch of Death per 30s, Fracture per 18s, and woven Impulse Drives [high TP-inefficiency and a tiny potency cost even if used optimally, and significantly higher if it reduced the synergies of your native GCDs]).

[Lyth]

Positionals don't intrinsically have any difficulty associated with them. If I were to bring a player who is completely new to melee a striking dummy and to ask them to hit their positionals, they won't have any additional difficulty in learning how to do this over and above learning the base rotation. The number of positionals itself doesn't matter all that much; it's just memorization and repetition. What keeps them interesting is their interaction with fight mechanics.

For starters, you need a moving and rotating target. On the most basic level, this involves recognizing the specific GCDs where the boss reorientates themselves and knowing where you need to be standing in advance to avoid downtime. You can't be chasing their hitbox after the fact. The learning around anticipating this is fairly instinctive and just comes with spending some time in individual fights. Where it really gets fun is when you give the tanks some actual freedom to reposition the boss. The best tanks are consistent from pull to pull and set you up to succeed. But you also find that some tanks will consistently make positioning errors that you can adapt to, which can be a lot of fun once you learn to read them and find workarounds. It also means that a fight that's well designed with actual movement can still stay fresh for tanks/melee, because of variations in execution across different groups. I think that that interdependence between tanks and melee needs to be preserved, rather than removed for convenience.

I also think that expanding on melee's movement abilities has a huge potential to influence how interesting positionals become, simply because you have more room for complex movement patterns on bosses and more clever uptime tricks that you can devise for individual fights. Regress is S tier in this regard.