Removal of Positionals

[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.