What are your unrealistic expectations for the upcoming Combat Live Letter?

[Equitable_Remedy]

It's kind of poetic (in the ironic sense) that the thread about "unrealistic expectations" is just everyone's desires.

[Supersnow845]

If you really want to play a job that requires melee uptime but doesn't require positionals, tanks are always an option, especially as tank gameplay around positioning and mitigation becomes progressively more vestigial. As it is tanks, healers, and casters have been steadily losing their defining gameplay mechanics on the basis of trying to engage players who have zero interest in actually playing those roles. We don't need to add melee to that mix, and you will get community pushback for this on a much larger scale than you saw with Kaiten.

If you're in the process of progging Sastasha, being a DPS in general is optional. That doesn't mean that you normally queue into the instance as a solo tank and ask your friends if they want to come cheer you on (although you could make a case for this with the current iteration of tank design).

Again why are you acting like the totality of enjoying a melee is positionals

You can like melee design and not like positionals, with 6 melee classes there should be room for one to not have positionals given we have 2 (pointless) sub roles inside 4 healers, 2 phys ranged from the proc role that barely use procs and at least one caster that doesn’t cast

Positionals aren’t an unassailable “if you don’t have positionals you aren’t a melee” they are just one facet of the melee role and one that doesn’t have to be in all 6

[HappyHubris]

It's kind of poetic (in the ironic sense) that the thread about "unrealistic expectations" is just everyone's desires.

If there is a low to no chance that those desires are met, they're unreasonable.

[HappyHubris]

Again why are you acting like the totality of enjoying a melee is positionals

You can like melee design and not like positionals, with 6 melee classes there should be room for one to not have positionals given we have 2 (pointless) sub roles inside 4 healers, 2 phys ranged from the proc role that barely use procs and at least one caster that doesn’t cast

Positionals aren’t an unassailable “if you don’t have positionals you aren’t a melee” they are just one facet of the melee role and one that doesn’t have to be in all 6

Yeah there are plenty of tough MMO classes independent of positionals.

[Roda]

For BRD:

Have a baseline level of proccing plus extra procs from DOT ticks. This will make AoE involve interesting decisions again.

Give me some actual songs to play during my combat cycle. Our current 3 songs could require a cast time (with no target); new buffs could be added; we could sing an insult to debuff enemies; etc. I just feel like an archer with some extra animation flashes, currently.

One gimmick could be buffing nearby allies with our songd only to encourage positioning choices in the raid group.

Vicious mockery would get me to change mains INSTANTLY

[ZiraZ]

Again why are you acting like the totality of enjoying a melee is positionals

given we have 2 (pointless) sub roles inside 4 healers, 2 phys ranged from the proc role that barely use procs and at least one caster that doesn’t cast

yeah maybe subroles are not a great idea if that's what we end up with

[Cynric]

I really don't understand how people can enjoy positionals in the slightest, bosses are always being moved around by tanks or mechanics so you get cucked for a very marginal damage increase each time anyway.

Also would probably cut down on people telling others how to play their class properly if they didnt have to remember to go flank.rear.side/whatever, screw that garb im far too old to care enough about a marginal dps increase while all that noise is going on.

That stuff keeps me entertained while I'm attacking honestly. It's not as fun when there aren't positionals to keep me moving. Do I need to do them? I mean I guess not, but I like getting higher damage for doing a bit extra.

[Kathryn]

That stuff keeps me entertained while I'm attacking honestly. It's not as fun when there aren't positionals to keep me moving. Do I need to do them? I mean I guess not, but I like getting higher damage for doing a bit extra.

Thats fair, each to their own, I've played this game since 1.0 and I have never not once enjoyed positionals so I've always been a caster, maybe im just getting old

[Lyth]

??

I think that it's a serious mistake to cater job design to people who are currently ambivalent to it. You drive away the core audience, and everyone else remains ambivalent. That's a contributing factor to a lot of the progressive simplifications that we're seeing across roles.

Contributing to this are bad actors who have no interest in the role but are out looking for personal gain. When Abyssos was released, all we heard from that tier about was how Casters 'should do more dps' because of the hitbox sizes and wall fights without positionals. This is where most of the push to remove postionals comes from. It's pretty obvious what their follow-up to this will be.

Likewise, a tiered system of 'sub-subroles' into BLM and non-BLM was probably the worst design decision to hit Caster DPS. Jobs in a subrole should have parity with each other at minimum, which in turn places some constraints in the design and types of gameplay challenges. If you remove those challenges, then that balance gets called into question. So if DRG post-rework is suddenly without positionals and comes with widespread simplifications and button loss as 'Dawntrail's SMN', does that mean that we suddenly create an 'unwanted tier' of melee DPS? At least SMN had Raise.

Unless players step in to defend their role and vocalize that these ideas are unwanted and unwelcome, the devs assume that players in the role want these simplifications and we end up with the likes of auto-healing tanks that don't manage positioning, casters that don't cast, and healers that aren't needed to heal while being restricted to one-button Broil rotations. A 'platformer without pitfalls'.

If you want people to be sympathetic to healer issues, then you have to offer a degree of mutual consideration to preserving roles that others care about in return. This is just the tip of the iceburg. Removing positionals will definitely come with significant backlash, at least after the fact.

[Supersnow845]

putting my quote as question marks changes nothing when you know what I’m saying and just ends up looking like a rude way to imply that what I’m saying is meaningless or confusing when it’s not

You seem to have this overwhelming assumption that what you want is what every player wants when it concerns classes you play but when it comes to other classes they are free game.

Me having a problem with healer issues has nothing to do with me looking for changes in the other roles. I have said dozens of times if square came out and showed empirically that healer population preferred the current design I would relent and agree with the majority. That’s why I don’t shout down people who come in offering suggestions for healers (as do most others), we point out flaws if there is one but we don’t work off the assumption that any one design is an unassailable truth as you seem to do with the melees. Anyone is free to offer any suggestions about any class. Sure more weight should be given to the mains but that doesn’t mean others should be discouraged from offering what they want out of a class, it’s why I prefer to offer suggestions expanding classes I find flawed like SMN, not reverting them

I’m a healer main but that doesn’t mean I have opinions about the other classes, if you truly don’t think others should be able to have opinions about the other classes why are you always on the healer forums or the tank forums

I’m not even going to mention I don’t want them removed for all melee, just an option like SMN for non casters and MCH for non proc phys ranged or PLD for low APM tanks or AST for high APM healers