On the Removal of Positionals

[ThorneDynasty]

i wanted cast times changed or removed on a melee but so many got butthurt over it lol

Didn't you immediately start going on about people being "weebs" simply for disagreeing with you? Who was butthurt?

[CKNovel]

Then simply teach the new vipers that the green buttons is for left or right of the enemy, and the red buttons are for behind the enemy.

The Coil (hunter & swiftskin) have side and back positionnal but are both green.
To be fair I'm being massively skill checked by the positionnals I wish at least it would be easier to read if we're going to end on a side or back positional. I know it depends on the GCD you start but after a burst, you can easily forget with what you started.

Viper feels completely different between Extreme 1 and 2, but I'm fine with not playing perfectly.

[ShadowyZero]

Didn't you immediately start going on about people being "weebs" simply for disagreeing with you? Who was butthurt?

why are you stalking me bruh? lmao just let it go already XD your obsession with me is getting creepy seriously do you not have literally anything else to do? or somewhere else more productive to channel your hate into?

[Inosaska]

Removing them allows more players to enjoy the jobs without having to worry about where they're standing to hit optimal damage and can focus on the mechanics of the boss fights.

[Mikey_R]

Removing them allows more players to enjoy the jobs without having to worry about where they're standing to hit optimal damage and can focus on the mechanics of the boss fights.

I have a theory, so humour me for a bit. However, it is only a small subset of people who actually care about positionals.

Starting at the more casual players/less skilled, whatever you want to call them. Regardless, these are people who play the game for fun and aren't to interested in optimising jobs. They don't care about positionals so whether a job has them or not is of no consequence. Obviously here, whether positionals are there or not, doesn't matter.

Going to the opposite side, the highly skilled players, the ones who find the optimising of positionals fun would obviously hate the fact positionals are gone.

Then, we have the people in the middle. These can be split into 2 types of players. Ones who want positionals to stay and ones who want them gone. Focusing on the ones that want them to stay, they enjoy trying to optimise for positionals, they might learn fight to fight where to use true north etc. They also understand that missing a positional here and there isn't that much of an issue.

So now we talk about the last set of people, the ones who want them gone. They tend to be the ones who seem to put positionals on some sort of pedestal. If you miss one, it is the end of the world, they are a hinderance to your gameplay, so they should be removed...just because they don't like them.

The problem here, which seems to be a common thread in a lot of things, is the players mentality. As is evident by your post, you seem to put doing positionals above doing mechanics. However, boss mechanics should come first, whether you can hit the positional or not. Optimising positionals come after.

[Atmaweapon510]

The problem with positionals is that they aren't really perceptible. I want immediate feedback that tells me that I hit one rather than wondering if I landed it if the positioning was kind of fuzzy. Otherwise it sort of blurs into the background and you're sort of wondering if it matters at all that you're doing things correctly. If they added some small bonus in addition to damage, positionals would be more appreciated in a kit.

[Galvuu]

Removing them allows more players to enjoy the jobs without having to worry about where they're standing to hit optimal damage and can focus on the mechanics of the boss fights.

I cannot express how much I detest this sentiment, and how much it has poisoned XIV job design over the years.
Why do you enjoy a job less if you miss 200 potency per minute? Why does this minuscule (literally minuscule, like 1%) dps loss impair your enjoyment?
Do people not realize how insane this sounds?
"I like working out, but I can't enjoy it because I don't lift like as much as Jesus Olivares."
People don't enjoy the job gameplay, at least not in a vacuum- no, they enjoy the feeling they're using a job to 100%, but without the ability or determination to actually do it. So, instead, every job must be sanded down to appease the lowest common denominator.
We can't have good players and great players, we cannot have depth in jobs because if there's any barrier of entry, or difficulty in execution, or just any attrition at all, then people won't enjoy it because we're not all doing the same damage or something.
This makes no sense- and there are already jobs where the skill ceiling is underground, to the point an auto-rotation bot can play as well as any human in the majority of content (I'm looking at you SMN).

I don't mean to single you out, but this sentiment, that I see posted frequently in many channels, drives me insane.
I'm not a good tank. I play it sporadically, but I don't put in any effort. I do it for fun. Tanks don't need to be dumbed down so an idiot like me can perform as well as a career tank. It's fine that there are optimizations or depth that I can't reach by practicing 15 minutes, or playing hyper casually. I just enjoy memeing on tank sometimes, I'm not even thinking about my damage being lower than orange percentiles, or that my gcd weaving isn't optimal. If you truly enjoy what you're doing, why does missing two or four positionals a minute for 40 potency each matter? Not criting for a nuke in burst results in a bigger damage loss- does that bother you too?!

[Eudyptes]

I cannot express how much I detest this sentiment, and how much it has poisoned XIV job design over the years.
Why do you enjoy a job less if you miss 200 potency per minute? Why does this minuscule (literally minuscule, like 1%) dps loss impair your enjoyment?
Do people not realize how insane this sounds?

I think the issue for most people is because it feels like a punishment for missing them rather than a reward for hitting them. This is actually a part of why I think positionals are a dumb, outdated mechanic that need to go as well.

To preface, I cut my teeth on MNK back in ARR, and have been primarily a melee dps main ever since, bouncing back and fourth between them. So landing positionals is so ingrained into me I often catch myself doing them on bosses that don't even require them. So this isn't coming from a "skill issue, I can't do them" perspective.

In a vacuum, positionals are stupidly easy. Let's face it, here isn't really much challenge in pushing to the left and right right every few seconds to hit them (esp nowadays when we have only a few to hit). That said, in that same vacuum why not keep them for some bonus damage on something that's not all that hard to do, right? I get where that perspective comes from. But we don't live in a vacuum. The reality is that bosses do not stand still, and no matter how good you are, how fast you are with TN, etc, you WILL miss positionals for something that is out of your control, as well as just doing mechanics properly. This just feels bad to get punished for, especially if you were doing the actual right thing like dodging an AE. On top of that DPS have natural punishments and it's why they are typically designed the way they are. This is something that for the most part extends to all games that have similar roles they are trying to keep things balanced. Melee need to be in melee range in order to hit things. Anytime something forces them out of that range their dps stops. Ranged classes simply do not have this issue. So they are naturally balanced via cast times and/or "ranged tax". So to adding further punishment on top of that is just salt in the wound if bosses are more than just glorified target dummies (which to be fair they kinda were glorified target dummies in ARR).

As for viper, I don't think it's too busy specifically. I have 100 viper, monk, ninja, and reaper right now, and with the exception of reaper they all feel pretty equally "busy". Ninja probably most of all tbh. I'm guessing it was mainly in reference to viper having ability positionals as well as combo positionals while the other classes have one or the other? Idk, I don't think it really needs any changes but I'm always happy to see positionals removed.

[mallleable]

I don't like postionals, but I would rather they be replaced with potentially better job/role mechanics than just be removed. Melee DPS would definitely be missing something if postionals were just removed with out replacing them with something else.

[Valence]

I have a theory, so humour me for a bit. However, it is only a small subset of people who actually care about positionals.

Starting at the more casual players/less skilled, whatever you want to call them. Regardless, these are people who play the game for fun and aren't to interested in optimising jobs. They don't care about positionals so whether a job has them or not is of no consequence. Obviously here, whether positionals are there or not, doesn't matter.

Going to the opposite side, the highly skilled players, the ones who find the optimising of positionals fun would obviously hate the fact positionals are gone.

Then, we have the people in the middle. These can be split into 2 types of players. Ones who want positionals to stay and ones who want them gone. Focusing on the ones that want them to stay, they enjoy trying to optimise for positionals, they might learn fight to fight where to use true north etc. They also understand that missing a positional here and there isn't that much of an issue.

So now we talk about the last set of people, the ones who want them gone. They tend to be the ones who seem to put positionals on some sort of pedestal. If you miss one, it is the end of the world, they are a hinderance to your gameplay, so they should be removed...just because they don't like them.

The problem here, which seems to be a common thread in a lot of things, is the players mentality. As is evident by your post, you seem to put doing positionals above doing mechanics. However, boss mechanics should come first, whether you can hit the positional or not. Optimising positionals come after.

I feel this is a blanket generalization. Perhaps it's true, perhaps it's not, but I do not recognize myself in any of those categories, and the reason I don't like positionals is because I don't like the type of gameplay, whether the UI feedback for them could be better or not, and not because it just "feels bad missing one". Sure it doesn't feel good missing one when you're actually trying, but that's a job constraint and I can respect that. My problem is that I don't feel anything good when actually succeeding at landing them, and that I don't care about that kind of gameplay, I care about my rotation and its intricacies, not where I stand relative to the target whenever I land blows. I do not consider myself casual and I do not consider myself in the "middle" as well. I just consider myself as not the target audience to positional based melee DPS, that's about it, that's why I don't main melees in serious content.

The problem with your analysis is that it's trying to paint people in a bad light by immediately labeling them with "a lack of skill" (your words), and an inability to cope with failure (missing a positional) as soon as they don't like them. Moreso, the vibe that this actually gave me is that you're trying to go for the overused "players with limited skill trying to lower the ceiling because they can't accept that they're not performing at the top otherwise". Don't get me wrong, I'm sure those exist (I actually have a certain someone from those very forums in mind...), but painting everybody that doesn't like positionals into that category feels a little bit insulting.