On the Removal of Positionals

[Valence]

You could make positionals work on physical ranged if you wanted to, and this wouldn't be the first game to try it. Lost Ark did it as well.

I know what you're getting at with arc lengths increasing proportional to the distance from the center. One way that you could work around this is by incorporating strafing movement tools. There's a built in lock-on feature in the game that melee players used to use to maintain directional autos while performing positionals. You'd basically just need to take the same feature and make it such that your strafe speed was significantly faster than your standard walk speed. Alternatively, you could let players strafe-roll along an arc into position. It could work really well for a Shaaloani-themed dual pistol gunslinger.

I don't think there's anything wrong with adding in a mix of positionals and/or casts to physical ranged. You might be able to argue in favor of more damage if you could incorporate a mix of casts and positionals, but you'd need to get physical ranged players on board with it first, get it implemented, and then argue the change, which is very roundabout. The big problem is that physical ranged doesn't really offer anything in terms of damage, uptime, or support utility that magical ranged doesn't do equally well or better. If there wasn't a role party bonus for physical ranged, I'm sure that it would always be replaced by an additional caster. The devs basically need to identify why this role exists and what value it adds.

I don't understand the sudden obsession with giving positionals to rphys when people are fighting tooth and nails to keep them on melee DPS because it's part of the role's identity. Why do you want to make rphys have them too? I'm really puzzled by that sudden idea. I find the idea of adding cast times and positionals to rphys extremely lazy to be perfectly honest. We could come with so much better and unique for that role...

Even melee players are extremely split on the issue of positionals, and you want to suddenly spread them to other roles as well? If I wanted to play a melee with positionals, I'd play a melee with positionals. I hate positionals, that's why I don't main melee in serious content. People ask non melee mains to leave melee alone with positionals, I respectfully ask people to leave rphys alone with this in return as well.

Edit: We need to remember as well that everything used to be a lot more immobile back then, encounters and jobs alike. Current PCT is as mobile as HW MCH. All modern casters are more mobile as HW BRD ever could hope to be. Some small cast times like Iajutsu wouldn't upset anything though, as long as it's not HW levels of casting, and it's not defining of the caster identity either, but that's the whole thing, it's not gonna redefine a constraint for rphys out of the blue. It's not going to change anything.

What rphys could need is a complete refocus on non deterministic rotations and a constant challenge on the choice of skills used. Ammo was a perfect example of this. Not hard by any means, but still required constant attention depending on the patterns. We could build upon this and make it more interesting. Honestly speaking what defines a physical range? Projectiles, that require ammo, be it MCH or BRD (idk about DNC, could perhaps inspire itself from pvp DNC which is very unique). A lot of mechanics could be built around ammo with a constant need to play around it during filler phases for instance. It could go beyond simple procs.