On the Removal of Positionals

[Taranok]

BLM has to choose between triple cast in burst phase and using it for movement, along with Swiftcast. They lose damage in one area to gain it somewhere else. It is the same with True North, optimal usage of the skill where you might lose out here, but get a bigger benefit there. So, should BLM lose access to Triplecast and Swiftcast and make everything instant cast?

It's funny you mention BLM, because it's not like there's literally any fights in EW or DT where cast bars are ignored by boss mechanics.

Meanwhile, EX1 pretends positionals don't exist. Or p10s, arc4 has an entirely new mechanic for removing its positionals to boot. Man, it'd be nice if bosses just straight up removed cast bars from casters, the devs already want to turn turret casters into unlimited phys ranged.

Positionals harm the game because it artificially limits what the devs can do in terms of boss design, all to make sure melee DPS can nail back and side positionals reliably while working true north in every so-often to deal with it otherwise. You can replicate this gameplay by making melee-only mechanics that have specific safe spot carveouts that ranged can ignore. And you can do this while making the bosses more mobile and kinetic so those gap closers are used more often.

But this desire to push turret casters into phys ranged is removing gameplay that can only be replicated by hard-rooting the players, something no one enjoys outside of opt into. So please continue the false-analogy of pretending positionals are remotely in the same category. I would love to see things like triplecast removed if it meant fight design took into consideration classes like BLM that want to spend 80 or 90% of their time standing still, and leveraged mechanics knowledge and prepositioning as the skill check of turret casters, like it was in the past.

[Lyth]

The core difference is in our mindsets. As a melee main, I want to see more opportunities for skill differentials and optimization to exist within my chosen role. I think a lot of melee players are of a similar mindset and determination, as they just want to be challenged on their role and push themselves to the limits. They don't really pay much heed to whether other roles push themselves or not.

Casting is often cited as being a 'skill differential' on magical ranged DPS, although it's certainly not a unique feature of the role. It sounds like you don't enjoy the skill differential on magical ranged DPS at all, but you also want the skill differential removed from melee so that they don't show you up in front of everyone else. It's really amazing how different the mindsets of players on different roles can be. We are not the same.

I think if you collectively feel as a role that being forced to stop and cast is not enjoyable, then you should be discussing that topic instead of positionals. There are plenty of games that allow movement while casting. You'd functionally be playing a physical ranged job with a 5 second GCD. Far be it for any of us to try to change your gameplay preferences. We just ask that you offer us the same courtesy.

I have no idea how 'positionals limit boss design'. If a mechanic renders a positional temporarily inaccessible, players can always find workarounds, and they've introduced a new system by which they can swap between a 'positional' and 'no positional' mode for specific mechanics like the M4 soft enrage. Melee already have plenty of considerations around AoE mechanics already that intersect really nicely with positionals, so it's not a 'one or the other' situation. They work synergistically to challenge players on the role.

In short, there aren't any good reasons to remove the skill differentials from melee.

[Eudyptes]

The core difference is in our mindsets.

It's just such a weird take to assume that the only possible way to have skill differentials is positionals, which is just increasingly becoming more apparent that it's bad design as fights evolve (again, there is no skill involved one way or the other when positionals are missed because there is no opportunity to not miss them). Most games don't even use any position based combat outside of an outlier skill here and there like a stealth backstab. So unless you think FFXIV is the hardest combat based game to play you gotta concede that other options are possible.

Now, I don't think positionals are holding them back on fight design even close to as much as the 2 min meta vice grip they have going on, but it is still something that has to be in the back of their mind when designing bosses for the sake of balance. This is, once again, evident in the fact they have been pulling the teeth from positionals regularly over the last 10 years. Honestly it's a dying mechanic they just need to put it out of its misery at this point, but I'm sure they will eventually.

Also:

I think if you collectively feel as a role...

This is also very "in a vacuum" thinking. As I mentioned before positionals as they are in FFXIV are a system pretty exclusive to FFXIV. It's not unreasonable for people who just in general like a melee dps role to want a more traditional melee dps experience. Furthermore, and possibly more importantly, is you can't just discredit class fantasy as a major motivation for people to play the jobs they play. I first picked up MNK because I really like the martial artist archtype in other games, and snubbed ARR SMN completely because it was nothing like a traditional FF SMN. So a lot of mechanical critique doesn't necessarily come from a place of "too hard", but rather it makes no sense.

I've been very clear about my stance on positionals as a whole (and I haven't said anything about casting being bad, I think casting and positionals are unrelated entirely as my stance is casting = needing to stay in melee range). That said, I personally wouldn't mind if a single class, specifically ninja, kept them for a form of class identity. I still think it's an overall bad mechanic but it would at least make sense on them. But the rest? Absolutely not. I mean MNK's are famously the "come at me, bro" archtype, so why are they forced to do "backstabs"? That's rhetorical, I know the answer is because of balance and class design from ARR and bosses being very stationary back then, but that time is gone. Same for the rest of the classes. None of them make sense as to why they need to hit x skill in y position. MAYBE some spear flanking on DRG but that'd be pushing it.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day they are never going back to how they were and will very likely be gone sooner or later.

[Zerovii]

Seeing some mention that "losing dps out of your control is bad game design" and I want to throw in my 2 gil.

Most =/= all. That is my entire point. If you miss so much as one, you have a dps loss. That is the objective argument you seem to be unable to comprehend. And the point of me bringing it up is that when you objectively lose dps for something not within your control, it is bad design.
...

The back-and-forth is rife with miscommunication because an objective fact ("you will lose DPS due to factors out of your control") is being conflated with a subjective judgement ("losing damage in this way is bad game design"). The latter is what's causing this disconnect: what you consider bad game design is considered by others to be a source of engagement. Your view that it is bad game design is obviously a valid one, but please do not treat it as a universally accepted fact.

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A big problem with this game's design direction over the past few expansion is that the devs have overly catered to players' insecurities around not playing perfectly. They keep lowering the bar over time to hide skill differences between players. But that discomfort is important as a stimulus for growth and retains player engagement - if you've mastered everything perfectly then there's no incentive to keep playing. Players want to feel rewarded for their efforts, but it also has to be earned for it to be truly satisfying. It's fine to adjust the skill floor to make jobs more accessible, but don't touch the skill ceiling if you want to retain your players in the long run.

Agreeing with this, and speaking more broadly (not taking aim at anyone in this thread specifically--just something I've noticed over the years) there's often talk about how positionals are supposedly holding back fight design, but I don't think positionals are at fault. I think the blame lies solely with the playerbase and their neurotic desire to execute everything perfectly. We could have a fight where the average person is only able to hit 50% of their positionals, and it would be totally fine as long as the DPS check properly accounts for this. But the problem is we have too many players--casual and hardcore alike--who get upset when they're forced into situations where they can't do 100% of their damage. We got full melee uptime fights in Endwalker because people couldn't handle forced disconnects. Fights with dynamic timelines (like O7S) are a no-go because people were complaining about Dada vs Biblio opener uptime differences. Look at E4S and P8S - both are fights with TWO (2) potential timelines, yet people still complained. And fight design is not the only aspect of the game that suffers from this; just look at the state of some jobs today.

Even though Dawntrail is a step in the right direction, the fight designers will always be held back by their need to appease the players that get mad and try to argue it's 'bad game design' when their perfectionist tendencies are challenged. Removing positionals is not going to change this. I fully believe the devs are capable of creating interesting fights/mechanics/jobs/whatever as Dawntrail is beginning to show us, but until the playerbase gets over their need to be 100% optimal in everything, there's no chance in hell we are going to see the full potential of what devs can offer.

Deleted and reposted as I forgot to include the quotes, my mistake.

[Eudyptes]

The back-and-forth is rife with miscommunication because an objective fact ("you will lose DPS due to factors out of your control") is being conflated with a subjective judgement ("losing damage in this way is bad game design"). The latter is what's causing this disconnect: what you consider bad game design is considered by others to be a source of engagement. Your view that it is bad game design is obviously a valid one, but please do not treat it as a universally accepted fact.

It IS bad game design. It is an objectively negative impact on performance outside of the player's control.

However, whether you like said bad game design or not, or just don't care about it is entirely subjective.

[Mikey_R]

You can replicate this gameplay by making melee-only mechanics that have specific safe spot carveouts that ranged can ignore. And you can do this while making the bosses more mobile and kinetic so those gap closers are used more often.

The fact you say this shows you don't understand why we like positionals. We don't want to be force into a specific spot, we want to find and make those spots ourselves.



Also, on the topic of 'forced DPS loss', you do not know that. It is only a guaranteed DPS loss if they assume you are going to be hitting 100% of your positionals. You don't know how many they account for when designing for DPS, so the statement is just false.

However, I done some very rough maths. Based off of Monk's 112 string, I took the average of the 6 GCDs based on usage per form (Leaping Opo/Dragon Kick 1:1, Rising Dragon/Twin Snakes 1:1, Pouncing Coeurl/Demolish 2:1), found an average per GCD, took the potency per positional, took it's average per GCD (remembering it is every 3 GCDs) and made a table for total potency over a 10 minute fight.

I then accounted for the % of positionals hit and compared that to the % of positionals assumed to hit (or intended to hit as by SE). Assuming SE wants an 80% positional hit rate, buy hitting 100% of your positionals, you gain 0.89% potency, at the other extreme, if you successfully miss them all, it is a -3.57% potency difference. The range between 70% and 90% goes between -0.45% - 0.45% potency difference. I do think it is worth noting that FFXIV's damage variance is ±5% as a reference. This maths was also tipped into the positional's favour, so real world differences will be even smaller (at least for Monk, though similar results would likely come from the other melee).

So, we have a very small damage difference, that makes no difference as to whether you hit them or not, they do not affect fight design and people find them fun to hit, even with negligible gains. Again, the only ones who want them gone are the ones who feel bad for missing them and/or making them out to be a massive deal breaker in your damage output. It is all subjective feelings with nothing objective behind it, and yes, it is subjective on our side as well. However, should we really take this away from those that enjoy them?

I also have not heard anyone who is against comment on having a range of positional requirements in the melee role. If you had 1 or 2 melee jobs that had no positionals, would you care that the rest had them?

[W00by]

Positionals harm the game because it artificially limits what the devs can do in terms of boss design, all to make sure melee DPS can nail back and side positionals reliably while working true north in every so-often to deal with it otherwise. You can replicate this gameplay by making melee-only mechanics that have specific safe spot carveouts that ranged can ignore. And you can do this while making the bosses more mobile and kinetic so those gap closers are used more often.

I strongly disagree with this idea, and if you hold this stance after playing the first Arcadion tier, then I don't think you did it on melee.

Positionals are an opportunity to make mechanics MORE interesting, not less. Sure, if people cry "my positionals!" and complain whenever a fight makes them hard to get, maybe the devs make them always easy to hit. But that is NOT the approach used in the Arcadion tiers.

Have you played a high positional uptime melee DPS in the 2nd or 3rd turn? (Spoilers for anyone who hasn't done them yet)

In Honey B. Lovely, the heart mechanic where she is shooting hearts out of her hitbox, they're coming from the edge of the arena, and she's dropping AoEs on you is INCREDIBLY difficult to land positionals during. They did not make that mechanic "boring" and "limited" just so melee could hit their positionals. The easiest way to do that mechanic is to stand at range so you have ample time to see where the hearts are coming from, but if you're committed to hitting your positionals in that phase, you have to react very quickly to AoEs and hearts and move accordingly, as well as ration your True North stacks or you'll run out. In comparison, that mechanic is very easy on casters because you can just stand outside her hitbox and be fine. The mechanic is ENHANCED by positionals, not harmed.

The same is true of Lariat Combos in the third turn. He hides his butt in the flaming wall and dashes across the arena repeatedly with little regard for your positionals, forcing you to creatively use gap closers, true north, and job-specific mechanics that delay positionals to keep uptime. Whereas for casters, you watch and ask yourself "do I go left or right?" And then do that.

It is an entitled take to say that positionals limit boss design. It indicates the idea that you feel you must ALWAYS hit positionals and therefore the fight must ALWAYS allow for positionals. But the most fun part of positionals for melee mains is trying to get them when it's hard, not when it's easy. And this tier was insanely fun on melee because of this high level of engagement.

There are times they turn positionals off, sure, but that doesn't mean they are meaningless mechanics. They add lots of depth to fights like this. And you could argue a phase where positionals are off is the same as a phase with low movement requirements for healers and casters or low damage output for healers and tanks--a brief respite, but not the norm.

[W00by]

It IS bad game design. It is an objectively negative impact on performance outside of the player's control.

However, whether you like said bad game design or not, or just don't care about it is entirely subjective.

This take might make sense if positionals were ever "outside the player's control," as you insinuate. But this is not the case -- far from it. Positionals are almost entirely within the hands of the melee player (excepting when tanks are actively griefing, which I don't think should factor into optimized job design, since in an "optimal" environment where you're trying to hit literally every single positional, you wouldn't play with a griefing tank anyway).

Take, for example, Reaper. I'm gonna throw myself and all the other Reaper players under the bus here and just come out and say it; that job basically does not have positionals. If you hate positionals but REALLY wanna play a melee, play Reaper. I mean, sure, the positionals are there. But you have so much control over when you do them that they might as well not be. You do one every 10 seconds or so, and that assumes you're doing them on cooldown, which you are by no means forced to do. If you get 50 Soul gauge and can't hit a positional right then and there, you could always just...wait. You can wait by continuing your combo, or refreshing Shadow of Death. You can wait by using Enshroud, which has no positional requirements. You can wait by holding onto a charge of Soul Slice until you know you're gonna be able to hit that positional. You can save up 100 gauge so you can True North and hit 2 positionals in a row, which buys you another 20s without having to do positionals.

The only time you MUST do positionals on Reaper is after Gluttony, when you have two in a row. But even then, I'm gonna share the cheat code: just True North it. Literally. Just True North every Gluttony. I had this habit so ingrained into me during Endwalker that I sometimes still True North Gluttony on WALL BOSSES that literally don't have positionals. If you just True North every single Gluttony and use the techniques mentioned above to delay and manipulate all other positionals, then you will only miss positionals in the extreme upper echelons of the game, literally the hardest fights in existence. And even then, you might miss, like. ONE Gibbet. It's not gonna break the bank. And you can optimize even more if you actually plan True Norths well. Even in an unoptimized environment, if you miss a positional on Reaper, either your tank is playing Instant Transmission DBZ DDR with the boss, or you could have done something better.

Now, that's one melee, but what about the job I main now, which is Viper? That job has incredibly high positional frequency. There's an alternating one at the end of every combo, and Dreadwinder has two that follow it, with double weaves no less! Surely it is often just impossible to hit positionals on that job! Well, no, not really. Because, again, you have ample resources that allow you to manipulate when and where you do positionals. You can use Uncoiled Fury stacks to delay positional casts. You can Reawaken with one of your odd minute casts to have about 12s of no positional requirements. You can progress your combo until you're on a positional hit, then start Dreadwinder, True North, and do both Dreadwinder positionals AND your combo finisher positional under a single True North. Using techniques like this, along with Slither to move to people that are in position if I'm not fast enough, I can almost always avoid missing positionals.

And, guess what? Even in situations where hitting positionals IS prohibitively difficult, like Dawntrail EX2 where the boss is facing the player for an extended period of time, positionals are within your control. Because the question flips on its head. The question is no longer "How do I hit all of my positionals?"

Instead, it is "How do I miss as few positionals as possible here?"

If you play the fight well leading up to phases like that, you can enter with two True North stacks and whatever tools your job has to delay positionals. You can time these True Norths as well as possible to cover as many positional casts as you can, and squeeeeeeze into uncomfortable places to try just a liiiittle harder to hit that positional, and use your job's tools if it has any to do just a LITTLE better each pull. Or, if you know the boss is gonna turn at a certain time (which is easy to notice if you do fights repeatedly in a game with scripted fights like this--they almost never turn completely randomly), try to delay positionals from that spot or plan to have a True North up there. If you do it perfectly and you're on a flexible job, you can often get through these phases without missing any positionals at all, even when you thought it was impossible before. And, if you miss one or two, hey! At least you hit as many as you could, by working a little harder. And some jobs are more flexible than others, true - Dragoon has less tools than jobs like Reaper or Viper do. But if you want that flexibility, hey, just play Reaper.

Thinking the positionals are out of your control indicates that you aren't at a level where you're really engaging with them. And that's fine! None of the techniques I've mentioned are required to clear even the hardest content, like Savage raids and Ultimate fights. The game isn't balanced around everyone being at the highest level, and it's honestly great that there's so many ways to enjoy this game. But to call it objectively bad game design based on a misunderstanding like this demonstrates that maybe you shouldn't be talking about the mechanic. You are assuming that every player should be at the ceiling of their job at all times. But this is not the case -- in fact, next to NO ONE is ever at the apex of their job, there's almost always something that could have been done slightly better. You need to realize that part of the joy is getting as close to the ceiling as possible, not assuming that we are entitled to it. They say the joy is in the journey, after all.

[rewd]

snip.

And have you done the raids on casters? I'd say clearly not, as you are generalising the most heterogeneous role in the game. Do you really think you can put SMN and BLM in the same basket just because they are both casters/magical ranged DPS?

The heart mechanic is easy on casters? Please, tell me again how easy it is on BLM. Any of those fights, actually.

Did you know that Lariat Combo can interrupt your spells because it can break your LoS? And yes, of course, I just need to look if I have to go left or right and then do that, since BLM can fly. If I'm casting Fire IV I'll just interrupt it and then come back here and say "Man, at least I'm not a melee, that would be stressful!"

Before meleesplaining, you should have enough experience when it comes to the jobs you want to talk about (as your profile shows, the only caster you have at 100 is RDM and you haven't even unlocked PCT). You can talk about melee struggles without minimalising caster struggles. It's very annoying and ridiculous.

[W00by]

If you wanna look at my logs since Heavensward, I've raided on SMN, BLM, RDM, DNC, and of course all the melees. Ive also played GNB, WAR, and PLD. I have done the most recent raids on RDM and have talked to lots of other casters about them. I've also watched healer clears of turns 2 and 3. I do think if you're trying to eke out EVERY drip of potency as a caster, it's of course going to be a lot harder. Just like if you're trying to hit every single positional, it's going to be harder.

I have a limited number of space in these posts, and I'm already verbose as it is, so I don't want to predicate every single caster comment with "except Black Mage that one's hard." I'm sure it is pretty hard on Black Mage. But having done it on Red Mage, I thought optimal RDM was much, much easier than optimal melee.

Now, check yourself before posting hostile stuff like this. I don't like to flex player experience, but I'm not "meleesplaining" anything. I play every role but healer, but you'll notice I don't talk about healer because, unlike you, I know my limits.