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This post is about issues shared by all Jobs within the general "Melee DPS" Role in FFXIV, rather than any specific Melee DPS Job.
As well, while this post is going to focus on the Melee DPS Role specifically, the four Tank Role jobs share many of these same issues and frustrations.
Do you currently enjoy playing Melee DPS in FFXIV?As well, while this post is going to focus on the Melee DPS Role specifically, the four Tank Role jobs share many of these same issues and frustrations.
No.
In fact, Shadowbringers has pushed me to the point of refusing to even play any of the Melee DPS Jobs, because long-standing issues with Melee DPS design, and Encounter design, continue to go unaddressed, and instead just keep getting compounded, or given awful "Band-Aid" fixes like "True North".
What do you dislike about playing Melee DPS in FFXIV?In fact, Shadowbringers has pushed me to the point of refusing to even play any of the Melee DPS Jobs, because long-standing issues with Melee DPS design, and Encounter design, continue to go unaddressed, and instead just keep getting compounded, or given awful "Band-Aid" fixes like "True North".
1. Melee DPS have extremely precise rotations with poor tolerance for disruption, delays, or disconnects from Melee Range.
Basically, any time something goes wrong, or any time an encounter strategy isn't perfectly optimized (often in ways that are impractical for PUGs, anyway), it is disproportionately-likely that the Melee DPS are the players that are going to get screwed over.
In this design environment, it is also disproportionately-exhausting and frustrating to play a Melee DPS Job. Why would someone want to play something that's going to very frequently be more work and more frustration for less fun and less output?7. Melee DPS are abnormally-punished by Enemy movement.
All Melee DPS
Monk
Samurai
Ninja
2. Despite the above design observations, Melee DPS are far-too-frequently not allowed to have uninterrupted uptime on a target in order to execute these rotations.Punished disproportionately for disconnects compared to other Jobs, due to the loss of Auto Attacks.
Dragoon- Wants to keep its "Life of the Dragon" cycle aligned precisely with its awkward system of rotating buffs ("Blood for Blood", "Dragon Sight", "Battle Litany").
- Wants to keep "Life Surge" aligned with "Full Thrust".
- Wants to maintain full coverage of all actions under "Disembowel" buff.
- Needs to alternate between "Chaos Thrust" and "Full Thrust" combos, but disconnects force awkward decisions about whether or not to drop "Disembowel" coverage, since applying "Disembowel" forces you to also apply "Chaos Thrust" again.
- Wants to enter its extremely-important 90-second burst cycle with a specific alignment of "Form", "Leaden Fist", "Demolish", and so on.
- Wants to minimize overwriting "Demolish", but also not let "Demolish" drop.
- Wants to minimize overwriting "Twin Snakes", but also not let "Twin Snakes" drop.
- Disconnects require performing annoying on-the-fly calculations to project out how to do any of this correctly, due to the convoluted alternating Form system.
- The crucial 90-second burst cycle relies on uninterrupted Melee Range uptime for 15-20s, and also becomes frustratingly-deranged if any interruptions to its "Form" alignment mess up "Perfect Balance", "Twin Snakes", "Demolish", or "Tornado Kick" timing, or any Positionals.
- "The Forbidden Chakra" is frequently overloaded with procs and gauge pips, leading to frustratingly uncontrollable losses of DPS, and any disconnects further compound this by preventing "The Forbidden Chakra" from being activated to dump gauge.
- "Nightmare fuel" 60-second rotation, where even small amounts of GCD drift will derange the ability to keep "Higanbana", "Meikyo Shisui", "Midare Setsugekka", "Tsubame Gaeshi", and "Shoha" aligned with encounter mechanics and party buffs.
- Wants to minimize overwriting "Gekko" and "Kasha", but also not let "Gekko" or "Kasha" drop.
- Wants to minimize overwriting Higanbana, but also not let "Higanbana" drop.
- Disconnects require performing excessive on-the-fly calculations to project out how to do any of this correctly, due to the frustratingly-rigid "Sen" system and the convoluted way in which it interacts with the 60-second GCD total, the "Iajutsu" system, and the actions "Higanbana", "Meikyo Shisui", "Midare Setsugekka", "Tsubame Gaeshi", and "Shoha".
- Disconnects also affect the totals of "Kenki", which can eventually compound enough to cause further on-the-fly adjustments to be necessary to avoid coming up unexpectedly-short for crucial actions such as "Hissatsu: Kaiten" and "Hissatsu: Senei".
- Absolutely must apply "Trick Attack" on-time, every time, to avoid de-synchronizing this crucial party-support buff from other party members's personal DPS rotations.
- Relies heavily on ensuring that all of its personal DPS burst lands inside its own "Trick Attack" window, pressuring a 15-second window wherein disconnects are extremely punishing.
- Has an action "Ten Chi Jin" that punishes the player for any movement whatsoever, and must be executed immediately off-cooldown to remain aligned with "Trick Attack", and can come off-cooldown just in time for a disconnect.
- Has an action "Dream Within a Dream" + "Assassinate" that punishes the player for disconnecting, and also prevents movement with an animation lock, but must be executed immediately off-cooldown to remain aligned with "Trick Attack", and can come off-cooldown just in time for a disconnect or necessary movement.
- Has an action "Shadow Fang" that punishes the player for disconnecting, but must be executed immediately off-cooldown to remain aligned with "Trick Attack", and can come off-cooldown just in time for a disconnect.
- Wants to attempt to dump "Ninki" gauge inside "Trick Attack", but this requires the action "Bhavacakra", which cannot be executed while disconnected, but holding it for after a disconnect will often cause the player to run out of OGCD weave slots to fit this gauge dump into, or force it to drift outside "Trick Attack".
Instead, far too many encounters force Melee DPS to devolve into uncomfortable, unfun, "improvised" stop-gap rotations that take away a great deal of the fun and satisfaction of the Job's gameplay.
Far too many encounters in the game, especially in Dungeons, Alliance Raids, Extreme Trials, and other "sub-Savage" content, but also in many Savage encounters as well, casually pepper an encounter's design with unpredictable, prolonged, exaggerated, or grotesque windows of forced disconnect from Melee Range.
In fact, it honestly seems like many of FFXIV's Encounter Designers either have never played a Melee DPS Job in their entire life, or are completely oblivious to the rotational needs and concerns of the Melee DPS Jobs.
Disconnects are applied at seemingly-arbitrary times that often are long enough to derange a rotation severely (eg, by allowing important buffs to drop all the way off), or allowed to occur at exactly the worst possible point in a Melee DPS rotation (for example, exactly at the mark where a Samurai needs to perform the crucial and hyper-sensitive "Higanbana" → "Meikyo Shisui" → "Midare Setsugekka" → "Tsubame Gaeshi" burst sequence).
In most cases, there is little to no way to "adapt" or "work around" the issue. Instead, a Melee DPS player must simply accept that their rotation gets completely ruined, with little to no recourse, or even anything "fun" to do instead (due to lacking any practical disconnect actions, in most cases).
In short — many encounters in the game are outright frustrating, demoralizing, and straight-up "not fun" as Melee DPS, and Encounter Designers seem either oblivious to this issue, or insensitive to this issue, or both.
3. Melee DPS are punished for trying to use the actions that they are given to deal with disconnects, forcing Melee DPS to spend most disconnect periods doing bizarre and annoying things, or just stopping their GCD entirely and doing nothing, all of which feels awful.Far too many encounters in the game, especially in Dungeons, Alliance Raids, Extreme Trials, and other "sub-Savage" content, but also in many Savage encounters as well, casually pepper an encounter's design with unpredictable, prolonged, exaggerated, or grotesque windows of forced disconnect from Melee Range.
In fact, it honestly seems like many of FFXIV's Encounter Designers either have never played a Melee DPS Job in their entire life, or are completely oblivious to the rotational needs and concerns of the Melee DPS Jobs.
Disconnects are applied at seemingly-arbitrary times that often are long enough to derange a rotation severely (eg, by allowing important buffs to drop all the way off), or allowed to occur at exactly the worst possible point in a Melee DPS rotation (for example, exactly at the mark where a Samurai needs to perform the crucial and hyper-sensitive "Higanbana" → "Meikyo Shisui" → "Midare Setsugekka" → "Tsubame Gaeshi" burst sequence).
In most cases, there is little to no way to "adapt" or "work around" the issue. Instead, a Melee DPS player must simply accept that their rotation gets completely ruined, with little to no recourse, or even anything "fun" to do instead (due to lacking any practical disconnect actions, in most cases).
In short — many encounters in the game are outright frustrating, demoralizing, and straight-up "not fun" as Melee DPS, and Encounter Designers seem either oblivious to this issue, or insensitive to this issue, or both.
Dragoon
Monk
Samurai
Ninja
4. Positionals are an outdated and irritating design element that punishes Melee DPS exclusively and disproportionately in most Encounters in the game.- Extraordinarily-long Combo Chains, combined with the addition of "Raiden Thrust" in Shadowbringers, mean that a Dragoon can basically never effectively use "Piercing Talon" without causing more DPS loss than just doing nothing, because "Piercing Talon" breaks combo chains.
- This feels horrible — Dragoon is effectively forced to just take its hands off the keyboard or controller and stop its GCD completely while sitting around patting its own spiked butt and waiting for FFXIV's Encounter Designers to allow the Dragoon to activate actions again.
- Potency attached to "Spineshatter Dive" and "Dragonfire Dive" means these actions will almost never actually be available to use as gap-closers, and instead just get spammed mindlessly from Melee Range as soon as they come off-cooldown.
- FFXIV's bizarre movement calculation system means that using "High Jump" from range sees to still treat the Dragoon as if they were located at every point between their current location and the target's location. In other words, using "High Jump" from range frequently just causes you to get killed by the AOE that you were supposed to be safely outside of.
- "Elusive Jump" requires bizarre and convoluted camera-spinning and other strange behaviors in order to function as an effective gap-closer. Failure to execute this directly will take the Dragoon away from the target, or into another AOE, or straight into a "death wall" or off the edge of the arena.
- Monk has nothing satisfying to do while disconnected, and it instead becomes a window for bland and unsatisfying "chores".
- "Form Shift" requires performing excessive projections and calculations to try to make sure that the Monk returns to the target in the correct form that will both keep the 90s window aligned, and yet also not allow either "Twin Snakes" or "Demolish" to drop off. In actual practice, whether or not this succeeds will usually end up being arbitrary rather than planned.
- "Meditation" is annoying to use, frequently clips the GCD awkwardly upon returning to the target, and just gives the Monk more OGCD clutter that the Monk already doesn't have enough weave space for, and is constantly struggling to not lose to overwritten procs. This makes this action much less satisfying than it might otherwise be.
- "Shoulder Tackle" is probably on-cooldown, because the potency attached to it means that it gets dumped in Melee Range in order to maximize the 90s buff window. Holding it for a disconnect means punishing yourself with compounding potency losses later. Neither outcome feels satisfying.
- "Six Sided Star" requires performing on-the-fly calculus of whether the disconnect will actually be long enough to justify the excessive GCD clock, or risks clipping unnecessarily into the subsequent GCD upon returning to the target. Additionally, the prolonged GCD from "Six Sided Star" causes the Monk to push out GCD space that could have been used for "Meditation", causing these two actions to conflict against each other in a way that feels like frustrating micro-management to sort out.
- "Anatman" is impractical and unusable in most situations, because it directly competes with "Meditation" and "Six Sided Star" for GCD space, and can also clip into resuming GCDs on the target, and even in situations where there is a prolonged period of time to utilize "Anatman", it will frequently get ruined anyway by the fact that these windows of an encounter usually also require party movement, which then immediately breaks "Anatman".
- "Enpi" breaks combos, which is a DPS loss over just doing nothing and finishing the combo afterwards.
- "Enpi" consumes "Meikyo Shisui" stacks.
- "Enpi" breaks "Tsubame Gaeshi".
- "Hissatsu: Yaten + Enpi" is useless in almost any case where using the enhanced "Enpi" will break a combo.
- ... all of which means that "Enpi" is useless in the vast majority of situations where a disconnect occurs, which means that Samurai is forced to just sit around doing nothing with its GCD while waiting for a disconnect to end.
- "Hissatsu: Yaten" does not launch the Samurai far enough or fast enough to be worth using over just walking out and/or "Sprinting" out, and also consumes "Kenki", which can derange timing on crucial "Hissatsu" actions like "Hissatsu: Kaiten", and thus "Hissatsu: Yaten" is a misleading DPS loss in the vast majority of situations.
- "Hissatsu: Gyoten" consumes "Kenki", which means that for similar reasons to "Hissatsu: Yaten", this action is used only when absolutely necessary, and otherwise avoided.
- "Shukuchi" is an awful, clunky action design that basically requires multiple different clunky and unresponsive Macros for Enemy Target, Friendly Target, and so on, in order to be used in any practical way, because attempting to quickly Ground-Target a tiny reticle in FFXIV's sluggish and unresponsive game engine is a fast way to get yourself "more killed" than just walking to that location would have.
- "Throwing Dagger" breaks combos and consumes stacks of "Bunshin" at dramatically-reduced potency, meaning that in the vast majority of situations, "Throwing Dagger" is completely useless, and the Ninja is forced to just stop its GCD and do nothing once charges of "Mudra" have been exhausted, or the Ninja cannot safely consume any further charges of "Mudra" without risking rotational derangement.
The game does not accommodate Positionals.
5. Melee DPS are constantly pressured to risk outright death or other disruptive effects just to try to execute their rotations in a satisfying way.Tanks don't have to deal with positionals. Ranged Physical DPS don't have to deal with positionals. Caster DPS don't have to deal with positionals. Healers don't have to deal with positionals.
This means that if an Encounter Strategy favors doing things as a party that make safely meeting Positional requirements either difficult or impossible... Melee DPS players are just expected to "deal with it".
FFXIV's Encounter Design team also seems to not really care about this issue, or at least not pay much attention to it, frequently designing encounters, encounter phases, boss positioning, and so forth, in ways that make obtaining positionals risky, hazardous, or impossible.
Positionals aren't even fun any more, or necessary.This means that if an Encounter Strategy favors doing things as a party that make safely meeting Positional requirements either difficult or impossible... Melee DPS players are just expected to "deal with it".
FFXIV's Encounter Design team also seems to not really care about this issue, or at least not pay much attention to it, frequently designing encounters, encounter phases, boss positioning, and so forth, in ways that make obtaining positionals risky, hazardous, or impossible.
When I was level 9 and fighting Orobon FATEs in Western Thanalan, I thought that Positionals were interesting, and added dynamism and interest to a combat system that was otherwise fairly static and boring.
But FFXIV has not needed Positionals for a long time now. At each additional level cap, Rotations and Encounter Designs continue to become more and more refined, involved, and complex, with all sorts of design elements to track and manage. In this design environment, Positionals are little more than a tacked-on nuisance, and make rotations feel unnecessarily convoluted and annoying when both Rotations and Encounters already have more than enough going on already.
In many cases, Positionals don't even make sense any more, and feel blatantly tacked-on just because someone told the Job Design team, "This is a Melee Job, it must have positionals". Why is "Armor Crush" a Flank positional? Why does "Gekko" need to be done from the Rear? With many actions, there's a complete desync between any sort of "attack fantasy" or visual and the positional requirement, making it feel arbitrary and annoying.
The "Band-Aid" fixes for Positionals are becoming more and more conspicuous and awkward.But FFXIV has not needed Positionals for a long time now. At each additional level cap, Rotations and Encounter Designs continue to become more and more refined, involved, and complex, with all sorts of design elements to track and manage. In this design environment, Positionals are little more than a tacked-on nuisance, and make rotations feel unnecessarily convoluted and annoying when both Rotations and Encounters already have more than enough going on already.
In many cases, Positionals don't even make sense any more, and feel blatantly tacked-on just because someone told the Job Design team, "This is a Melee Job, it must have positionals". Why is "Armor Crush" a Flank positional? Why does "Gekko" need to be done from the Rear? With many actions, there's a complete desync between any sort of "attack fantasy" or visual and the positional requirement, making it feel arbitrary and annoying.
"True North" is an annoying action that basically serves to add additional tacked-on keybind clutter to Melee DPS rotations. There is nothing interesting about it, it's just slapped-out as part of an already-overloaded OGCD weave system whenever the player is once again forced to lose Positionals due to Encounter Design or party strategies.
The very fact that "True North" currently exists, and keeps getting its cooldown reduced more and more, is evidence of how poorly Positionals fit into FFXIV's modern design: the design team refuses to actually remove Positionals, and instead keeps tacking on more convoluted chores that effectively remove Positionals.
Also, "Riddle of Earth", but I'm getting burnt-out with this post, so I don't even feel like getting into this one, but it's more of the same issue. Positionals are so bad at this point, that the designers decided to give Monk "True North 2: Electric True-galoo", so you can "True North" while you "True North".
Also, more and more and more enemies are getting the beloved "Circular Target Circle" that signifies all Positionals automatically apply, because more and more often it's becoming blatantly-obvious even to the designers that Positionals won't work in a certain encounter or piece of content. So there's increasing swathes of game content where Positionals already don't even matter... but then sometimes, they suddenly arbitrarily do again, because their existence still needs to be justified.
And finally, the developers keep scaling back the difference between making a Positional and failing a Positional, again and again, patch after patch after patch, trying to minimize the difference between situations where you can and cannot land a Positional.
Holy Zodiark, devs, look at your own hand-coding on the wall: Positionals are not working as a design element any more, and you keep doing more and more to attempt to minimize their relevance, yet refuse to just remove them entirely. This sounds like the description of a bloated, unnecessary design element that has badly-outlived its usefulness.
"But as soon as Positionals are removed, then you'll be complaining that Melee DPS feel more boring and less skillful to play!"The very fact that "True North" currently exists, and keeps getting its cooldown reduced more and more, is evidence of how poorly Positionals fit into FFXIV's modern design: the design team refuses to actually remove Positionals, and instead keeps tacking on more convoluted chores that effectively remove Positionals.
Also, "Riddle of Earth", but I'm getting burnt-out with this post, so I don't even feel like getting into this one, but it's more of the same issue. Positionals are so bad at this point, that the designers decided to give Monk "True North 2: Electric True-galoo", so you can "True North" while you "True North".
Also, more and more and more enemies are getting the beloved "Circular Target Circle" that signifies all Positionals automatically apply, because more and more often it's becoming blatantly-obvious even to the designers that Positionals won't work in a certain encounter or piece of content. So there's increasing swathes of game content where Positionals already don't even matter... but then sometimes, they suddenly arbitrarily do again, because their existence still needs to be justified.
And finally, the developers keep scaling back the difference between making a Positional and failing a Positional, again and again, patch after patch after patch, trying to minimize the difference between situations where you can and cannot land a Positional.
Holy Zodiark, devs, look at your own hand-coding on the wall: Positionals are not working as a design element any more, and you keep doing more and more to attempt to minimize their relevance, yet refuse to just remove them entirely. This sounds like the description of a bloated, unnecessary design element that has badly-outlived its usefulness.
I think that this metaphorical train departed the metaphorical station a loooooooong time ago. The time for worrying about this passed some time long ago, when "True North" kept getting its cooldown reduced more and more, "Riddle of Earth" became ludicrous, and potency differences between landing and failing a Positional kept getting squeezed narrower and narrower.
So, I think we're already there. At this point, Positionals just need a mercy-killing, which frees Melee DPS up to have different design elements used to add depth and interest. And that's if they actually even need that — even without Positionals, most Melee DPS already compete favorably for complexity, depth, etc with most other Jobs. Possibly even "out-compete" in many cases.
So, I think we're already there. At this point, Positionals just need a mercy-killing, which frees Melee DPS up to have different design elements used to add depth and interest. And that's if they actually even need that — even without Positionals, most Melee DPS already compete favorably for complexity, depth, etc with most other Jobs. Possibly even "out-compete" in many cases.
Per everything discussed above, it becomes clear why Melee DPS feel a high amount of pressure to stay next to the enemy target for as long as possible, and are severely punished for not timing this correctly.
For example, a Melee DPS that's "good" at estimating how long they can stay in an AOE can pick up tens or twenties of extra GCDs over a given encounter, and mitigate or entirely avoid having their rotation deranged internally, or desynchronized from party buffs externally... all of which creates a dramatic discrepancy in DPS output compared to a more cautious Melee DPS.
This pressures all Melee DPS players to take these kinds of death-tempting risks in order to feel competitive, and if they don't, they will be judged unfavorably players that tend to just look at final DPS output.
In turn, this increases the burden on Healers, who have to clean up the messes for the many Melee DPS that feel pressured to take these risks to maintain their rotation, but get it wrong, and then either outright KO, or require an emergency spot-heal.
Then it becomes the entire party's problem if said Melee DPS has too much Weakness (leading to Enrage) or is KO'd during a mechanic that cannot afford to have any missing players (common in Extreme and Savage). So ultimately, this is irritating for everyone involved, and becomes everyone's problem.
If Melee DPS rotations were significantly more flexible about disconnects, and provided significantly better options for how to keep the GCD rolling while disconnected, this dramatic discrepancy could be attenuated significantly, and probably reduce the stress or frustration level for many Melee DPS players accordingly.
6. Melee DPS are abnormally-punished for decisions made by Tanks and other players.For example, a Melee DPS that's "good" at estimating how long they can stay in an AOE can pick up tens or twenties of extra GCDs over a given encounter, and mitigate or entirely avoid having their rotation deranged internally, or desynchronized from party buffs externally... all of which creates a dramatic discrepancy in DPS output compared to a more cautious Melee DPS.
This pressures all Melee DPS players to take these kinds of death-tempting risks in order to feel competitive, and if they don't, they will be judged unfavorably players that tend to just look at final DPS output.
In turn, this increases the burden on Healers, who have to clean up the messes for the many Melee DPS that feel pressured to take these risks to maintain their rotation, but get it wrong, and then either outright KO, or require an emergency spot-heal.
Then it becomes the entire party's problem if said Melee DPS has too much Weakness (leading to Enrage) or is KO'd during a mechanic that cannot afford to have any missing players (common in Extreme and Savage). So ultimately, this is irritating for everyone involved, and becomes everyone's problem.
If Melee DPS rotations were significantly more flexible about disconnects, and provided significantly better options for how to keep the GCD rolling while disconnected, this dramatic discrepancy could be attenuated significantly, and probably reduce the stress or frustration level for many Melee DPS players accordingly.
- If a Tank does something bizarre with Boss Facing, Melee DPS lose their Positionals.
- If a Tank turns a short-range Cleave the wrong way, Melee DPS are the most likely to get KO'd.
- If a Tank sits a boss in an AOE, or doesn't move a boss to a new safe location quickly enough, or any of hundreds of other possible ways that a Tank can make a boss's Melee Radius a deadly hot-zone, then Melee DPS are the ones that lose out dramatically and disproportionately.
- The same issues apply for someone dropping a dangerous AOE right on top of a boss's hit circle.
- The same issues apply for Ranged players that stand outside the party stack, and lure boss leaps and jumps and dashes out of melee range.
- The same issues apply to any "safety" strategies that absolutely make sense for clearing encounters, but require players to spend prolonged amounts of time away from the boss.
Basically, any time something goes wrong, or any time an encounter strategy isn't perfectly optimized (often in ways that are impractical for PUGs, anyway), it is disproportionately-likely that the Melee DPS are the players that are going to get screwed over.
In this design environment, it is also disproportionately-exhausting and frustrating to play a Melee DPS Job. Why would someone want to play something that's going to very frequently be more work and more frustration for less fun and less output?
Similar to the previous observation, FFXIV's abysmal server-client positioning handshakes (or whatever, I'm just throwing out words that sound vaguely correct, hopefully you understand what I'm trying to say) means that as soon as a target begins moving, it becomes incredibly frustrating to continue to successfully activate Melee-Range actions without receiving errors and failures.
This applies when Tanks need to move a boss. This applies when bosses decide to just randomly dash over to the other side of the galaxy to charge that Bard that wants to stand at the South Pole while doing their rotation. This applies when bosses decide they suddenly want to stand on the East side of the room. etc, etc, etc, etc...
Therefore, in addition to all of the other nuisances and frustrations facing Melee DPS, they also need to learn all sorts of bizarre tricks and timings for how to anticipate boss movement, boss facing, boss turning, boss jumps, boss leaps, boss charges, and so on, and so forth, and lead these motions correctly, often in ways that are visually bizarre and unintuitive.
Otherwise, you just get flooded with "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range."
...and your rotation desyncronizes and deranges anyway, even though on your screen, you are standing RIGHT NEXT TO THE TARGET.
8. Melee DPS Role Actions are underwhelming and uninteresting.This applies when Tanks need to move a boss. This applies when bosses decide to just randomly dash over to the other side of the galaxy to charge that Bard that wants to stand at the South Pole while doing their rotation. This applies when bosses decide they suddenly want to stand on the East side of the room. etc, etc, etc, etc...
Therefore, in addition to all of the other nuisances and frustrations facing Melee DPS, they also need to learn all sorts of bizarre tricks and timings for how to anticipate boss movement, boss facing, boss turning, boss jumps, boss leaps, boss charges, and so on, and so forth, and lead these motions correctly, often in ways that are visually bizarre and unintuitive.
Otherwise, you just get flooded with "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range." "Target is not in range."
...and your rotation desyncronizes and deranges anyway, even though on your screen, you are standing RIGHT NEXT TO THE TARGET.
...Maybe I shouldn't even mention this, since honestly, this is the absolute least of Melee DPS's problems, compared to everything discussed above.
But, uh, yeah:
"Feint"...
"Bloodbath"...
But, uh, yeah:
- "True North" is a tedious and annoying "Band-Aid" button for something that shouldn't even still be in the game at this point.
- "Arm's Length" is a bizarre "Get Out of Mechanics Free" button that basically only exists to undo half of what Encounter Designers try to do, making you wonder why the encounter even has a knockback to begin with.
- "Second Wind" heals for so little that it barely makes any difference in the vast majority of situations, making it an annoying and unsatisfying keypress.
- "Leg Sweep" doesn't even need to exist, its cooldown is too long, and almost anything interesting is immune to it. This is boring and mostly-useless button filler.
- ...is a frustrating and bland action that is sometimes completely-useless on entire encounters, because FFXIV's encounter design has a serious paraphilia about "Magic" damage.
- Other times, it's useless for almost anything except some auto-attacks.
- Then, randomly, Melee DPS will suddenly hit an encounter where "Feint" actually meaningfully reduces important damage.
- It just feels very uneven — "Tactician" is always useful for something. "Addle" is always useful for something. "Reprisal" is always useful for something. Whereas, "Feint" is just randomly useless on entire encounters.
- One solution would be to be make "Feint" a generic 10% damage reduction. This is boring, but at least it would allow Melee DPS to feel "important" during party-wide mitigation schemes.
- Another solution is to always include dangerous "Feint-able" Physical damage in every single encounter. This is not likely to work out well in actual practice, since it will become obvious and gimmicky, and constrain encounter designs in a weird way. And also, it's basically doing the same thing as the previous idea, but with extra steps.
- A third option is to make "Feint" do something other than generic mitigation. For example, it could become a very clear "Tank" cooldown, for example, by making the target "Miss" all auto-attacks for the duration. This would give "Feint" a productive niche in significantly reducing damage from long strings of auto-attacks, something that Tanks and Healers struggle to plan enough cooldowns for in many encounters.
- A fourth option is to just remove "Feint" completely and leave mitigation entirely up to the Support Jobs. Fairly boring, but not significantly more boring than having a button that's literally or almost-literally useless on like 50-70% of encounters already.
...is actually pretty smart and satisfying, and rewards good rotational alignment and good play, and can actually make a huge difference when timed well and in the correct situation. So, I like "Bloodbath". I think that this is an example of a Role Action that's actually fun and interesting.
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