[Latto]

Can there be a way to toggle whether or not you want to be in melee range of a monster when you land a back attack? Playing a 0 defensive stat sniper or any long range glass cannon in general, starting the battle surrounded by enemies is completely the opposite of what you'd want.

[Raigen.Convict]

You could try... Not doing a back attack?

[Mokou-tan]

To be fair, that loses you a whole free turn of actions. On one hand, it doesn't make sense that a ranged character wouldn't open fire from a distance when attacking from surprise.
On the other? That's the weakness of having low defenses, you don't want to be near an enemy. There's plenty of movement options available, so you can always spend an action getting some distance.

[Ranylyn]

I personally prefer to avoid the back attack when playing as a glass cannon ranged attacker.

... problem is, the rest of the party never has a reason to play that way, and I need to spend my "free turn" just escaping immediate counterattacks once the new turn rolls around. As an MG, for example, I'll need to use repeated Parting Shots to not immediately be destroyed, as opposed to milking Overcharge for all it's worth.

I've basically started building characters as solo specialists and party specialists separately, because of this kind of inconvenience.

[Lolzytripd]

I'm going to be that guy that points out that ranged classes, such as Ranger and gunner actually have Retreat based skills that still allow you to make basic attacks with guns and bows, use those....

[MegaBlues]

I think it's just bad design that back-attacking, something that should be arguably always beneficial, can be a detriment depending on your build.

Add in Close, Medium, and Far preferences for back-attacking, with Close being next to an enemy, Medium being 3-4 tiles from the enemy, and Far being 5-6 tiles from the enemy.

[Snake]

It should depend on the weapon type you're holding in your main hand, imo. The weapon's range and/or if it's melee or not is a good way to define how many tiles you want to be away from your target on a back attack.

Or even, maybe make it so that the back attack makes your first movement not consume any Momentum (a free, one-time Electrocharge effect) if you're using a gun or a bow?

[Latto]

You could try... Not doing a back attack?

I never do a back-attack when I'm playing solo, but in a party back-attacking is what people always try to go for, which is super detrimental for glass cannons considering how sometimes the tanks are stuck with 1 or 2 monsters while the squishies have 4 around them (literally just happened to me right now as I'm playing SL2 LOL.) Don't get me started on the amount of times I end up sitting next to a bunch of spatials.

I'm going to be that guy that points out that ranged classes, such as Ranger and gunner actually have Retreat based skills that still allow you to make basic attacks with guns and bows, use those....

Build wise and roleplay wise, my character is supposed to have next to no mobility but compensates for far range safety. Also gunner's retreating shot is like what, 4 range with a hit penalty? Flip shot also has like a 7 range target area.. You'd be better off just using movement if you really wanted to get far away, which still wastes momentum... which is the whole advantage to getting a back attack. My current build is oriented around having 0 mobility/defense but being able to achieve up to 23 range so it makes no sense that my character gets the jump on someone and immediately goes guns (bows?) blazing into melee mode.

Literally happening right as I type this:

[Raigen.Convict]

Personally, that free round is the round you get to reposition. Sure, makes no rp sense but you can't have every game mechanic match rp mechanics. It's just not gonna happen. Dev doesn't do anything that there's no real -reason- to do.

[Neus]

I mean, you still get a free round to do whatever so it's not like it's an actual detriment. Because enemy placement is mostly random it's not really easy to have a 'preference' for how far you want to spawn from enemies because there might not always be tiles that fulfill that condition.

Not saying this can't change but I'll have to think more about a solution that would make sense.