An extensive feedback on 6.1 Samurai changes

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Originally Posted by Zeretus

Thank you very much, appreciate the response a lot! :D



Personally, with how my keybinds are set up, 33 actions is a perfect number for me, no more, no less. However as far as I'm aware it's less comfortable to play on a gamepad due to the limited amount of possible keybinds, so I guess that might be the reason. And of course making space for future additions as well.



I actually enjoyed playing around with the idea of Kaiten giving autocrits, but like I said, unless they resolve the concern of crit buffs first, we end up sacrificing job synergy, which is especially painful with Samurai being a raw dps oriented job. (You can already encounter difficulties finding a group pushing high-end content as a samurai in the current iteration)



I'm a little bit on the fence when it comes to utility tools having the same potency per kenki as your main ogcd filler. While it does provide them some depth for optimisation purposes, incorporating them as a consistent part of your rotation doesn't really entice me a lot. Especially considering risks involved using them outside of intended scenarios. So I think that's something they should be mindful of moving forward.

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Hi, controller/console player here. Absolutely no problem with button space for me. The only one I find an issue was NIN and PLD, but that too had more to do with finding a place for everything where I would use it comfortably, rather than having access to it at all.

Button bloat for controllers on SAM is not the problem and I wish ppl would stop thinking we have it so rough.

Ultimately Kaiten had to go. It comes down to a simple principle of DPS design. Do not do in two ogcd presses what you could have done with one.

Kaiten was not a meaningful decision. You never made the decision not to Kaiten, unless you'd made a big mistake. Once you got your groove going, Kaiten was a sure thing, always, every time. What this meant was that Iaijutsu was always, every time, going to be Kaiten'd no matter what.

So, if Kaiten doesn't serve as a decision point, and your Iaijutsus are always, without exception, two button presses, why must it be two button presses? Is there a reason (other than preserving muscle memory, or you like the animation) to make it 2 button presses?

And the answer is, no. There really isn't.

So a question that also needs to be asked is why the devs never reacted to your attachment to Kaiten, and your clear love of the button?

The answer is: You never expressed any love for Kaiten. Never. When people talk about the high points of Samurai, they talked about Midare Setsugekka and they talked about Senei and they talked about Oni and they talked about Tsubame.

But they never talked about Kaiten, except 'You hit this button every time you do Iaijutsu.' Ya'll just talked about it like it was--it was just a button you hit because you had to.

So they treated it like you talked about it--like a button you just had to press.

Then, when they announced Samurai burst was being redistributed (which is part of the reason behind the change, as a nerf to Dancer and Bard and other raid-wide burst windows), you reacted with some strange cultish emotional attachment to Kaiten that frankly is out of nowhere.

So... forgive me if I don't exactly believe ya'll when you say Kaiten is THAT important and THAT beloved. I think there's a different reason, and that the Kaiten-Bargaining is just an emotional response to something deeper.

I think ya'll are seeing Samurai is not leading the DPS charts, and you're afraid that nerfs to synergy will keep it there and you're afraid that the devs don't want Sam to be good.

And this is a reasonable fear.

But here's the problem. If they bring back Kaiten, they're going to gut the potencies of Iaijutsu and Tsubame to compensate, or they're going to make Kaiten enable the auto-crit, but what they're not going to do is revert the old potencies and put the power back in Samurai burst. They've said that reducing that burst and putting that power elsewhere is their intention, so Kaiten coming back won't get you your big dick MSG crits back. So when you ask for Kaiten back, ask yourself--if they're going to keep Samurai burst low anyways, is this actually what you want? Or, is what you want actually the samurai burst back?

And unfortunately, because Samurai is making Dancer and Bard degenerate compared to Machinist (making the ranged role exceedingly difficult to buff) they can't exactly revert the old Samurai power distribution, can they?

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

Ultimately Kaiten had to go. It comes down to a simple principle of DPS design. Do not do in two ogcd presses what you could have done with one.

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a) No, it didn't. b) Kaiten doesn't entail an additional OGCD compared to Shinten spam - what are you talking about? c) even if it did, that isn't a principle of DPS design - what are you talking about? Ever played dancer?

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

Kaiten was not a meaningful decision. You never made the decision not to Kaiten, unless you'd made a big mistake. Once you got your groove going, Kaiten was a sure thing, always, every time. What this meant was that Iaijutsu was always, every time, going to be Kaiten'd no matter what.

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There are endless examples of this in the game that aren't questioned whatsoever. Do you not Scorch following every Verflare or Verholy? Is Reassemble a meaningful choice? How about combo chains? Kaiten was effectively a combo prerequisite for Iaijutsu - that isn't inherently bad.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

So... forgive me if I don't exactly believe ya'll when you say Kaiten is THAT important and THAT beloved. I think there's a different reason, and that the Kaiten-Bargaining is just an emotional response to something deeper.

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There's plenty of posts talking about Kaiten and why it was important - hopefully the devs read more carefully than you do if they read any of it at all.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

I think ya'll are seeing Samurai is not leading the DPS charts, and you're afraid that nerfs to synergy will keep it there and you're afraid that the devs don't want Sam to be good.

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You think wrong. We want our job to be fun again.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

So when you ask for Kaiten back, ask yourself--if they're going to keep Samurai burst low anyways, is this actually what you want? Or, is what you want actually the samurai burst back?

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What we want is 6.08 samurai back - we want Kaiten AND the burst, but speaking for myself, if I could only have one, I'd take Kaiten without a second thought. The job is completely braindead without Kaiten.

BUT...we want both, and there's no good reason to not have both. Their insistence on flattening out dps to tone down burst while simultaneously reworking every raid buff to align, which increases the focus on burst, is contradictory at best if not completely misguided.

That said, if they do insist on flattening out dps, they have a lot more work to do. My dancer has much worse gear than my samurai, yet tech step crits for more than 3x Midares combined and Starfall is worth about 1.5x Midares. If samurai's burst was a problem, pretty much every other jobs' burst is as well.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

Ultimately Kaiten had to go.

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I respect your perspective, but fully disagree and believe you are making the situation far more simplistic then it is.

And also don't believe you have a place to assert what other players are actually feeling regarding the change.


On the core issue (at least as specified by you. SE has been all over the map on their excuses) regarding the removal of spikes in damage through MSG crits... I personally believe you are speaking with far to much authority on this specific point.

Why do you insist that Iaijutsu burst are not coming back no matter what? I understand SE has expressed that they simply don't want to deal with the complications of dealing around classes that have spiking damage... but its not like it would be impossible to do. And its not just the fact that SE can revert their design direction if they have a a reason to do so, but also the fact that the SAM change was 100 to 0 in one go. Our finishers hit practically for what our build up does... They could have certainly redistributed numbers without such a heavy hand and our Iaijutsus could have still hit like finishers without being completely evened out across our kit.

This also doesn't account for the fact that SE specifically designed the class this way. It was the SAM identity. Even more glaring is the fact that SE doubled down on this specific identity for SAM in EW by introducing Tsubame-gaeshi. They could have not provided Tsubame-gaeshi and rather had distributed that damage out throughout our rotation and it would have also effectively flattend that peak damage spike, while not robbing the SAM of its' identity and big crits. We just wouldn't double the crits back to back (and IMO is far less of a hit to the class identity of removing kaiten and finisher crits.

All in all, I personally believe it to be a bad idea to homogenize damage into a boring, mindless stream (but do understand there are complexities in design that may force that need). However, even if needed, I believe it could have been done in a way that wasn't such a night and day rework of the class. I also believe that making this change at the entire detriment to the very theme that derived enjoyment in the class is short sighted as well and differing approaches could have been made to achieve similar results, but without effectively rewriting a player's invested game experience. (There have been countless suggestions across the forums to that very effect).


When it comes to kaiten, I agree that it is heavily tied to the identity of SAM burst, but I believe it disingenuous to focus only on the loss of SAM's high crits and not also recognize that kaiten was part of the equation.
1. Yes, the numbers at the end were the payout, no argument there.
2. But Kaiten provided control over your burst. (Yes, there is a optimized rotation, but not everyone was proficient at it and that was the entire point. Kaiten gave control over how well you played in a couple of aspects. It wasn't an automatic button.... which leads to:
3. You had to pay attention to Kenki (now there is no reason to).
4. There is a specific enjoyment factor of powering up a move (weather you don't experience that same concept or not is fine, but please understand others have and do enjoy it).
5. Not just with the concept of powering up your next move, is the graphical aspect which many have expressed they enjoyed seeing.

In all, the big crits were the reward and certainly a big part of SAM identity without question, while Kaiten was a integral part of building up to that reward. The problem is certainly two fold, it is the loss of kaiten AND satisfying finishers which was the hallmark of SAM.

I do understand if you only care about the numbers that show on a chart, and keeping up with other dps classes, I don't question why the above factors arn't a part of your perspective... But many many players (expressed by the many threads across all server groups) are heavily effected by what is discussed above. Staying in the general ball park of damage, but playing a game that is fun to play is far more important to players like me then making sure I am the perfect player and am constantly outputting optimized damage.


Sure, the big crits were part of the fun (and I certainly am advocating for that to be returned, or at least adjusted back to actually make SAM a relevant class again. If you are dead set against this, or simply believe that SE is going to parade forward with this homogenization of damage across the game... We probably don't have a lot to discuss... I am simply holding out to hope this isn't the end destination and there isn't much use in listening to people simply tell me that 'what I enjoyed is never coming back and just to drop it'.) but Kaiten was also a huge part of the equation...

That one button effected multiple facets across how people enjoyed playing SAM. Simply dismissing this perspective with effectively 'do you really understand what you are complaining about', I believe isn't a considerate view of exactly what the removal of kaiten effected.

Just by combining it with the iaijutsus alone removes the idea of powering up a finisher from the game in its entirety in the first place (not even referencing the finisher numbers). It just becomes a single move without augmentation. I don't agree with the sentiment of "So, if Kaiten doesn't serve as a decision point, and your Iaijutsus are always, without exception, two button presses, why must it be two button presses? Is there a reason (other than preserving muscle memory, or you like the animation) to make it 2 button presses?" A. because I don't agree that it wasn't a decision point. It was always a point of possible failure, meaning it was a decision point, but also B. There was direct engaging feedback of pressing a power up button, and then hitting a enemy with a powered up move.

As a slight aside... I much rather SE combine follow up combo'd moves like Jinpu turns into Gekko, and Shifu turns into Kasha... Then simply combining a augment move with a finisher because there is no more augment in that scenario. (That said, I play on controller and before 6.1, never had an issue with button/action bloat and the removal of any buttons in general i think is unnecessary. But I am more then willing to bend and adjust to changes, if those changes were actually at least still made in the direction of the SAM class.

The reason these changes have been so outright rejected was the complete identity change from what players enjoyed...


Anyways, should wrap this up as I probably will start repeating myself on points if I keep rambling... But in my own opinion and conclusion:

1. I don't think kaiten had to go. There were ways to work around this. Hell, they could have just made the kaiten button provide the automatic crit Midare got, still done the same potency adjustments (and while still robbed of crits) would have been a better solution. We would have retained the feeling of augmenting our finishers, we would have retained the basic kenki management we had instead of completely lost any reason for kenki at all, and we would have retained our cool kaiten animation that was quite satisfying to watch lead into our Iaijutsu.
2. I believe SAM spike damage can be retained without entirely gutting the class of identity and feel. If it had to change, my first choice would be the rethinking of the pointless tsubame-gaeshi and adding that damage back to our rotation rather then flatten all finishers... Besides that the change didn't have to be so heavy handed... as well as plenty of other ideas that could alleviate this.
3. Dancer and Bard having issues should not be resolved by destroying the fun factor of another class.

TL/DR (sorry for the winded post):

I appreciate your candor in joining the SAM discussion. So often posters that don't agree simply do so by mindlessly talking down to others... But regardless, I don't not agree with your assessment that the homogenization of damage is a set in stone design path (I understand that it's effectively SE's stated goal, but many players are speaking out against this design direction) and I believe you are not giving appropriate credit to what Kaiten actually effected in game play and how it involved the player and just the basic feel/enjoyment of the concept behind the move (and in turn are not perceiving the actual weight many SAM players gave that button)


Quick edit: I was getting my moves mixed up and when they released... Tsubame-gaeshi was released in Shadowbringers and I was thinking of the Namikiri release. But all the same, this just further reinforces my point. SE has been doubling down Tsubame-gaeshi, and tripling down with Namikiri, on this very specific type of play style. SE made SAM in this theme, and reinforced it with every expansion.

I rather they back off on the Tsubame-gaeshi and Namikiri, leave Kaiten and Midare crits alone, and redistribute damage, rather then gut the class from the very theme they built it for and leave those lingering moves that created the problem in the first place as awkwardly disjointed with the awkwardly disjointed new direction they are taking the class.

The decision making part of Kaiten comes not from using the ability itself, but properly managing your kenki gauge in order to have enough of it available before the execution of Iaijutsu. Something that every samurai player who invested the time into the job had to learn and is familiar with both on a casual and optimal level of play. On a casual level it comes down to basic understanding of resource management. On optimal level it involved calculating the amount of kenki at your disposal moving into a burst that you could spend on optimal shinten uses inside a raid buffs window while also keeping enough of it for Kaiten, which is not always trivial, considering different kenki generation levels based on encounter (forced downtime, Third Eye uses).

On top of that, the idea of Kaiten was to highlight the following Iaijutsu, giving more impact to this weaponskill, something that, as you mentioned, is the high point of Samurai.

The ability should not be the frequent talking point for it to be impactful or crucial. Something that is clearly evident by the amount of feedback the community has given in response to this change.

I personally don't care how they decide to adjust Kaiten, as long as it preserves its original idea. That being the oGCD ability, that empowers following Iaijutsu in some way or another while consuming some amount of gauge resource.

My concerns over potencies redistribution have nothing to do with the overall job balance and everything to do with how it feels to play, and I stated as much. If the ability that takes 8 gcds or 2 minutes to build up towards is barely noticeably stronger than any other then what's the point to begin with? Balance numbers can always be adjusted to the desired level while keeping a meaningful and satisfying relation between potencies inside the job design itself.

While we are on the topic of job satisfaction and how things feel to play, allow me to address that concern more thoroughly. I often see people disregarding this point altogether in favour of balance or when they bring up this point they seem somewhat ashamed of it as though it's a silly consideration in comparison, which always seems funny to me. Let me put it this way: Nothing in job design is more important than how the job feels to play. It is its sole idea, the purpose and the point. Everything else is secondary to it. Even the balance concerns circle back to this goal. If you doubt me, ask yourself why do people even care about their job dealing high amounts of damage? It's because whenever they put the effort into playing it they want to feel rewarded for their work. And whenever that is not the case, it doesn't feel good.


That is all to say, the job balance concerns are out of the scope of my feedback. They all come down to some mathematical aggregation of potency values that the devs can tweak however they want in order to achieve the desirable picture across all jobs while simultaneously preserving the relations of abilities potencies inside every individual job and frankly speaking they usually do a pretty good job with it.

Gonna have to disagree with Mr Gruntler. Kaiten was an integral part of our kit and it makes zero sense to have removed it. It was a conscious decision on if I felt like using the skill or not. I didn't even have to use it on only my iajutsu, occasionally I'd use it on other weaponskills if I had the kenki to spare. Now there's practically no point in having kenki since it literally just gives you four uses of Shinten as an oGCD and is completely pointless.

Although it was something you wouldn't want to use in any other scenario outside of buffing Iaijutsu (it always being less potency per kenki than Shinten otherwise) it still highlights the idea of Kaiten being a point of mastery and job knowledge, that you had to learn how to utilize properly which is now absent.

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Originally Posted by CelestiCer

I can imagine gamepad issues, hence the proposals I made. But there are plenty and many others who suggested other types of solutions. I genuinely want Kaiten back... As for Auto-Crits, I am not a parser or a competitive raider to want optimized Comps? though I also notice it that Samurai's get puhsed out of groups and that isn't a good thing I agree with that.

As well with Gyoten weaving.. .such a big oversight on their end to have it's Kenki potency match Shinten. I'll take it? to somewhat fill the void of Kaiten removal? but the QoL of casting it back to back would feel really nice since there's a big pause for Enpi/Enhanced Enpi that I find a lack of reasoning to really use it or even existing out of being niche. I do want this to feel more fluidly flowing? but not that it overrules old Kaiten and Shinten cause it would be difficult to incorperate this into fights where we would require to back dash for optimized damage output yes.

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i'll confirm that controllers have no issue.
you don't need all 33 abilities bound at all times.
some are super situational that you'll either never use or use only in dungeons (hence an 3rd hotbar for it, but only need it for when you do dungeons, talking about turning the sen symbols into Kenki)
yes, 2 hotbars are completely filled, but it doesn't feel bloated, it feels like i should learn to put it into muscle memory so it just snaps to those skills instead of actively thinking about it, which is fine and is good since that shows you need to learn your job.
it's not summoner where most of my hotbars are empty.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

Ultimately Kaiten had to go. It comes down to a simple principle of DPS design. Do not do in two ogcd presses what you could have done with one.

Kaiten was not a meaningful decision. You never made the decision not to Kaiten, unless you'd made a big mistake. Once you got your groove going, Kaiten was a sure thing, always, every time. What this meant was that Iaijutsu was always, every time, going to be Kaiten'd no matter what.

So, if Kaiten doesn't serve as a decision point, and your Iaijutsus are always, without exception, two button presses, why must it be two button presses? Is there a reason (other than preserving muscle memory, or you like the animation) to make it 2 button presses?

And the answer is, no. There really isn't.

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oh boy, you're opening an huge can of worms here.
alright let's do it.
so if Kaiten was a no brainer, something that was ALWAYS gonna get used inbetween an Iaitsu/ogi cast (which you are correct)
then why not remove the rest aswel from other jobs.
remove the dots from Bard, you'll always apply to them right? make them 1 button for both DoTs (or better yet, remove 1 of the 2 DoTs and add some potency to remaining DoT, i'm joking but your idea is basically an generalization)

you can go through every job and remove always used abilities left right and center, it doesn't adress the issue.
the issue is that this doesn't fix the overal issue, SAM has barely any synergy now because of always crit, which is the same issue that Warrior still has, but warriors can be forgiven since they're tanks.

there are plenty of ways to fix it, like with your logic, why not combine ikishoten and Ogi together since 1 does not go without the other, you'll always press Iki to get to Ogi.