Should Tsubame-Gaeshi(SAM skill) be adjusted?

SAM right now is alright. However, aside from Hagakure's "nerf", there's one skill that makes it a lot less flexible compared to its Stormblood counterpart: Tsubame-Gaeshi. It's function is simple really, You fire off an Iaijutsu, then use Tsubame to pop a second version of it. However, what makes things really awkward is that after using your Iaijutsu, you HAVE to dedicate your next GCD to using Tsubame or else it won't work. To accomdate this, SAM players have to use filler combos during their loops to make sure that Tsubame comes off cooldown at the same time as Meikyo and so on.

Screwing this up however, can feel pretty bad. Common scenarios are being "forced" to wait a GCD for tsubame to come off of cooldown or just ignore it for the next 60 seconds just so you can realign it with raid buffs. Why is Samurai, an originally flexible job is with a skill that harms its flexibility?

Some suggestions I have is to make it scale off of skill speed(since it doesn't for some reason), and to not remove the stored ability when the next non-Iaijutsu GCD rolls in. Doesn't have to remain there permanently. Thoughts and/or suggestions? Some people may argue that it might make the job too easy, which I can understand to an extent due to some changes to other jobs in this expansion, but i'd rather have a flexible job than a job with an Achilles Heel ability.

This isn’t a problem that’s unique to samurai, it happens with monk as well. At least it did before the change to perfect balance anyway (needing a filler dragon kick to align demo with riddle of fire). For Sam they actually have 3 variants depending on skill speed. Sam is actually in a fine place with it, if you forgot to hagakure or didn’t use the proper filler actions that’s on the player, not the job.

Overall though this is more an issue with skill speed and oGCDs that have a static time. Skill speed is largely ignored by most jobs because all it does is throw off rotations and make them not align with cooldowns and raid buffs.

I wouldn't like the ability to "store" the previous Iaijutsu to simply click Tsubame when it goes off cooldown. Sam has been since Stormblood a job that requires good ressource management for burst setup, which was made possible at the time with the amazing Hagakure.

The devs wanted to accentuate this feeling in 5.0 and gave us Tsubame as an extra damage. However, the fix and rigid nature of the ability made it pretty clear that they didn't knew how to optimize it, or did not try when testing it. Even at the time of the media tour, nobody at the time was especially interested in Sam/knew how the stormblood sam worked, which led to the lack of crucial feedback with the release of 5.0,especially because Hagakure was entirely removed at the time, because it made the rotation "too difficult". How ironic to have it back one patch later as a band-aid fix for Tsubame.

To get back on track, I really dislike the rigid nature of the rotation right now, as it incentivize "perfect", "strict" and "always identical" looping in order to work. The genius of Stormblood's Sam was that you had to know exactly when to use Hagakure to maximize damage/reset your opener, and it was actually a good challenge to see where it was considered the best dps gain at each fight, where right now you don't have a choice. You follow the loop or you're good for a sad 9GCD drift on your burst, which feels terrible and isn't always good with fights that are difficult in uptime management.

I can understand the opinion of not making it scale with skillspeed (because then we wouldn't align with the 60sec burst timer that each job has), but I really wish that there was more focus put on knowing when to hagakure for optimal damage, rather than "Hagakure is there just to make sure that you don't overcap sens in your badly thought rotation". And I really hope for a return of the Stormblood Samuraï gameplay and feeling rather than another badly implemented mandatory burst ability.

But still, we all know Sam is at the top spot of damage right now so "it is fine" and "doesn't need anything", right ? :)

I'm relatively new to savage raiding but keeping Tsubame aligned with raid buffs is being a total pain.

You had to use the dash abilities, couldn't attack for a few secs, bye bye rotation.

I love everything else about Sam except how rigid Tsubame is. I never got to try Stormblood Sam but it sounds better. Perhaps some tweaks to hagakure could improve it.

If not, I think if midare had a buff (to use tsubame) that lasted a few seconds it would be less annoying. (Like Nin's Suigetsu allowing easier TA buff alignment management.) But just a few seconds so it wouldn't make the job too easy.

I worry that letting SKS affect Tsubame would make it even harder to align with buffs though. So i don't think that is the problem.

To be honest, I think that Tsubame would have been a thousand times better if it had the current requirement of Shoha, instead of a strict 1min timer.

Just imagine Tsubame being available once every three Iaijutsu, to repeat the last Iaijutsu used between Midare and Tenka (we all know Kaeshi higanbana is trash anyway :x )

This, along with getting back old Hagakure (or at least a 15kenki/sen version) would be a much better version of this skill, by allowing a less rigid rotation that should still in theory allow player to optimize damage, while not being stuck at small and precise GCD tiers, and would also get entirely rid of fillers combo which feels bad to use.

Heck, with this change, I even think we wouldn't even need the new Shoha as well... Or we could keep the new one, and make it available after a use of Tsubame.

But that's just some silly thoughts, I haven't done the maths on this, so I don't know exactly how well this could work. Ill try to think more about it later.