Samurai - A Suggestion for Endwalker

Before I start this post, I know the ability Shoha seems to be getting a change in Endwalker.

Shoha - 3 Meditation stacks for a 400 potency OGCD. Real flashy combo finisher.
Hissatsu: Senei - 1100 Potency 2 min CD that is used as the typical starter to the SAM burst window.
Hissatsu:Guren - 850 Potency AOE frontal cleave, which shares the same CD as Hissatsu:Senei.

Why do I mention these 3 abilities? Shoha seems to be rather lacking in utility, as you build towards it with Iajutsu/Tsubame-Gaeshi/Meditation. These 3 abilities generate meditation stacks, which upon building 3, you can use Shoha for an OGCD 400 potency attack.

Looking at the optimal SAM rotation for DPS, you'll notice Hagakure (Normally used as a combat reset, as stickers are built during combat) is used to delay your rotation to line up with Hissatsu:Senei.

My suggestion: Give Shoha an additional effect of lowering the CD of Hissatsu:Senei/Hissatsu:Guren. This would help round out the optimal rotation, and would also give the added benefit of being able to utilize Hissatsu:Guren more often in dungeons for AOE combat.

It’s not just to line up with senei, it’s to line up with raid buffs that typically come every minute, 2 minutes, or 3 minutes in some cases. Ideally you want to burst like that because it lines up with cooldowns like trick attack, divination, chain stratagem, and technical step just to name a few. Being able to burst with senei a few seconds earlier brings you out of that buff window which will considerably drop your damage output.

At best, accelerating the Senei/Guren CD via Shoha will simply have moved it from 60|120s raid buffs alignment to notably rarer 90|180s alignments. More likely, you'll have just dropped it out of alignment with anything, causing Senei/Guren to perform worse in practice than it's balanced around (on paper).

Why do that? Unless it's going to be something highly pervasive, like Improved Infuriate, why add that convolution even if it weren't likely wasteful/destructive?

There's a far simpler solution if you want Shoha to feel impactful: increase its potency, siphoned from skills that appear less powerful than they actually are.

Ideally, allow Shoha also to be used at lower charge for proportionate animation length and potency so it's not so hampered by its related gauge cap.

This would just be a trap to trick bad players not to use Hissatsu with raid buffs

I've always wondered if there was something about that skill I wasn't getting, it really seems like a lot of build up for little benefit? So I kind of agree there should probably be more to it

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Originally Posted by Tsiron

I've always wondered if there was something about that skill I wasn't getting, it really seems like a lot of build up for little benefit? So I kind of agree there should probably be more to it

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It was purely a downtime compensation skill (one to be charged only when you could not strike the boss, thus reducing the ppgcd cost of that downtime for up to ~3 GCDs).

Now, it's a downtime compensation hampered for 33 to 100% of its strength based on rotational elements outside of its control. It's siphoned some strength from other parts of the kit, and therefore may randomly give less compensation.

But, it was never originally sold as a capstone skill, only a way to double down on the benefits from Meditation (which itself provides up to 15 seconds of downtime compensation), albeit for a shorter span (at most 3 ticks, 6.1-8.9 seconds' compensation).

Add anything more to it than that, and it goes from simply decreasing SAM's fight-specific weaknesses to a part of their power budget... which then has to be siphoned from elsewhere.

If you want it to feel more powerful, that again just comes down to siphoning yet more potency from other skills to put into Shoha, but that in turn may affect the viability of, say, 'ad hoc' rotation in ways some will like and some will not. Alternatively, you can turn it into a GCD and add SAM's at-level average ppgcd to the skill to compensate, making it make bigger, prettier numbers, but that doesn't actually make it any stronger and will make SAM feel, rotationally, like it's been slowed down, since the time between Shifu/Jinpu refreshes will be more constrained with that extra rotational GCD slotted in.