6.1 SAM Changes & Thinking Through Job Complexity
In LL70, a slide on job changes listed the removal of Samurai’s Hissatsu: Kaiten. This is an unfortunate decision for many reasons, and will hopefully be reversed come 6.1’s release.
The removal of Kaiten before every Iaijutsu streamlines SAM. However, "streamlining" is not always a positive thing. What distinguishes a good player from an excellent player? If jobs are streamlined to remove all angularity and complexity, there is little room to express your skill once you’ve mastered the basics. Many players enjoy FFXIV because the jobs allow for this kind of expression! Training wheels are helpful, but a bicycle is more fun.
If jobs are streamlined like this, there is also no opportunity to improve as a player. If a job’s rotation consists of simple combos, newer players will never grow past a basic stage of competency. Learning about a job’s optimizations and synergies can never happen if these things don’t actually exist in its toolkit.
One of the main themes of FFXIV’s story is learning to work with others, to strengthen oneself through diversity and shared talents. Yet if we clamour for jobs to be easier, to sand off all the rough edges that make jobs unique, there will be no real diversity and we will stagnate as players. There are ways this can be unfriendly or needlessly complicated, but real variety gives FFXIV its strength.
LL70 gives reasons for Kaiten’s removal:
- Button bloat. SAM has many abilities that "bloat" more than Kaiten—Senei/Guren, Shoha/Shoha II, and Tsubame/Ogi Namikiri on separate buttons rather than using existing ones (GNB’s Gnashing Fang). Kaiten has a tangible impact on playstyle; these other buttons do not.
- Action bloat. A typical SAM rotation casts Kaiten 4–5 times a minute. Kaiten is not strict or high-pressure. It is the opposite of bloat—an ability with minimal downsides to an improper use, but encourages the player to pay attention to their resources. This is a useful transferable skill (like DRK’s Bloodspiller when Living Shadow is up soon).
- Damage variability. This is the reason for auto-crit Midare/Ogi Namikiri. However, there is a solution to this: make Kaiten guarantee the next Iaijutsu crits. If Iaijutsu moves must be changed to auto-crit (despite lowering SAM’s synergy with buffing classes like DNC/SCH/DRG), then Kaiten can still play a role.
Aesthetically, Kaiten is cool! The little animation is neat. SAM isn’t a hack-n-slash berserker but is more dynamic, requiring thought and dexterity. It fits the theme and feels nice to press.
Ultimately, the removal of Kaiten makes SAM less engaging, less cool, and less deep, with no real upsides. There is nothing wrong with class complexity, as long as it isn’t unpleasant or confusing. Job complexity encourages players to improve and learn. Seeing that latent complexity there, just under the surface, may encourage players to understand the job—and FFXIV as a whole—on a deeper level.