My thoughts on Kaiten.

The thing about Kaiten is not just that it's a core skill that boosts other skills, but rather what it provided in terms of class complexity. Kaiten cost 20 Kenki to boost any weaponskill, primarily Iaijutsu, by 50%. This is a MASSIVE reward for a very basic skill in meter management, because it is very easy to both save or accidentally waste the meter needed for Kaiten.

In the opener alone a Samurai will use 80 Kenki on Kaiten, which is obviously rewarding them by buffing Higanbana, Ogi Namikiri, and multiple uses of Midare Setsugekka. By removing Kaiten, Kenki is now ONLY spent on Senei/Guren and Shinten and seeing as Senei/Guren are on a 2 minute cooldown it becomes nothing but Shinten spam. This now mirrors the issue that the team fixed regarding Stormblood's iteration of Dark Knight in Dark Arts spamming.

I ran the numbers prepatch for the efficacy of Kaiten vs Shinten and here's what I have.

Shinten = 10.8 potency per Kenki
Ogi Namikiri = 22.5 potency per Kenki
Midare Setsugekka = 16.5 potency per Kenki
Higanbana = 26 potency per Kenki

The Higanbana number is not 100% accurate as it of course varies, but that is the ballpark I got based on my own GCD.

If the issue is crit variance, why not make it so Kaiten can provide the guaranteed critical hit? If the issue is bloat why not merge Shoha and Shoha 2 or Guren and Senei? There is never a good reason to use Shoha 2 or Guren outside of dungeons or very specific scenarios.

TL;DR Kaiten is not bloat and makes a SAM player learn meter management skills.

Agreed, and really well put.

To add my own, Kaiten had that Human Error and Button variety effect. Humans are not perfect, missing a Kaiten no matter how low of a chance did happen, Samurai isn't a hard job so the DMG loss isn't that bad, "why would you want human fault in your gameplay?" because it adds **flavour** being too powerfull isn't fun, striving to be the best you can is to many, Samurai really doesn't have a lot of room to mess up once you learn your rotation, as a lot of jobs don't either, any chance to feel diffrent is a plus in my eyes, not a lot of Jobs have this "Wind-up to a huge attack" and definitely made the player felt better for remembering to do it. It's not hard to remember, but makes you remember you can always be better, and that's what playing is if you care about it.

Now we will have only Shinten spam since Senei/Guren is on a 2 minute cooldown, before we had Kaiten and Shinten, it's not much but it's not just clicking the same buttons constantly, and adds room for that error i enjoyed. While im not super against Kaiten not existing i feel like it really added a lot more to Sam, the animation itself being a huge reward for this roleplay element the game likes to do very often (there's a reason there are sometimes very menial quests while you have a world to save) in turn making the Job more "sterile?" blanketed. Not to say the Job is boring or faceless, it's a fun job, just that every element that isn't artificial to make it feel diffrent than others is good in my opinion.

Funnily enough, the crit variance issue was not a big deal back in 4.x, because you would use Hagakure to convert Sens into Kenki for Shinten, this is a dps increase and smoothes out the damage profile.

The devs chose to force SAM into a strict 1min burst job with high potencies on select skills in 5.x, they willfully created this problem, and further doubled down on it with Ogi Namikiri in 6.0

And even more ironically, they are encoruaging the use of Third Eye, this goes against their general intentions to lessen skill gaps, and adds to the so called non-existant action bloat. (for the record, I like the skill expression Third Eye and the animation of Seigan)

This is something I didn't even begin to touch on! Hagakure Samurai was much more interesting, balanced, and skill based than anything we had in Shadowbringers or End Walker! It was a ton more fun too! Here's hoping we get Kaiten back just like we did Hagakure, but not in the gimped form