Sam changes lol

So I’m not the most seasoned ff14 player I started playing last year in august and cleared my 1st savage tier a few weeks back. It’s been great! Samurai has been a lot of fun felt really satisfying and Ima weeb too so that helps.

HOWEVER, 12th of April effectively marked the death of the job’s feel, in my opinion. Player experience matters a lot and spamming shinten is not a great experience especially when you consider the masterpiece of an animation kaiten was, to be clear I understand why it was removed, I don’t like it, but I get it and, maybe SE told themselves it was to reduce bloat except we now press gyoten to optimise lol. And though appearances don’t matter in the scope of killing a boss they do when u take player experience into account.

What I’m more troubled by is it seems this is part of some larger rework which is fine but why do we get some half assed 25% done reworks in the retail version.

The crits, oh god the crits. What I don’t understand is if we’re constant trying to control rng by removing rng why not just go all out; make everyone’s big hitters auto crit and rework crit buffs and also give auto 99 rolls in raids while you’re at it. Rng is rng if I wanted to play a game with no rng id play chess or something. This and the fact that we charge an attack with 8 gcds and cast for a messily 20k seems anti climactic.

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Originally Posted by Alex1337

maybe SE told themselves it was to reduce bloat

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Fact of the matter is, it was never about bloat. If they were concerned about bloat, it could've been alleviated in a host of other ways like combining Senei and Guren onto the same ability (and giving Senei AoE drop-off so it can still be used in AoE/dungeons); Combining Shinten and Kyoten (with the same AoE stuff); having Shoha upgrade into Shoha 2 instead of giving us yet another single target/AoE version of what amounts to the same ability; Ikishoten could've changed into Ogi-Namakiri after pressing it, saving us a button; Iaijutsu could've changed to Tsubame-Gaeshi after activating, again saving us a button. Combine all these changes and they'd have opened up 5 buttons/hotkeys for brand new abilities moving forward, or simply leave them empty for the sake of reducing bloat and despite all this the feel of the class wouldn't have changed dramatically or at all.

The only real justification they have for these changes and the removal of Kaiten is crit variance and smoothing out damage over time so SAM's peaks are lower and valleys are higher on a graph - something that 90% of SAM players couldn't give a toss about, and something that ToS forbids us from looking at anyway... Not that that's ever stopped anyone. Speaking as a SAM player who doesn't really interact much with the savage/ex/ultimate content for lack of a static, I was fine with the crit variance and doing less damage during my rotation if it meant that my Midares had the chance to hit like a truck and it was *always* satisfying when they did, particularly when you got that Kaiten wind-up animation, the sound trigger, that castbar filling and you just knew that the enemy was about to have a very bad time. Genuinely feels like the soul of the class has been ripped out by the removal of that one ability.

Ya the crit variances never bothered me. I'd make jokes with my static about how we need to restart the fight because my opener didn't crit, but honestly I didn't care that much especially when my non crits were hitting harder than these "auto crits" and nothing was more satisfying than getting those 50k+ crits. Also, as SlickPaws says, the irony of them wanting to adjust variances when we're not supposed to be parsing in the first place is not lost on me.