6.1 Samurai Feedback

So I've taken my time with experiencing the 6.1 Samurai and now when we're in 6.11 I thought it was about time I share my feedback.

From my experience the damage Samurai does is about the same as before, although slightly lower than in 6.0. Although while the DPS has remained mostly the same, the job has lost most of it's identity and some utility that made the job more fun and engaging.

Here are my points:

1. Hissatsu: Kaiten Removal
There are a lot of people who are upset with Kaiten being removed. The skill added some variety to the Samurai rotation, letting you use your Kenki for something that wasn't Hissatsu: Shinten. The skill was also very cool with a flashy animation and satisfying sound, adding to the job fantasy of being a Samurai.

2. Tenka Goken / Kaeshi: Goken changed into circular AoEs
This is something I haven't heard being talked about too often, but it's something I've experienced. Before when these skills were cones you could use them to avoid enemy AoEs by positioning yourself outside their attacks while also satisfyingly counterattack with your own attack. The skill wasn't something being used all the time like Fuko. Unlike Fuko, these Iaijutsus are only used occationally and could thus be synced up to enemy AoEs to avoid them in a satisfying and effective way. Now you're forced to stand in the middle of an enemy group all the time except when using Hissatsu: Guren every 2 minutes. This change has thus severly limited Samurai's offensive mobility during large mob pulls.

3. Damage Allocation Changes
The big change is that most damage was moved from Samurai's big attacks to Samurai's lower-damaging combo skills. The biggest complaint I've seen about this and what I've also experienced myself is that it's not as satisfying to see your big attacks do way less damage than they did before. It removes a lot of the impact they had and also diminishes the job fantasy of Samurai: "taking down enemies with a single stroke". From my experience playing Samurai they've always been about big damage, big numbers and a lot of dopamin. Seeing these skills do a shread of their former damage is really disheartening and reduces the appeal of Samurai as a job. Then we have the issue that Samurai doesn't recieve as much benifits from Party Buffs anymore, because the damage Samurai does during the burst window has been significantly lowered, since the big attacks have had their damage reallocated.

So in summary:
From my experience of playing the Samurai in 6.1 and reading/hearing feedback from other players the biggest issue with these changes seem to be that they remove the fun factor of playing Samurai by removing variety from their rotation and reducing the dopamin rush/satisfaction of playing this job. I thought Samurai was the best it has ever been in 6.0 and don't really understand why these changes were implemented in the first place.

Thank you for reading my feedback, feel free to comment with your own thoughts.

I will agree that the kaiten removal has been getting the most attention. But on every point you are right and many many others dislike the changes made.

Here's hoping we all get what we want before too much time passes.

so where previously kasha/gekko could dcrit for more than a midare crit at the height of 6.1s degenaracy, we now (6.11) have cases where midare can out dcrit a ogi which is a 2m cooldown 🙃 . The hilariousness of this rework is unbelievable; why not try guaranteed crits (which is lazy game design btw) BEFORE moving potency from our phat hits into combo builders? then the change wouldnt have felt so completely crap. They try to fix the problem of variance VIA the auto crit route only to further move the variance out of the biggest outliers in variance (midare and ogi) so that now, the lines are getting blurred between builders and spenders.

They could have just added an additional component to Kaiten and made it so that your Namakiri would crit when kaiten is used prior. This would have added another layer of game-play that punished bad samurais. Instead, they just removed a skill that adds complexity to the class and now the job feels very unsatisfying.