Samurai Changes

I didn't realize there was such a large outcry against the Samurai changes and I would just like to add my voice to it.

Resource Management
Having two ways of 50% resource spend with Kaiten and the large damage OGCD made it pretty tricky to not overcap on kenki, while always having enough kenki saved for your required spending. With the kaiten removal and kenki cost regulation the resource management is completely gone. You can just hit the buttons when they glow and you probably won't drift anything more than a single GCD, it's so thoughtless. Reducing Senei to 25 kenki sucks, but it's not the biggest deal on its own. However, with the kaiten removal those changes together entirely removed an area of optimization and fun for this class

Tsubame-gaeshi charges
Freestyle samurai is no longer a meme anymore, the difference in performance between a Samurai with 0 knowledge of timing optimization and a Samurai making sure to line everything up is minimal. It wasn't even that large of a gap before, but always lining your cooldowns up was so immensely satisfying to do right, it felt very rewarding. This is not even that large of a reduction to the the skill cap on its own, but with resource management being completely removed the class has nothing to think about. This change really doesn't make sense to me becuase it makes it easier for the casual Samruai to reach the class's max damage output, but casual content doesn't require anywhere near that kind of effort, so why ruin the fun for other players when the aid for casual players is nowhere near needed or even noticable.

Kaiten itself
People have talked about this one so much that I don't have much to add. I'll just quickly say that yeah, the button felt good to press and added to the resource management minigame. Removing this button, especially with their reasonsing of button bloat despite the new skill they just added having it's own bind despite being solely attached to Ikishoten, simply does not make sense. This button adds so much satisfaction and slight nuance to the rotation that removing it could only conceivably be done by someone who only plays the class in AOE.

Difficulty reduction
I understand making the classes easier as this game is primarily focused towards casual players, but I passionately believe every role should have a class that has a more involved rotation, for the players that care. Samurai, as the melee selfish dps, should parallel Black Mage in its rotational room for optimization. Casual melee players have plenty of options for easy rotations, why remove their option for a more involved rotation? Shadowbringers freestyle Samurai could easily pull its own weight and more in any casual content, and the hardcore players still had a ton of room to optimize. Please, bring that back. Attach the new skill to Ikishoten, undo the kenki cost reductions, give us kaiten back, and make Tsubame-gaeshi have a single charge again.

At the time of 6.0, Senei's kenki cost reduction was necessary in order for us to do a proper opener

Now that we don't have Kaiten, it doesn't really matter anymore

They could just put Senei back at 50 kenki and probably double Shinten potency and make it 50 kenki as well if they really want to reduce the APM of the job

That makes sense, after taking a break near the end of shadowbringers I didn't start playing hard content again until recently.
I bet kaiten would renew the resource management minigame on its own without needing to increase senei's cost back to 50. Hopefully they bring it back and attach the endwalker skill to ikishoten as a minimum

That moment I realized I have to update the Compiled SAM threads with... more Threads...

Our collective Feedback of over 145 plus threads now against Kaiten removal and the negative 6.1 changes, while wondering what the heck SE is doing as their MO seems to be Job simplifications for...what?

• Reworking jobs to be more accessible
• Lowering the bar that wasn't low enough
• Making Raiding content more palatable
• Appealing to a new audience
• Turning FFXIV online into mobile with 5 buttons

Remember them saying " Try it out / Give us feedback ", never forget it... 5 months silence, " Staying respectful " can go into the garbage bin, when respect didn't go both ways

I want Kaiten back, Tenka Goken as a cone, and a revert on whatever else bullsh*t changes they done to impossibly please the crayon sniffers with Auto-Crit crap cause they'll complain about the next variance that will stand in their way from a perfect parse. My hot-take, I liked my hits having impact and not hitting as flaccid as SE's excuses to the Samurai changes.

Don't worry, the little ounce of good faith I have left will wait for them to bring out a " Y'Shtola NFT " while they ruin DRG and AST with the same bull-sht rework and excuses they gave us.

Might all be a reach, as much as a reach as a revert happening at this point... but hey! if it did happen? it wouldn't surprise me 1 bit

I really don't believe this is catering to casuals, either. I'm certainly not hardcore - but I want a class with some depth nonetheless. I find, say, Dancer & Machinist painful at times. And I'm finding Samurai tedious now, too. The cone aoe was better - I'd be satisfied with getting Kaiten back, but I really don't like standing on the tank when positioning was so much more *logical.*

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Originally Posted by Ceridwen

I really don't believe this is catering to casuals, either. I'm certainly not hardcore - but I want a class with some depth nonetheless. I find, say, Dancer & Machinist painful at times. And I'm finding Samurai tedious now, too. The cone aoe was better - I'd be satisfied with getting Kaiten back, but I really don't like standing on the tank when positioning was so much more *logical.*

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I feel like they've redefined "casual" to mean the most basic bottom-of-the-barrel player who might conceivably be interested in FF14. All the additions to the game that have opened up a wholly single-player-focused approach tells me that they are making a concerted drive to bring an entirely new class of player into the game.

I get this, from a business perspective. You want the reach of the product to grow, to bring in more money. I just don't think it's going to go as well as they think it will because, as another developer at another company once said, gamers are smart; they can tell if they're in for a game or not and they'll figure that out pretty quickly. Making the onboarding process of your game even more streamlined or accessible won't bring enough new people into the game to justify the workload. Either a gamer wants to play your game or they don't, so your goal as a developer should be providing those kinds of people, the ones who are in for your game regardless, with the content that will keep them coming back.

SE seems to be engaging in this "race to the bottom" in terms of expecting a certain level of skill or effort from their players, and I can't imagine that this is anything less than a corporate executive-driven choice. While I don't have anything against make a game accessible to a wider audience, if it's done so at the expense of your established - and quite loyal - player base, then we have a problem.

In a lot of ways (not every way, but a lot) it seems as if they are putting the cart before the horse. They're putting the monetary gain ahead of the game quality, instead of focusing on putting out a quality product and trusting that the monetary gain will come steadily from there. It's a mistake that more and more corporations seem to be making nowadays, with the emphasis on chasing short-term profit at the expense of long-term stability. SE's bungling of their western IP's in their misbegotten efforts to chase the NFT dragon is further evidence that the decisions being made at an executive level are not robust ones that bring mutual benefit for the customer AND company, but are purely company-centric with an eye to extract as much profit from the consumer as possible.

It's an untenable situation because if there's one demo you don't fuck with it's loyal gamer fans. I pray that my reading of the situation is wrong, but at least as far as statements made by Matsuda go, it's clear that there is a major disconnect between reality and what SE leadership believe to be reality.

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Originally Posted by Quor

I feel like they've redefined "casual" to mean the most basic bottom-of-the-barrel player who might conceivably be interested in FF14. All the additions to the game that have opened up a wholly single-player-focused approach tells me that they are making a concerted drive to bring an entirely new class of player into the game.

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That seems likely - but if they're really after the Utter Casual, then they'd do better to revamp the start/ARR, give abilities sooner, faster, and speed things up immensely. They've done some, true, but it's still a slog. And if I were them, I think I'd redo some voice actors! (except ARR Merlwyb) If first impressions count, that's where you'd lose the most people - not by gutting the Samurai, which you can't play til you get through that part anyway. I'm always in the position of trying to convince friends 'it gets better, just wait!' And that's true, but if you want to hook in new players, they might want to fix up the early part more. It was painfully getting some of my bunny's lower classes even to 50 - weird lack of aoe, the BLM being utterly the worst in terms of pain.

People that are going to stick it out to end game would surely want slightly more interesting classes. (I'd be fixing them up, rather than dumbing them down, personally - I mean, I really didn't enjoy leveling a 2nd dancer, for one thing. I'd do something fun with the machinist, too. And give my healers another damage button!

Anyway - oh well. I'm fully expecting a major disappointment when it comes to this reversion, which I deeply, truly want.

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Originally Posted by Ceridwen

I'm fully expecting a major disappointment when it comes to this reversion, which I deeply, truly want.

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Let’s be real, they’re not going to revert this shit. They’re going to slap another 20-50 potency on jinpu and shifu again and tell us to stop crying. Square is notorious for hamstringing classes for entire patch cycles despite overwhelming outcry and concern by the player base. Squares idea of class evolution is to take a couple abilities away then add them back next expansion under a different animation or ability name.
The funny thing about all of this, I’m already used to not having kaiten, and while I miss the badass animation of it, it won’t break my heart if it doesn’t come back.
My biggest problem with these changes (I’ve said this in a bunch of posts already so sorry for repeating) are the midare and namikiri nerfs, primarily midare.
Our staple job ability pretty much got halved in damage. Seeing midare barely able to break 30k, when I was easily doing 55k+ before just feels awful. The frustrating thing is that by the end of this next savage tier, samurai will probably feel like before once we reach the next tier of crit. I think this is what square is counting on. I’m really frustrated by the class design direction overall, not just for Sam. They’ve been dumbing down the jobs and the game in general for a while now. Feels very reminiscent to when WoW started to nosedive in it’s job design.

Calm your anger, not everyone gets the cookie jar.

Part of moving on is to still go about enjoying the game regardless.