Kaiten removed? What is going on?

They could have kept Kaiten, but have it do absolutely NOTHING outside of that flourish animation and it would STILL be better than outright removing it, I have no idea what they were thinking, nor why they thought this would go over well with both casual and hardcore Samurai players.

Not only that, but it's a terrible omen for the way job design is going. As people have said as nauseum; dumbing down jobs is going to be pretty bad for long term growth when there is absolutely no skill ceiling to aspire to. I get that it's to help the influx of new players getting used to their job, but how does that help them? Casual players still want to aspire to be better. Hell, just a year ago I WAS a new player, and picking up a job like SAM just made me want to be better. It's hard to understand the "Just go play Ultimate" argument when I, myself have done an Ultimate before. You know what DPS do for Ultimate fights? Do damage. That's it. They don't have to worry about healing, holding boss aggro or boss positioning. We do damage, and that is our only job. We have to do mechanics, but so does everyone else. The ONLY thing that is engaging for DPS players is the job design itself and it really doesn't feel like the devs have realized this. Samurai was FINE the way it was a patch ago. Like, what? What is going on? Just give me Kaiten back and I'll shut up forever.

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Originally Posted by VladdThunderstruck

Kaiten removed? What is going on? (snip)

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Unfortunately, Welcome to the forums.

Many of us Samurai's never even set foot here until these horrible changes to our beloved Job. You're one of many, myself included who came here out of frustration to voice their concern and opinion on what many of consider to be a huge mess up from Square regarding gameplay enjoyment.

Looking passed the trolls, there are genuine SAM mains/players doing high-end content that see Kaiten removal and the direction they take as a positive. The only positives I can get out of these changes are less RNG parsing and DSR Ultimate having a unique mechanic requiring accurate damage output to not cause a wipe and lastly, another nuisance of a hurdle removed for parsers to get from 98 to 99 or a 100 parse easier.

Flawed arguments because I don't see how Kaiten removal was necessary to solve this. As for damage variance of which Kaiten could have been unrelated to, rebalancing Samurai's DPS variance purely for DSR Ultimate around 1 specific mechanic... well then why not remove all Damage variance at that point of any job? Balancing every job around 1 specific mechanic seems very restrictive, but what do I know? I just enjoy Kaiten, how dare I. And as for parsing? I mean idk what that solves for FFXIV. Maybe for FFLogs, but I don't play FFLogs to know any about this.

As for the argument of " Just go play Ultimate ", there's a difference enjoying mastering Job difficulty at a certain degree a player sets? Versus which content you take your a job to play with and then play it perfectly there. It's a vastly different way of enjoying the game.

Kaiten removal didn't do anything to fix anything, and they replaced Kaiten removal with potencies and Auto-Crits of which changes I am fairly sure no one asked for at the time nor does it do anything for our job's gameplay it's just damage numbers. And the damage variance argument is flawed to support Kaiten removal, since I can't recall damage variance being such a big issue prior to Endwalker to clear any content to validate any of it.

kaiten removal so dumb. i legit cant think of any reason for the change

reasons for kaiten to exist
- cool animation
- big numbers / dopamine hits
- some kenki mangement

reason for kaiten removal
- job more braindead for casuals
- less apm ( jk just press shinten instead )
- button bloat ( jk so many better ways to remove buttons )


2 of the reasons giving for removal are just bad reasons, making the job easier imo is also bad but maybe you can make some arguament for accesablility etc.

i just want kaiten back. crittting 25k on midare feels weak.

I also want the devs to Bring Back Kaiten, almost all 6.1 changes for Samurai made the Job worse, I have Samurai Exclusive Alts that I cannot play because of the Kaiten Removal, due to the compromised enjoyability.. but at least Enpi doesn't eat Meikyo Shisui.. that's something... though true, alot of Player are unhappy with FFXIV and if the devs do not listen to our voices maybe One Day People will pass on FFXIV because it has become a braindead baby game, I do not want that to happen but that's the direction we are heading.
Tanks lost DPS Stances, Healer's lost Cleric Stance (which was a Cool Down, funnily enough) FFXIV lost it's DoT Mage DPS and will we ever have a DoT DPS again?
but at this Point, I just want Kaiten Back.

EDIT: I do not buy that the Samurai suffers Button Bloat at all!

Pretty much every sam main has hated the change. The balance discord was in complete uproar over it.

I know they have a lot going on... But please, please address this! It is NOT getting better.

This has been an issue with SAM players since day 1 of patch 6.1. Personally I barely even see anyone playing a SAM anymore because of the changes, and I used to main it until the change. Now it just does overall less damage than before.

Some say it’s only a 3% decrease, but the numbers I see say differently, even with auto crits.

The main issue is that they decreased the power of the finishers far too much, to where they barely do half the damage as before, when comparing the crits of the two. Not to mention the gauge is now used to spam one single or two attacks, depending on if you’re attacking multiple enemies or not.

Personally, I say switch to another class and don’t play it. Let those numbers tell the devs we hate it and continue to say our hate for the change here. I switched to Reaper and Monk, with Reaper being the strongest for me (ironically Reaper for me did far more damage than the new Samurai build did by a large amount. Even taking in the slower attacks, it does far more damage even with not as good gear on it at the time).

SE need to understand that casual players dont care about damage numbers and damage fluctuation, they care about have fun playing the game, and they just kill the fun of the job.

I'm a casual player rn, and my first melee job at 80 is SAM and i keep saying to my raiders friends that at some point im gonna want to raid and SAM will be my choosen job to do that. Now i leave my SAM at lvl 80 and im gearing other DPS jobs to start my savages, because for me now SAM is the most boring job of the game and i dont have any fun with my new, super and extremely innovator gameplay called SHINTEN SPAM.

OP just came out of a coma; Wait until he hears about Summoner....

/s



Really though, it was a stupid change that barely touches action bloat (i.e. button presses) and is probably the 10th or 11th thing that should be done to clean up hotbars.

I feel like there's an overall push that we're slowly seeing to pull back damage ranges as much as possible and THAT is the main reason for the change. I expect that they're going to pick a potency value, e.g. 700 and any attacks that are that potency or higher are going to autocrit. Kaiten was really just a way to punish bad Kenki management (Not saying that there's anything wrong with that, Kaiten was fun as hell) and increases the possible damage range for Midare/Hig.

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Originally Posted by M_Red

This has been an issue with SAM players since day 1 of patch 6.1. Personally I barely even see anyone playing a SAM anymore because of the changes, and I used to main it until the change. Now it just does overall less damage than before.

Some say it’s only a 3% decrease, but the numbers I see say differently, even with auto crits.

The main issue is that they decreased the power of the finishers far too much, to where they barely do half the damage as before, when comparing the crits of the two. Not to mention the gauge is now used to spam one single or two attacks, depending on if you’re attacking multiple enemies or not.

Personally, I say switch to another class and don’t play it. Let those numbers tell the devs we hate it and continue to say our hate for the change here. I switched to Reaper and Monk, with Reaper being the strongest for me (ironically Reaper for me did far more damage than the new Samurai build did by a large amount. Even taking in the slower attacks, it does far more damage even with not as good gear on it at the time).

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Its roughly 3% from the old potential max. The main difference now is its significantly more consistent which I can't complain about....that said, the dopamine from the build up of kaiten into a big 60k crit is completely gone =/. between that, the awkward flow before iajutus and that fact that kenki may as well not even exist since its just turned into a shinten spam.....Ya sam just isn't enjoyable anymore.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

Its roughly 3% from the old potential max. The main difference now is its significantly more consistent which I can't complain about....that said, the dopamine from the build up of kaiten into a big 60k crit is completely gone =/. between that, the awkward flow before iajutus and that fact that kenki may as well not even exist since its just turned into a shinten spam.....Ya sam just isn't enjoyable anymore.

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the main issue is that they introduced Kaiten as the main ability for SAMs back in Stormblood, everyone loved how flashy it was and hitting big was amazing.
now the devs (or atleast the job balancer) backed themselves into a corner since somehow they're having difficulities balancing the job around Kaiten. (which is weird concidering that Kaiten was an flat out 50% potency increase, not an number that fluctuates, but i'm not an balancer)
they're also having difficulities with crits in general and want away from it which they're doing slowly but surely, instead of doing this gradually, they should do it as an big expansion thing like belts.
make an PTS available where some set in stone encounters can be played with the new version of the job, let anyone enter that PTS so that the sample size is big enough (anything that happens on that PTS affects the main game)

people would get an taste of what's to come, can give feedback before it gets added and worsen the situation, i get not wanting an PTS for content, but job balancing should be done through PTS.

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Originally Posted by darkdyllon

the main issue is that they introduced Kaiten as the main ability for SAMs back in Stormblood, everyone loved how flashy it was and hitting big was amazing.
now the devs (or atleast the job balancer) backed themselves into a corner since somehow they're having difficulities balancing the job around Kaiten. (which is weird concidering that Kaiten was an flat out 50% potency increase, not an number that fluctuates, but i'm not an balancer)

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The "issue" is the large range of damage; Midare was I think 720 potency? Ignoring Direct Hit you had 4 possibilities with Midare:


No Kaiten, No Crit: 720 Potency
No Kaiten, Crit: ~972 potency
Kaiten, No Crit: 1080 potency
Kaiten, Crit: ~1332 potency

Midare averages at about 15% of the damage that Samurai did (in 6.0), having a range that is from X to almost 2X is a very big range given how important it is to the overall performance of the job. If it were a once every 2 minute ability or something that would either be 1% or 2% of your damage that would be one thing, but the way it was set up, it gave Samurai a wide damage range and they just wanted to pull that in.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

The "issue" is the large range of damage; Midare was I think 720 potency? Ignoring Direct Hit you had 4 possibilities with Midare:


No Kaiten, No Crit: 720 Potency
No Kaiten, Crit: ~972 potency
Kaiten, No Crit: 1080 potency
Kaiten, Crit: ~1332 potency

Midare averages at about 15% of the damage that Samurai did (in 6.0), having a range that is from X to almost 2X is a very big range given how important it is to the overall performance of the job. If it were a once every 2 minute ability or something that would either be 1% or 2% of your damage that would be one thing, but the way it was set up, it gave Samurai a wide damage range and they just wanted to pull that in.

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It was 660 potency before, not 720, but that's beside the point.

The problem isn't so much with auto-crits as it is the loss of Kaiten's impact on potency.

6.08
Midare: 660 (but you never did this)
Midare + Kaiten: 990
Midare + Kaiten + direct: 1237
Midare + Kaiten + crit: ~1584
Midare + Kaiten + cirt + direct: ~1980

6.1
Midare: 600 (but you can't do this because auto-crit)
Midare + crit: ~960
Midare + crit + direct: ~1200

Our auto-crit now is weaker than our non-crits were with Kaiten. If we still had Kaiten and were auto-critting for ~1440 every time and sometimes hitting direct as well for ~1800, I doubt there'd be an outcry.

Some people would lament the loss of variance, but I suspect that the vast majority of people are lamenting the loss of potency, not the loss of variance.

Of course, for balance, they can't just make 20% of our damage profile auto-crit (including Ogi Namikiri) - but they could have taken some potency away from filler abilities to balance; instead they did the exact opposite - buffed fillers at the cost of potencies that we actually care about.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

The "issue" is the large range of damage; Midare was I think 720 potency? Ignoring Direct Hit you had 4 possibilities with Midare:


No Kaiten, No Crit: 720 Potency
No Kaiten, Crit: ~972 potency
Kaiten, No Crit: 1080 potency
Kaiten, Crit: ~1332 potency

Midare averages at about 15% of the damage that Samurai did (in 6.0), having a range that is from X to almost 2X is a very big range given how important it is to the overall performance of the job. If it were a once every 2 minute ability or something that would either be 1% or 2% of your damage that would be one thing, but the way it was set up, it gave Samurai a wide damage range and they just wanted to pull that in.

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which is why I had that Idea of "Hey if Midare now guaranteed crit.. just make Kaiten Direct Hit the following attack!", thus Kenki Management would still be rewarded (with Direct Hit) and you Guarantee Direct Crit Midare and Direct Crit Ogi!
though I still would've have to test how Direct Hit Higanbana works on the DoT and Tenka Goken would still be ruined ^^;

Yet.. could it be argued that the Button Bloat Problem is now worse on Samurai?
due to the Monotony of the Shinten Spam?

Took samurai for the first time into Bozja the other day since 6.1 kaiten removal. I was hitting mobs with midares and it felt.... underwhelming.

I dont know why they didnt just make kaiten a guaranteed crit ability and raise the potency of midare (100p maybe? Idk I'm not a theory crafter). That removes both crit variance and keeps people happy?

There is just literally no logical reason to remove Kaiten the way they did


- Button bloat argument
Flawed. Even if mistranslated on Square's end... there are numerous solutions that serve as better alternatives vs outright removing Kaiten.

- Action bloat argument
Flawed. Even if Square meant Action Bloat, our APM/Skills cast amount did not reduce. At best 2 Less Kaiten casts perhaps, while littering our opener with Gyoten for optimized Kenki spending.

- Meta argument
Flawed. Many of us loved Samurai for it's gameplay, not for it being top-dog damage meta for us to complain. I know right? imagine, playing SAM cause it's fun and complaining about the the changes that impacted our enjoyment. Weird right?

- DPS Variance argument
Flawed, because damage fluctuations did not stop anyone from clearing all content " ever ". Kaiten removal was unnecessary to tackle this issue, keeping players who desire less DPS fluctuations, improving whatever developing issues Square had, and keeping Samurai players who love dishing out big hits happy, while reserving Kaiten.

- Improving Samurai argument
Flawed. A Shinten-Gauge isn't an improvement. Even if changes were meant as a setup for " New " improvements, these " New " improvements or no where to be seen to validate Kaiten removal. Why remove something good, when Square has nothing to show to replace it with?

- Non-Interactive Argument
Flawed. You will have read it before -> " it's a button you press every-time " <- Yes... so is Hakaze and every over job combo/resource spending button. By that logic all buttons that are a nuisance to your parse wittle fingies shoud be removed. Poor argument, unless anyone wants to convince me 6.08 with Kaiten is less interactive then 6.1+ Shinten spam without Kaiten.

I've added your thread to the " Compiled SAM threads against Kaiten removal ".

Next update and yup still no word from Square, absolute radio silence. Somehow it's not surprising.