Can we just not go through with the tsubame change?

Maybe I'm stupid but I just don't even understand the point of a change like this. They say that its to simplify things but like...how does this simplify anything? How was a change like this even on their radar? It just doesn't make any sense. If anything this change actually adds a small bit of complexity by forcing another condition to be met in order to use tsubame. The only thing I can think is that they wanted to create some kind of change, however small, to the samurai rotation because as it stands without this change the samurai rotation will not have changed in any way save for -2 shintens in burst and + 1 of the new ogcd. The rotation with this change simply moves a meikyo to be used at some point before tsubame.
Maybe somebody can explain to me the what the purpose of this change is because it simply doesn't make any sense.

I can think of a couple of reasons, though let me preface this with I hate the 1st one and I thought the 2nd one was solved enough at this point.

1. They plan to change the meikyo cooldown to more hard lock it to 1 minute/2 minute burst windows.

2. Tsubame is still one of the most obtuse skills in the game and they are hoping this makes it less obtuse for new/low skill players. Which, I figured just adding the 2nd charge was more or less good enough for this but I guess they disagree.

People were trying to do weird stuff with meikyo and tsubame instead of using 1 every 60 seconds. Non-standard optimizations that aren't intuitive and easily drift without high levels of focus are bad game design. They want the rotations to flow naturally in a sensible way.

You're free to make your own game with weird stuff that is counter-intuitive and takes reading guides online to understand.

They're railroading new samurai players into understanding that a one/two minute burst exists to reel in freestyle SAM play. I doubt it is to prevent more optimal, obtuse rotations but rather make the lowest common denominator have a sense of what the job was designed to do. This is because Samurai isn't a job with an obvious 60 seconds damage buff that you put the rest of the abilities under. Previously they would drift their tsubame but they probably don't know that raid buffs even exist and don't understand why it matters if you press it off cooldown versus just doing it next time midare is up. They also could've alleviated some of this by making Tsubame a shorter cooldown but they probably want newer players to understand that they should meikyo to be able to do higanbana as well. Basically, they are creating a tutorial for the job within the rotation because they don't know how to teach new players otherwise.

My only guess is that they have statistics that show that really bad Samurai players are really bad because it is arguably harder to play in a 2 minute buff heavy meta compared to other jobs with their own 2 min buffs that let you know when its up.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

Non-standard optimizations that aren't intuitive and easily drift without high levels of focus are bad game design. They want the rotations to flow naturally in a sensible way.

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I don't agree with this, especially when the damage difference is as small as it is in sams case. With non-standard blm you can see gains of over 3% increased damage. With sam your looking at absolutely tiny gains for playing non standard. In most cases the gains won't even be noticeable. On a fundamental level though I do think that it is a good thing to have non-standard rotations that give small (keyword being small) gains because that is the stuff that will keep your more hardcore player base engaged, which is a good thing. As far as trying to make it more intuitive I just don't see how this change accomplishes that without doing something like what arkdra said in his point #1. I feel that most people will come to understand that you just send tsubame on cd every 60 seconds seeing as it has a 60 second cd. This change also does not address the people who use tsubame on higanbana, if they were doing that before they will still do it now. I dunno I just feel like this change is so out of left field and unless they actually change how meikyo works then this change just seems so...strange.

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Originally Posted by Azlith

I don't agree with this, especially when the damage difference is as small as it is in sams case. With non-standard blm you can see gains of over 3% increased damage. With sam your looking at absolutely tiny gains for playing non standard. In most cases the gains won't even be noticeable. On a fundamental level though I do think that it is a good thing to have non-standard rotations that give small (keyword being small) gains because that is the stuff that will keep your more hardcore player base engaged, which is a good thing. As far as trying to make it more intuitive I just don't see how this change accomplishes that without doing something like what arkdra said in his point #1. I feel that most people will come to understand that you just send tsubame on cd every 60 seconds seeing as it has a 60 second cd. This change also does not address the people who use tsubame on higanbana, if they were doing that before they will still do it now. I dunno I just feel like this change is so out of left field and unless they actually change how meikyo works then this change just seems so...strange.

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If there is a more optimal way of playing, most people who take the game seriously will be drawn to executing it that way even though they don't enjoy it as much. People who care about performance tend to conform or want to conform to what is optimal whether they like it or not. I think the 0.0001% of the playerbase that is engaged by these optimizations are less important than the people who do it or think they should be doing it because it is optimal despite not enjoying it. It's a problem with game design if people don't enjoy what they have to conform to to be optimal, because there are a lot of people who force or think they should be forcing themselves to play optimally and adhere to what it is rather than playing how they really to at the cost of dps.

Then there is the other demographic who plays how they really want to and feels bad about not playing the job "right" despite knowing the miniscule optimization that they are choosing not to execute. It's a lot of bad feelings from several different groups just to keep the "hardcore playerbase" engaged. It's almost like elitism is cringe and people shouldn't be feeling like they are underperforming because they don't do this stupid thing that leads to 3% or less dps.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

If there is a more optimal way of playing, most people who take the game seriously will be drawn to executing it that way even though they don't enjoy it as much. People who care about performance tend to conform or want to conform to what is optimal whether they like it or not. I think the 0.0001% of the playerbase that is engaged by these optimizations are less important than the people who do it or think they should be doing it because it is optimal despite not enjoying it. It's a problem with game design if people don't enjoy what they have to conform to to be optimal, because there are a lot of people who force or think they should be forcing themselves to play optimally and adhere to what it is rather than playing how they really to at the cost of dps.

Then there is the other demographic who plays how they really want to and feels bad about not playing the job "right" despite knowing the miniscule optimization that they are choosing not to execute. It's a lot of bad feelings from several different groups just to keep the "hardcore playerbase" engaged. It's almost like elitism is cringe and people shouldn't be feeling like they are underperforming because they don't do this stupid thing that leads to 3% or less dps.

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I don't see any evidence to support this with regards to this game. I've done a lot of PF of savage, EX and unreal (and a tiny bit of pf ulti) and I don't believe I've ever seen anyone complain about non-standard rotations nor have I ever seen anyone call someone out on playing standard. Its called standard for a reason, that reason being that the vast vast vast majority of players play that rotation. In the case of samurai especially I would guess that over 95-98% of the people who play this job don't even know that ad-hoc rotations exist, virtually everyone plays standard. The balance discord doesn't even mention the existence of ad-hoc. Of those that do know ad-hoc is a thing most of them don't even care enough to play non-standard because its simply not worth trying to learn for them, the damage increase just isn't worth the effort seeing as standard is more than good enough. Again, my experience leads me to believe that there are hardly any people out there worried about how much damage they're losing or how much damage their party members are losing due to not playing standard on any job and in any content.

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Originally Posted by Azlith

I don't see any evidence to support this with regards to this game. I've done a lot of PF of savage, EX and unreal (and a tiny bit of pf ulti) and I don't believe I've ever seen anyone complain about non-standard rotations nor have I ever seen anyone call someone out on playing standard. Its called standard for a reason, that reason being that the vast vast vast majority of players play that rotation. In the case of samurai especially I would guess that over 95-98% of the people who play this job don't even know that ad-hoc rotations exist, virtually everyone plays standard. The balance discord doesn't even mention the existence of ad-hoc. Of those that do know ad-hoc is a thing most of them don't even care enough to play non-standard because its simply not worth trying to learn for them, the damage increase just isn't worth the effort seeing as standard is more than good enough. Again, my experience leads me to believe that there are hardly any people out there worried about how much damage they're losing or how much damage their party members are losing due to not playing standard on any job and in any content.

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??????? People don't complain about their job design in game typically, they're busy playing the game and don't want to be a buzzkill. Here is someone posting on the forums saying they don't like non-standard rotations being optimal.

That said, anyone can throw out arbitrary numbers based on feelings. Let me give it a try. I would say that 99.99% of players don't like ad hoc sam being optimal.

If we're making things up then I would guess that 99% of samurais don't know about either rotation since they're too busy eating glue to read their tooltips and figure out how to use higenbana, 3rd eye, or any kenki skill other than shinten.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

??????? People don't complain about their job design in game typically, they're busy playing the game and don't want to be a buzzkill. Here is someone posting on the forums saying they don't like non-standard rotations being optimal.

That said, anyone can throw out arbitrary numbers based on feelings. Let me give it a try. I would say that 99.99% of players don't like ad hoc sam being optimal.

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The numbers I threw out were arbitrary, correct. I never claimed them to be true or factual. I prefaced those numbers with the words, "I would guess" to indicate this. That being said that guess was based on my experience with other players and from what I've seen in discussions on these forums and elsewhere. It is also based on the many top logs that I've looked at all of which used the standard rotation. Virtually nobody talks about non-standard samurai gameplay. I would love to see ANY thread on this forum that complains about the existence of ad-hoc samurai that has gotten any sort of traction in favor of being against non-standard. If you don't like non-standard being slightly stronger than standard then that's great, good for you. I simply do not see this being a common complaint. Most people (again in my experience) seem to like the existence of "skill expression" as it gives them something to strive towards for mastery. In fact one of the most common complaints you will see on these forums and elsewhere, with regards to battle systems, is that square is removing most avenues of skill expression from the game. Again, if you don't like it that's great but I don't think most people agree considering the sheer quantities of recent and old threads that complain about the devs dumbing everything down in this game (surely I don't have to start pulling up 2 min meta threads.)

It doesn't really do anything to Cooldown management, and kind of drops SAMs AoE damage in dungeons as it's now less convenient to use Tsubame on Goken.

This thread is starting to go a little off course with talks of standard vs non standard rotations. The main point I was trying to get across in the OP was that this change is needless, nobody asked for this, and all it will serve to do is screw up 3 years of muscle memory with regards to the sam rotation which doesn't seem to have changed at all other than this. Now instead of pressing meikyo after tsubame you will press it just before. I really just cannot understand what was going through the devs minds when they decided to make this change unless of course, like I said earlier, there is an additional change in the way that meikyo functions but there didn't seem to be any evidence of that from what they said or from the job action trailer. If they want to make big changes to the sam rotation then thats fine, great even. But to make us relearn the muscle memory of our rotation just for something like this seems so nonsensical.

It makes the job less prone to drifting, it's not hard to understand. Like instead of having 2 one minute cooldowns with two charges, you have one. Your meikyo and tsubame uses will always line up with 1 and 2 minute buff windows now instead of having a chance to drift apart.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

It makes the job less prone to drifting, it's not hard to understand. Like instead of having 2 one minute cooldowns with two charges, you have one. Your meikyo and tsubame uses will always line up with 1 and 2 minute buff windows now instead of having a chance to drift apart.

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They gave tsubame a 2nd charge in Endwalker to help with drifting. In Shadowbringers tsubame was just a 60 second cooldown ability with no charges and it was very easy to drift. Samurai was actually quite difficult to play perfectly back then. Now that it has two charges in Endwalker it has become extremely easy, arguably the easiest melee to play, which is fine. Saying that this change helps with drifting just doesn't make sense. This changes adds another qualification required to be met in order to use tsubame. Currently you need to have used iaijutsu in order to use tsubame. Now you will need to use both iaijutsu and meikyo in order to use tsubame. If anything this makes the ability more prone to drifting because if you don't manage to use it within the window of time (whatever that maybe be) you are allowed to use it after pressing meikyo you will have just completely lost a use of tsubame. It takes tsubame and makes it less flexible in its use not more.

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Originally Posted by Azlith

They gave tsubame a 2nd charge in Endwalker to help with drifting. In Shadowbringers tsubame was just a 60 second cooldown ability with no charges and it was very easy to drift. Samurai was actually quite difficult to play perfectly back then. Now that it has two charges in Endwalker it has become extremely easy, arguably the easiest melee to play, which is fine. Saying that this change helps with drifting just doesn't make sense. This changes adds another qualification required to be met in order to use tsubame. Currently you need to have used iaijutsu in order to use tsubame. Now you will need to use both iaijutsu and meikyo in order to use tsubame. If anything this makes the ability more prone to drifting because if you don't manage to use it within the window of time (whatever that maybe be) you are allowed to use it after pressing meikyo you will have just completely lost a use of tsubame. It takes tsubame and makes it less flexible in its use not more.

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Maybe you're criticizing it because you're not able to understand what the changes actually accomplish? Tsubame will not have its own cooldown anymore as it will be tied to meikyo uses. Meikyo is the cooldown, tsubame is the granted use. It probably won't even have charges anymore, it will just be available for use every time you use meikyo.

How are you going to be more prone to drifting when you only have to manage 1 60 second cooldown with 2 charges instead of 2 60 second cooldowns with two charges used at different times?

Less flexibility is good when it leads to more consistency. I am pretty much 100% sure now that everyone criticizing the changes just doesn't understand how it is going to play out in dawntrail gameplay. Presumptuous and baseless negativity.

There is not even going to be a time window on it. You will have a buff that says "tsubame ready" that doesn't expire and maybe it will even stack.

Funny how all this started after 6.1 (which is all valid tbf). They got alot of backlash from it and instead of fixing their mistakes fully, they said "welp, we arent doing any major changes ever again unless its an expansion patch."