I'm just not getting the Samurai hype, what am I missing?

[Chronons]

Its difficult to know why it is you are not liking SAM. Without seeing your play we dont know if there is something you are missing. It could be the case that it just doesn't click with you. I love tanking and have leveled them all at various points, but PLD has just never meshed with my play style. Sometimes that just happens.

That being said at a high level of play SAM becomes more difficult than some of these posts seem to suggest. At a base level you can play the class slow and passively and pretend to do big dps because you Midare occasionally, but that is not how the class is optimally played. The Kenki management is arguably one of the most dynamic job gauges available, Sen must be generated and spent appropriately, positional requirements for dps, and you must maintain proper timing on 3 buffs and a DoT. SAM has moments where it slowy builds it resources and moments where it builds them in burst, that has to be managed so as to not overfill resources or lose buffs. Downtime is punishing because SAM requires all of their buffs to maintain their high dps and while you do have mobile abilities to help with this, they come at a steep cost to your dps.