Samurai 5.0 Changes

[Arkdra]

I only hate the fact they that they removed Hagakure. THE main flavor of the job was to balance your hagakure usage with meikyo and bana, rewarding the player for keeping those 3 aligned.

Now with Haga gone, it all crumbles back to a lvl 60 rotation. Yes, same old level 60 rotation.

Get 3 sens, Midare, repeat. No engaging decision-making, no rewarding sen usage. No fun.

Hagakure was get 3 sen and burn it and didn't really lead to any interesting decision making, other than paying enough attention to the hagakure cd to know when you need to hold on to your sen or not. It also consistently leads to a feel bad situation for me because I am at 2500sks and there is always a point in my rotation where hagakure comes off cooldown 1 second too slow so I either clip the gcd, midare and then rebuild which stalls hagakure for 15 seconds, or waste the sen and it makes me sad every single time. (the answer 100% of the time is waste the sen btw, so it's not actually an interesting decision). Removing it will significantly help out all those mediocre sams who never used it to begin with.

But like hell am I going to give up any sks to fix it.

Also Hagakure is an incredibly bad skill from the perspective of being understandable. Literally 0 new players will ever look at hagakure and understand the value. Hagakure only makes sense once you've mathed out the potency value of 1 kenki, and then the average potency of your gcd, and then also understand the opportunity cost of using said gcd.

[Lilyth]

Hagakure was get 3 sen and burn it and didn't really lead to any interesting decision making, other than paying enough attention to the hagakure cd to know when you need to hold on to your sen or not.

Wow. Sorry but it's kinda clear that you don't have much knowledge about this topic. Haga timings literally determine how optimally you play the class. Besides the opener, which we have many, Hagakure leads to numerous situations where decision making is key to develop your rotation. "Should I burn Haga with only 2 sen and have Higanbana inside trick attack?" "Meikyo is coming off CD with Hagakure, should I Yukikaze first in this next cicle so I can perform a non-Yuki Meikyo, or just Midare if it's close to a phase transition?" Your entire rotation is built upon these three skills' timings and how they interact together, alongside how fast you build Sen. Removing Hagakure leaves only the LVL 60 rotation behind! You always midare, no questions asked. No complexity, no thinking required, no alignment, no nothing. Just boredom.

It also consistently leads to a feel bad situation for me because I am at 2500sks and there is always a point in my rotation where hagakure comes off cooldown 1 second too slow so I either clip the gcd, midare and then rebuild which stalls hagakure for 15 seconds, or waste the sen and it makes me sad every single time. (the answer 100% of the time is waste the sen btw, so it's not actually an interesting decision).

I see so much of this going around. If you can't figure out how to align your skills in such way that Haga will come off CD exactly when you need, that's a problem in your rotation and not the skill itself. There are plenty of ways to prevent this from happening (change your opener, move your Hinganbana usage, perform non-Yuki Meikyo or vice-versa to control your GCD pace and do Yukikaze-Higanbanas when feasible to achieve the same). Honestly all I can see here is "I don't know how to implement this skill in my rotation, therefore it's bad."

Removing it will significantly help out all those mediocre sams who never used it to begin with.

That's something I can agree with. It will significantly help people who can't be bothered to learn how to properly play their class to perform better. The irony I see here is that those "mediocre" samurais couldn't care less if Haga went away or not since they honestly couldn't care less about their performance at all.

Also Hagakure is an incredibly bad skill from the perspective of being understandable. Literally 0 new players will ever look at hagakure and understand the value. Hagakure only makes sense once you've mathed out the potency value of 1 kenki, and then the average potency of your gcd, and then also understand the opportunity cost of using said gcd.

Again, is it a bad skill because you assume most players don't get it? I don't know about you, but the first time I glanced over it I could already say that insta 60 kenki was a good trade-off. There are also tons of information available out there, you don't need to be a math wizard to realize that, just look it up and see what other people have to say about it. They will literally do all the math for you.

At the end of the day, SE simply deemed necessary to reward lazyness and bad play instead of trying to actually teach their player base how to play. Not only Samurai, but other classes entire toolkit are being severely dumbed down as the game progresses (I mean, did you check the SCH thread?), their rotations are becoming blander than ever. There's only so much you can simplify a rotation before it get's boring and repetitive.

But tbh I haven't played the new Samurai and I could actually like it, who knows. I sincerely hope that I'm wrong about it but I highly doubt it.

[Valenth]

But it's the same potency as Kaiten-Higanbana and Tsubame only repeats the previously executed Iaijutsu. Why would you ever overwrite your DoT with the same potency DoT?

I'm probably missing something obvious since it's late but what's the advantage over double Midare or Goken?

You can DoT up two different targets. Not useful in a single-target boss, but if it has adds or the boss consists of multiple targets then you can DoT up two of them if you wanted to.

[DaemonInazuma]

I love the changes to SAM. I'm glad they didn't mess with the identity of the job and rounded out the skill set with the new abilities.

On the topic of Shoha, I actually think it will be a useful ability in boss fights simply for the fact that there is always some amount of downtime during the fight to get your stacks up. Tsukiyomi comes to mind with the long transitions. The only change I would make to it is potency increases. 500 for 5 stacks is way too low so hopefully they will increase it.

As far as Hagakure, though we'll lose the complexity of when to spend Sen, I'm very pleased they changed it to Ikishoten. What we lose in complexity, we gain in our burst phase. I'm already trying decide if Higanbana is worth it as part of our opener vs. a potential 4 Setsugetka (I use the 3 Sen opener).

Personally, I've always found the complexity of the job in Third Eye and using Seigan. I was really hoping we would get a AOE counter but sadly not this expansion.

[DaemonInazuma]

I love the changes to SAM. I'm glad they didn't mess with the identity of the job and rounded out the skill set with the new abilities.

On the topic of Shoha, I actually think it will be a useful ability in boss fights simply for the fact that there is always some amount of downtime during the fight to get your stacks up. Tsukiyomi comes to mind with the long transitions. The only change I would make to it is potency increases. 500 for 5 stacks is way too low so hopefully they will increase it.

As far as Hagakure, though we'll lose the complexity of when to spend Sen, I'm very pleased they changed it to Ikishoten. What we lose in complexity, we gain in our burst phase. I'm already trying decide if Higanbana is worth it as part of our opener vs. a potential 3 Setsugetka (I use the 3 Sen opener).

Personally, I've always found the complexity of the job in Third Eye and using Seigan. I was really hoping we would get a AOE counter but sadly not this expansion.

[zuzu-bq]

Not a big fan of the infuriate like aspect of the skill that comes to replace Hagakure, mostly because its... just there? No real interaction with it. Skill is fine design-wise just sort of bland.

Single target Guren... eh? I understand the kind of split between single vs area for spenders like Shinten and Kyuten that can be spammed but doing this for a 120s cooldown ability is sort of weird. I'd rather if it was another new OGDC split from sharing recasts. But I understand that'd need the skill to be lower potency and cost less kenki and this wouldn't go on SAM's identity of big numbers. I guess?

Double Iaijutsu seems cool, nice to see another job get an OCGD with a cast beside old HW BRD and currently BLU. Maybe the trait could've also prevented Casts of being interrupted since you're now locked into doing both back t back.

The Meditation follow up skill might cause issues since you can meditate in uptime and luck out a proc and possibly use that for Shoha. Gotta wait to see the release to check this out. I do really hope this isn't the case or it'll get really akward.

The Seigan buff and AoEs keeping the buffs are very appreciated.

[Liam_Harper]

You can DoT up two different targets. Not useful in a single-target boss, but if it has adds or the boss consists of multiple targets then you can DoT up two of them if you wanted to.

I guess we can expect some prolonged 2 target fights then. Higanbana needs to last at least 40 seconds to be worth applying and most adds or dungeon trash don't last that long. I can see why you can't stack it though, at 60 sec cd it would make spending it on Higanana mandatory on bosses.

I have to agree on Hagakure being a shame. You can actually perform to quite a decent level, like 95% percentile, without even having Hagakure on your bar. Which makes it one of those skill-cap abilities that rewards the skilled player but doesn't affect the casual player. Similar to Seigan.
I'll take the new Infuriate happily enough, I'm not a perfect Sam and it'll probably be a boost for me, but if I had the choice I'd leave Haga there so the class retains some depth. Minor nitpick though. Overall with the exception of Shoha I'm very much looking forward to 5.0.

[silentwindfr]

depending of the skill speed hagakure was making the whole cycle a mess, the timer wasn't matching with all the skill we was using and often i was in position where i had to use hagakure while having still tons of kenki...
honestly it's a good change, the main focus of the samurai must be his iajutsu and his kenki usage more than burn sen and loose iajutsu for use kenki skill.

in a sense our iajutsu will be our gcd rotation and kenki will be used for everything ogcd and our work will be to balance the two for get more and more dps.
we can say it make the jobs simpler, even if i will more say it make smoother and more fluid in the execution.... maybe we will less see people say, /delete samurai and ask for samurai to come for raid because our dps will be top notch.

finally i want to add this, hagakure never did add deepth to the jobs, actually it was more like something throw in middle of an engine for mess it up. we can even say that it was the worst of the sam skill in many way, it was extremely affected by our attack speed when our goal is to be still fast enough for ditch a lot of damage... and more important it was creating a situation where our more important dps skill is ditched for ogcd skill mostly because it was more damaging... making midare setsugekka that was means to be our hard hitter skill, less important...

like said, them goal was probably to smoothing the kenki generation and make the iajutsu more important for us.... what explain the add of tsubame-gaeshi, because let's be clear this skill give us a burst insane, you can probably throw:
- Hissatsu: kaiten > midare setsugekka > Hissatsu: Seinen > kaeshi setsugekka > hissatsu: shinten

what will be a very strong burst... we don't know how all the new skill will weave together... but i doubt we did loose deepth... we did get more choice with hagakure out of the picture.

[Shurrikhan]

Pros:

• Double-sword thing looks cool, I guess? Even if tactically very unnecessary, give Guren already hits like a truck and could just turn truckier?
• Extra damage after Meditation? Looks cool, but it's not super applicable.
• ...I'm out of things already...

Cons:

• Losing Hagakure. I'm not sure why people are saying that its removal was a boon to Skill Speed. With its removal it feels like half the thought behind Samurai has gone out the door, all just for the appeasement of grey Midare spammers.

  I've run every amount of Skill Speed from ~500 to 3k and there's never been a point where I felt I was inescapably screwed by more than 1-2 GCDs by my Skill Speed's alignment with Hagakure. At many a comfortable breakpoint anywhere from min to max SkS, I could have it timed perfectly to the GCD. Yukikaze (and, on a fight-by-fight basis, the buffed Yaten-Enpi) are surprisingly effective tools for alignment and the greater your speed, the more modular/"building block" choices you have by which to round out your macrorotation and align it to Hagakure. And I enjoyed having to account for those things.
  
  Heck, one could easily make the point that removing the ability to Sen-shear will actually make gameplay harder and clunkier...

• The AoE changes. I hate how people describe these as "buffs, because they no longer have damage falloff" when it's just... pre-falloff-ed. That isn't what cost our potency here, but, bare with me:

  I much prefer having to weave in some single-target skills over just doing 121312131213 all day. It's also not nearly such a buff at 3-4 targets as it would first seem. Over the course of 30 seconds, now 14 GCDs, we'd be losing Shifu and Jinpu combos each cost us 4 GCDs of AoEs, now roughly 480 potency. But over the ~20 seconds of AoE remaining, the average potency difference is almost enough to offset that at lower target counts. I'd have much rather seen Fuma increased to 120 and Oku and Mangetsu maintain their fall-off but with an increased base of 220 so that we can really milk our Meikyo Shisui AoE and we could see more overlap in the 2-4 target range between AoE and single-target choices, which in turn would allow us better modular control for Hagakure.

• Shoha. I was originally of the opinion that it should be a situational skill, but I'm noticing other fun functions it could carry that would keep it feeling unique without feeling outright neglected in particular fights. For instance...

  Let Shoha be a skill of its own that you wouldn't usually bother to use. For instance, give it an effect like Monk's SSS, pacifying you for 2 GCDs after using it (preventing all but Gyoten, Yaten, Enpi, and your non-damaging abilities). Each stack of Meditate you generate (to a maximum of 4 stacks) shortens this penalty by half a GCD. Give it a 30-second CD and significant enough potency that it's a mid-combat damage gain after a few stacks, but otherwise should only be used before forced downtime or right after a jump, and can't be used both for a boss jump and the return immediately following it. It can be used for Hagakure alignment, timed to brief forced downtime with Yaten-Enpi for a net potency bonus, acts as free damage after jumps, and allows for sacrificial last-ditch burst on demand.

[silentwindfr]

Pros:

• Double-sword thing looks cool, I guess? Even if tactically very unnecessary, give Guren already hits like a truck and could just turn truckier?
• Extra damage after Meditation? Looks cool, but it's not super applicable.
• ...I'm out of things already...

not really double sword, is sword and scabbard and it's goal is to make Guren something you use while in middle of an AoE situation while Seinen (the name of the skill) will be used against mono target. leading to an increase of damage (whatever is his potency) against boss.
for the pro:
- i see a more smoother cycle with the removal of hagakure, giving us more iajutsu... making us focusing on kenki usage and use iajutsu when and how we want. instead to burn our sen for get extra damage from shinten spam.
- a better burst, tsubame-gaeshi will give us an insane burst, while used with kenki skill we can get some very potent burst that we was lacking in a sort.
- no more tp for the aoe and refresh of jinpu and shifu from the aoe combo.... honestly it's very very very strong.
- up of shifu and jinpu we have only 3% of difference in attack speed buff than with ninja and 8% for a monk in 4 gl stack and we still hit like a truck... i means it really good. it's not an enormous change, but it still there we get more faster and stronger even if it's 2%. it can make the difference...
- and one of the best pro, our job that was already really good didn't change for something weirder... no... where with the monk of SB i was unhappy by the little change it was because the jobs was very old and the change wasn't extraordinary. but here we have a jobs that is solid in his rotation and we get more tool for make it better...

the loose.... more the replacement... of hagakure is a welcome change because our signature move, that was even shown in the trailer of SB, is the iajutsu not the kenki... kenki is something here for give us something to do between gcd skill.... not the signature move of our job. and when hagakure was making our signature move less potent than something normally used between gcd skill it was a trouble.
some think it was skill to make it work, yes, it was skill to make it work... but do it was them intention to have hagakure kill midare setsugekka dps, that something we can wonder.... even if they technically answer us by the change of shb. no?