Quote Originally Posted by Kazimere View Post
This is why we can’t have nice things. Back in the day, you HAD to have things like goad. You HAD to have the dog down jobs. So, they took that stuff away to help with variation. Now, we get some nifty utility on a high dps job that isn’t actually needed (it’s really just flavor), and they are acting like the sky is falling instead of advocating for more stuff like that on melee. It’s ridiculous.
Here's the thing: Things like "goad" were taken away because SE as a whole would rather simplify the overall experience. Positionals? Originally nerfed in value, now straight up getting removed from jobs, because SE would rather simplify the overall experience. A job that "doesn't really have a rotation", but rather has "priorities" exists because SE would rather simplify the overall experience.

Dancer? New Summoner? New Monk? Machinists since ShB? All of these things are efforts to simplify the overall experience, so that "everyone" can play a job, even ones they've spent more time complaining about than actually playing to any extent, much less raid with.

A pure DPS, that doesn't offer ANY utility or group buffs, should be a valid option for a raid group. It should bring damage to justify that it offers nothing to the rest of the team, and only benefits from what the team brings. It should be a trade off that players of the group choose to make, and they shouldn't have a nagging feeling that maybe they'd be doing better if they stacked four dps that all brought some sort of raid utility with them. So in a sense yes, SAM, BLM, AND MCH should be the A Number One Buttkickers of their respective roles, from a personal DPS perspective, because of how little they provide to other DPS in a team. That's the trade off.

The problem facing Samurai now is similar to the problem Monk faced in Heavensward, being ostensibly the top melee dps, but not actually desired by anyone at the high end of play because there's other jobs with better synergies. And SE has a TERRIBLE track record with Monk in their efforts to try and kitbash in some utility without actually considering both the identity and the actual act of playing the job, failing to address longstanding issues repeatedly across multiple expansions, and ultimately giving up and remaking the design in hopes of driving up player population for the job. That failed, by the way. It failed big and it failed ugly. But somehow, I can see SE doing the exact same thing to Samurai in the future, and like Monk it will be a problem they created for themselves.