LL 70 Kaiten/SAM preview: Pragmatic/constructive ways to adjust the change before 6.1

[Edweena]

I have planned to unsub when this becomes a reality, and get back playing after they revert it. My friend said to me 'It happened to job X, you'll get used to it'. They may be right, but we're also at fault if we keep enabling bad decisions. Ihave said my piece in other thread and dont wanna sound like a broken record but

Bring Kaiten back.

If you have other jobs to play I'd recommend that (over unsubbing) since many other jobs are wonderfully designed. If they notice that less people playing Samurai as a result of changes made to it they're likely to change it.
(Monster Hunter did the same with one of it's weapon types / classes, the hunting horn, since no one played the fucking thing. They had the data readily available to see how many people played the various weapon types and I can only assume that FF14 also looks at similar data regarding job distribution)
Job representation is a good enough way to voice concerns about said jobs, as that's the data the developers can immediately see, unsubscribing is fine too but sucks
And yeah it may take a while for them to revert it, but hopefully they ADDRESS it at least ASAP. Say something like okay maybe this patch we'll have no kaiten until they fix up another solution that we all know is much better.

[Edweena]

Biggest point of Kaiten removal is it invalidates the existence of Kenki. Samurai isn't a job where you pool resources for burst windows as you don't have personal buffs in those windows like Dancer does. So why save it or manage it at all?
If you don't have Kaiten, you should just spend your Kenki ASAP on Shinten. If SHINTEN LIGHTS UP, YOU PRESS IT. Why keep track of a Kenki bar at all when you're supposed to just press the buttons its used on as soon as they light up?
(Shoha is no different they can literally delete the UI element for the entire Kenki bar if you have an icon for Shoha and Shinten somewhere visible on screen.)

Kaiten made it so that you wanted to always pool enough kenki to use Kaiten immediately when needed, animations are cool but that's not the primary purpose of kaiten. Now we don't want to pool any kenki whatsoever so that we have no risk of over capping when activating Ikishoten.

With this change we can just press Shinten between every GCD where we're not using an OGCD already (single weaving) and not have to THINK at all about kenki management (also it glows too lol), and just press Shoha when it lights up / makes a noise.
Why even have Kenki now? Because it's slightly more flexible than a CD? Many classes use CD's in place of cluttered on screen UI elements. The thought process would remain the same in a flow chart kind of way if Kenki was gone and Shinten became a CD instead.

Can you press Shinten?
----> Yes -----> Press Shinten
----> No ------> Wait for Shinten

Literally the same thought process involved in waiting for a CD.

[Edweena]

Flow Chart for current Kaiten / Shinten Usage btw:
Can you press Shinten?
---> Yes ---> Will you have enough kenki for Kaiten after? ---> No ---> Wait until you have enough kenki for a Kaiten after
---> No ----> Wait
Already so much more complex to even organize in a forum post lol gimme MS Paint please

[AnimusVox]

Samurai isn't a job where you pool resources for burst windows as you don't have personal buffs in those windows like Dancer does. So why save it or manage it at all?

Samurai is supposed to burst during other people's damage buffs and pooling Kenki plays a big part in optimizing its damage. It's the reason a lot of people are upset that Midare/Ogi are going to be auto-crits as SAM will not benefit as much from crit buffs anymore.

[Luin]

Biggest point of Kaiten removal is it invalidates the existence of Kenki. Samurai isn't a job where you pool resources for burst windows as you don't have personal buffs in those windows like Dancer does. So why save it or manage it at all?

Eh?

Yes, we do pool for burst windows. Every job has 2minute bursts. Correctly playing SAM involves pooling for 2m raidbuffs like Technical Step/Divination/Battle Litany/etc etc. It's extremely unlikely that your party will have no raidbuffs. SAM's entire identity has always been about abusing raidbuffs (for now, it will lose this come 6.1).

Say you use 4 Shinten. That's 1080 potency. If you use those 4 Shinten under Technical Step though, that's ~1296 potency, or 216 potency gained just by pooling your resource. This adds up over an entire fight.

However, you are still right that removing Kaiten grossly simplifies this pooling and how kenki is spent in raidbuffs.

[Edweena]

Eh?

Yes, we do pool for burst windows. Every job has 2minute bursts. Correctly playing SAM involves pooling for 2m raidbuffs like Technical Step/Divination/Battle Litany/etc etc. It's extremely unlikely that your party will have no raidbuffs. SAM's entire identity has always been about abusing raidbuffs (for now, it will lose this come 6.1).

Say you use 4 Shinten. That's 1080 potency. If you use those 4 Shinten under Technical Step though, that's ~1296 potency, or 216 potency gained just by pooling your resource. This adds up over an entire fight.

However, you are still right that removing Kaiten grossly simplifies this pooling and how kenki is spent in raidbuffs.

In isolation from other jobs and their kits we pool faaaar less. it doesn't help Ikishoten just gives us a load of kenki we would pool anyway, and especially with everything moving to a 2 minute window
(trick attack is now mug on a 2m cd, chain strategem, devilment but rip guaranteed crits anyway, is there even any 1 min cd's that we benefit from?)
So even if we're not pooling we're getting 50 extra kenki every 2 mins, and we're probably at or above 25 kenki anyway, anything close to 40-50 and we risk overcapping and waste on that activation.
It's far less of stressing on pooling kenki than other jobs like Dancer or Machinist that take quite a while to build up their resources.

If we had a larger kenki cap or generated it at a much lower rate it could be considered far more important to pool but as it is currently I barely consider pooling especially when we have an instant 50 kenki button.
Imagine Dancer just got 2 feathers or 50 espirit when they used devilment (they kind of get the espirit generation but still) pooling would barely matter at that point, so much it could be barely considered pooling.

If there were 1 min burst windows still with trick attack then yeah the 1 minute pooling window outside of Ishikoten would be nice but now that trick attack is gone and replaced with mug, the one place we would significantly pool doesn't matter anymore.
I get my definition for "we don't pool" is vague and incorrect but I'm trying to stress that there are so many things that work against the point of pooling.

[Kazimere]

Biggest point of Kaiten removal is it invalidates the existence of Kenki. Samurai isn't a job where you pool resources for burst windows as you don't have personal buffs in those windows like Dancer does. So why save it or manage it at all?
If you don't have Kaiten, you should just spend your Kenki ASAP on Shinten. If SHINTEN LIGHTS UP, YOU PRESS IT. Why keep track of a Kenki bar at all when you're supposed to just press the buttons its used on as soon as they light up?
(Shoha is no different they can literally delete the UI element for the entire Kenki bar if you have an icon for Shoha and Shinten somewhere visible on screen.)

Kaiten made it so that you wanted to always pool enough kenki to use Kaiten immediately when needed, animations are cool but that's not the primary purpose of kaiten. Now we don't want to pool any kenki whatsoever so that we have no risk of over capping when activating Ikishoten.

With this change we can just press Shinten between every GCD where we're not using an OGCD already (single weaving) and not have to THINK at all about kenki management (also it glows too lol), and just press Shoha when it lights up / makes a noise.
Why even have Kenki now? Because it's slightly more flexible than a CD? Many classes use CD's in place of cluttered on screen UI elements. The thought process would remain the same in a flow chart kind of way if Kenki was gone and Shinten became a CD instead.

Can you press Shinten?
----> Yes -----> Press Shinten
----> No ------> Wait for Shinten

Literally the same thought process involved in waiting for a CD.

Please stop saying you’re having to manage kenki. You aren’t. Every combo chain gives you enough kenki for a Kaiten. There is nothing to manage.

[Leemon]

Please stop saying you’re having to manage kenki. You aren’t. Every combo chain gives you enough kenki for a Kaiten. There is nothing to manage.

If you don't have to manage it good for you. It doesn't mean other people don't have to manage it too. You can swing your e-peen freely but don't devalue others.

[ItsUrBoi]

Please stop saying you’re having to manage kenki. You aren’t. Every combo chain gives you enough kenki for a Kaiten. There is nothing to manage.

That's not true. Look, let's say you are on 15 kenki, and you have both the Kasha and Gekko combos done and you are doing Hakaze into Yukikaze ). You were at 15 kenki, now you are at 35 ( Yukikaze gives 15, Hakaze gives 5, so 20 gained ).
If at any point when you are doing Hakaze -> Yukikaze you do a Shinten, you will not have enough Kenki for a Kaiten, therefore you do not do Shinten.
You can only do Shinten if you will have enough Kenki for a Kaiten on your next Iaijutsu. In a vacuum, yeah , you will never have to think about it, but in practice you will use plenty of Shintens and may run into this "issue" -> to which the answer should be to get better at playing samurai - learning to manage the resource, instead of removing this from the job and making it worse.

[Ransu]

Please stop saying you’re having to manage kenki. You aren’t. Every combo chain gives you enough kenki for a Kaiten. There is nothing to manage.

Do you even know how the current rotation works? You absolutely can overspend kenki and not have enough for kaiten when re-applying higanbana