Hissatsu: Kaiten

[KokaSokaLoka]

admiteddly It's not 90 yet but i played samurai as a main job right through the last expansion with random amounts of savage experiece. ( i don't raid but i do occassionally slot fill for friends)

but my question would be this..
when would i ever want to use midare without first using kaiten?
when would i ever want to use higabana without first using kaiten?
when would i wantto use any applicable skill without first using kaiten?

Unless it changes between 83 and 90 the answer is always NEVER! which means there no choice no strategy no impact, its just bloat..

now if it was a case where you kaiten had a cool down and you could only use it on i dunno maybe 1/3 of your iajutsu uses then bam!! now it has weight and impact because not only is there an element of choice to be made but there would also be a visible difference when using it... "whoa that midare ripped the boss to shreds compared to the last ones i did..."
but when you kaiten everything it's just another midare for the same old damage yet again... boriiingggg..

No, you'd just use it for every higanbana or ogi namikiri. There'd be no strategy still because SE is streamlining jobs to that point and there's always a best use for something. You're basically just suggesting Reassembled but for SAM. And if thinking about strategizing the job is fun to you then how can you be in support of streamlining jobs? Taking away Kaiten reduces the thinking needed with kenki management from 1 braincell to 0.

[KokaSokaLoka]

More skills or buttons doesn't mean better gameplay. the issue is what those skills and buttons do and how they impact a fight. there are games where you may only have 5 or 6 skills but the way they flow and the impact they have on a fight makes for a much better gameplay experience.

Kaiten carries no weight or impact. maybe between um 52-60 where kenki is actualy a finite resource.. but 60+ you just kaiten everything without much thought thats not deep or engaging. its just bloat.



pretty much agree with this.. when you're pressing a button that many times it really doesnt feel fun or impactful. (problem with many ogcds in general, they're just busy buttons to keep you occupied)

when you're pressing a button to power up every iajutsu. are you really powering them up?. or just doing normal damage?

You skip the first Kaiten on the first Midare, then proceed as normal. And then without shinten you have nothing to spend it on but kaiten which is also not deep or engaging. I don't understand how "it's not deep or engaging" is an argument to make something even less deep or engaging?

And allow me to pose this argument - Less skills or buttons doesn't mean better gameplay. the issue is what those skills and buttons do and how they impact a fight. Cookie Clicker is not a fun or invigorating gameplay experience because you only have one button to press, though I suppose with the arguments I see here some people seem to think it's peak video game design.

FFXIV raid design has always been a dance. Very rarely do they utilize a stun/interrupt which is about the biggest "impact" you can use a skill on a fight. Every other skill basically serves to do damage, reduce damage taken, or heal. FFXIV has a slow gcd speed and the reason for that is so you can better utilize ogcds. Take off all your ogcds and play through P1S, you'll have so much free time on your hands. I took Kaiten off my hotbar with my static's weekly run on Tuesday for P1S, the gameplay felt way more empty, and that's with still using shinten and third eye. How incredibly boring it would be to not have to weave anything. The basis of your argument is pointlessly reductionist, 95% of the buttons in the game serves to do damage, reduce damage taken, or heal - so by your argument it's all bloat.

[Divinewindx]

Yes, I'm very saddened to hear about it's removal, and I'm hoping SE back tracks on it.

[IdowhatIwant]

More skills or buttons doesn't mean better gameplay. the issue is what those skills and buttons do and how they impact a fight. there are games where you may only have 5 or 6 skills but the way they flow and the impact they have on a fight makes for a much better gameplay experience.

Kaiten carries no weight or impact. maybe between um 52-60 where kenki is actualy a finite resource.. but 60+ you just kaiten everything without much thought thats not deep or engaging. its just bloat.

This alone tells me you don't know how to play the class, so its hard to take what you say serious. But, Kaiten is one of the few skills that actually tie a classes 2 gauges together. I think most players would rather keep kaiten and have the whole meditation system scrapped to reduce button bloat. Which shoha only exists, because meditate served little purpose originally, so instead of removing a useless skill the repurposed it into something that wasn't needed. Sadly kaiten being removed is making samurai like most classes, have a gauge that is used for a single skill. Which at that point why even have the gauge at all it's now just screen clutter.

[NotReallyMistral]

Ngl, I really just came into the forums to say my piece about this.

I still don't understand why people are arguing about Kaiten and its purpose. Yeah, sure, we all use it to really just power up iajutsu, but it's probably the only skill that lets us do constant resource management which, if you're doing your rotation correctly, isn't a problem that you should come across. Also, that person who said Kaiten carries no weight or impact clearly don't understand what Kaiten represents for SAM. It's a cool looking animation, is the only actual skill that makes us manage resources, as slack as that department has been for SAM, and is the only skill (i think it's the only one anyway) where sen and kenki are both actually being utilized which i thought was a cool mechanic.

Don't get me wrong, but honestly, I feel like people who advocate for kaiten removal just don't want to deal with that very simple resource management and just makes us lose another ogcd that actually felt important - and can be very annoying if you make a mistake with wasting kenki when you lose the opportunity to use iajutsu in some situations - and it doesn't feel like a filler unlike shinten. So.....if they don't revert this decision, guess we back to shinten spamming? Just like the ye olde days of 4.0 just without hagakure then. But hey, apparently Kaiten is less important of the two.

[Aiscence]

More skills or buttons doesn't mean better gameplay. the issue is what those skills and buttons do and how they impact a fight. there are games where you may only have 5 or 6 skills but the way they flow and the impact they have on a fight makes for a much better gameplay experience.

Kaiten carries no weight or impact. maybe between um 52-60 where kenki is actualy a finite resource.. but 60+ you just kaiten everything without much thought thats not deep or engaging. its just bloat.



pretty much agree with this.. when you're pressing a button that many times it really doesnt feel fun or impactful. (problem with many ogcds in general, they're just busy buttons to keep you occupied)

when you're pressing a button to power up every iajutsu. are you really powering them up?. or just doing normal damage?

The thing is, you need to use it before most iaijutsu yes. But it costs kenki, so to use it, you need to keep a balance between using shinten to not overcap but not use it too much so you don't have enough anymore. The problem is that, by removing it, you will just now spam shinten when you have 25, without a single speck of thinking and if you optimize you will spend it at 90/95 just to spend it under buffs at once. That will be the only utility of that gauge, which ... seems consistent with a lot of jobs now, having a gauge that is barely used for one thing with minimum interaction. And yes, when learning samurai you will do mistakes and not have enough to do Kaiten, but mistakes are what makes you learn, sadly the dev wants to remove all the ""noob traps"" that can lead people to do any mistakes.

But if you think that "kaiten do not bring much complexity", you should read: that's how low the bar already is, that's how much the game already is far too simple. it's something that drk/mch/healers have gone through between sb and shb without many people talking about, it's sad that it took them to touch samurai for people to begin to riot. Sadly, with yoship saying nice takes like: aha I remember when people asked us to make the game more difficult in HW, it's not something we want to do anymore or if people want engaging content, they can do ultimate or even: ou healer "that can kinda heal extreme" became too good, so we had to replace it. That means 99% of the content is made to just be a visual novel while the gameplay is relayed to the background, and that includes the jobs.

[Dzian]

You can apply this to so many things. Maintenance buffs for a start. The 1 step in your 1-2-3 combo is just "tedious filler" to use 2 and 2 is tedious filler to reach 3. Why do RPR's have to press Blood Stalk and Gluttony? Why do NIN always have to press Mudras? Why make DNC's do 3 steps? What's the point of any ability that grants resource or gauge, just make them recharge a little faster. Or a better example is why does Reassemble exist on MCH still or Zoe on SGE.

Kaiten gives the Kenki gauge purpose. If they wanted to get rid of it, they should have added something else to keep the gauge meaningful.

True but at the same time Ninjas mudras is probably the best example of how it only takes a few buttons to create engaging game play. 4 or 5 buttons on ninja can drop 8 or 9 different skills with different effects depending on how you interact with them..

i find it to be one of the most engaging jobs for that reason alone. perhaps a little less so since they put mudras on the gcd but still those 4 buttons (5 with kassatsu) do more than any other buttons in the game imo.

as for the rest of you're quote combat itself has been pretty tedious since beta.. and slowly getting worse.. early ARR combat was ok in coils where there was a lot more to do than just hitthings till there dead. but so many elements of combat have died, resource management, (mp tp) eminity, crowd control, weaknesses, placement, (gotta bind that golem in just the right place to get petrified so you can hide behind it) and now its just mindlessly whack out the same rotation till its dead..

and what makes it tedious is that when the next patch comes with new content and new bosses it's essentially the same rotation yet again.. and the next patch after that and after that and so on..

This alone tells me you don't know how to play the class, so its hard to take what you say serious. But, Kaiten is one of the few skills that actually tie a classes 2 gauges together. I think most players would rather keep kaiten and have the whole meditation system scrapped to reduce button bloat. Which shoha only exists, because meditate served little purpose originally, so instead of removing a useless skill the repurposed it into something that wasn't needed. Sadly kaiten being removed is making samurai like most classes, have a gauge that is used for a single skill. Which at that point why even have the gauge at all it's now just screen clutter.

honestly its not a difficult class to play. basicaslly never let your kenki drop below 20 and you're golden. Always keep 20 for either kaiten or Yaten / gap closer if you want to optimise uptime. boom done..

only 83 at present though but i cant imaging it changes that drastically at 90..

[GaleMex]

Yes, I'm very saddened to hear about it's removal, and I'm hoping SE back tracks on it.

I don't.

Samurai has way too many buttons, it's almost crossing the boundary of what a controller can handle.

Kaiten is boring from a gameplay perspective. It just artificially raises the skill floor and punishes you for miscalculating your Kenki. Also a skill that just boosts your next weaponskill isn't really the pinnacle of interesting game design...

[LeonKeyh]

I don't agree with this, because you are kind of blurring the line between the two.

Damage typing was removed yes, to make all jobs "viable" and accessible for casuals/midcores.

Damage *variability*, particularly when it comes to critical hits, buff windows, and rotation bloat, is what has been consistently removed for the sake of parsers.

There is some overlap and the two do affect each other. A lot of changes made for the sake of casuals like removing of elemental/damage typing, TP, etc. do *de facto* affect damage variability even if that is not the primary purpose. But reduction of crits and the homogenization of buff windows is purely in service of hardcore raiders.

Which, in a similar vein, I have been hearing a lot of people whinging for Blood Weapon stacks on DRK along with Delirium and it is something I just don't agree with. I don't want *every* ability on a job to be a stack. I *like* weird buff windows. It's not efficient but it at least keeps gameplay interesting.

I misunderstood what you meant by damage variability; You're talking about autocrits/DHs.

Even then I disagree it was made for hardcore raiders because I'm sure that they don't want to have multiple materia melds for each of the jobs that they want to play. Adding autocrit to SAM abilities is going to mean that crit materia is going to be less useful on SAM which will lead to yet another job that doesn't really share ideal melds with jobs that share the same gear. Magical Ranged is already a mess when it comes to that, and WAR is much different from the rest of the tanks because of its auto DH.

I can't see any hardcore player wanting something like this. They LIKE damage variability.

Homogenization of buff windows is, again, not in the service of hardcore raiders. "Hardcore" raiders would easily be able to line up buffs with different cooldowns (IF that's something that would deem to be useful. They would be able to easily go through the math of the buff and see whether holding a 90 cooldown for 30 seconds is worth it to stack the buff with 120 second buffs. That is stuff that "hardcore" raiders LOVE to do. The change to buff windows was squarely done to lower/remove the large DPS difference between midcore/lowcore raiders and hardcore raiders. I'm sure hardcore raiders dislike the change because it removes skill expression and puts them closer in performance to those midcore raiders.

I agree with you on the Blood Weapon/Delirium stacks; I enjoy knowing what buffs need to be done in the second OGCD window to ensure that you get all of the GCDs you need into them. But I think the people whining for those stacks are just wondering WHY they went ahead and streamlined it for jobs like WAR, but didn't for DRK (and they typically bring it up as "proof" that DRK is largely neglected).

[LeonKeyh]

I don't.

Samurai has way too many buttons, it's almost crossing the boundary of what a controller can handle.

Kaiten is boring from a gameplay perspective. It just artificially raises the skill floor and punishes you for miscalculating your Kenki. Also a skill that just boosts your next weaponskill isn't really the pinnacle of interesting game design...

Kaiten isn't a skill floor thing, it's a skill ceiling. You're not punished to the point of uselessness if you miss a Kaiten, it's just there to reward people who are able to calculate it correctly. Boring is subjective and I disagree but I can't really argue that.

As for SAM having too many buttons, I almost agree with you. I play on controller and it's a bit rough, but there are TONS of alternative changes that could be made instead of getting rid of Kaiten:

Make Shoha II replace Shoha and have big attack + fall off damage to enemies around the target
Combine Shinten and Kyuten into a single attack that does high damage + fall off damage to enemies around the target
Combine Guren and Senei into a single attack that does high damage + fall off damage to enemies around the target
Have Tsubame-gaeshi replace Iaijutsu after a cast instead of having it a separate button
Have Ogi Namikiri replace Ikishoten once used

That would free up 5 buttons while not at all changing the gameplay of the job.