Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[Ryaz]

Yoshi-P addressed this while reading patch notes and said they wanted to change up both Samurai and Ninja. They are closely monitoring feedback and may make further changes (or reversions) in 6.2 depending in community feedback.

He also said they were going to make a separate post about their reasoning for the changes, which I'm highly interested in seeing because they really feel out of nowhere, especially when there were several other routes to reducing button bloat than removing Kaiten. He's apparently aware a LOT of people aren't happy.

[Quor]

Yoshi-P addressed this while reading patch notes and said they wanted to change up both Samurai and Ninja. They are closely monitoring feedback and may make further changes (or reversions) in 6.2 depending in community feedback.

He also said they were going to make a separate post about their reasoning for the changes, which I'm highly interested in seeing because they really feel out of nowhere, especially when there were several other routes to reducing button bloat than removing Kaiten. He's apparently aware a LOT of people aren't happy.

That's a start. Now it's up to us to finish it. The changes need to be reverted, full-stop. I'll live with a circular Tenka Goken. I won't like it but I'll accept that there are plenty of people who might prefer the braindead all-circular aoe GCD combo. Fine, I can compromise on that even if I hate it. But the potency nerfs? The auto-crits? They Kaiten removal? All reverted, 100%. Not some of them reverted. All of them. SAM was perfectly fine as it was in 6.0, and if their stated issue of "action" or "button" bloat is still a problem then the community has brainstormed nearly a half dozen ways to address it that don't involve the removal of core job mechanics.

[jetteaime]

Totally agree. It feels like the devs think the player base is stupid and incapable of learning a more complex rotation.

And the “button bloat” justifications are getting out of hand. The controller settings in this game are so accessible, even jobs with a lot of buttons like GNB in ShB wasn’t bad if you knew how to use R2+L2 and W-cross hotbars.

SMN went from having a complex rotation to now mostly pressing one button.

SAM without kaiten feels empty, and the kenki gauge feels incredibly boring because we no longer have to look at it aside from preventing overcap with ikishoten. Squeenix please, stop the oversimplification of jobs.

[Warpup]

Totally agree. It feels like the devs think the player base is stupid and incapable of learning a more complex rotation.

And the “button bloat” justifications are getting out of hand. The controller settings in this game are so accessible, even jobs with a lot of buttons like GNB in ShB wasn’t bad if you knew how to use R2+L2 and W-cross hotbars.

SMN went from having a complex rotation to now mostly pressing one button.

SAM without kaiten feels empty, and the kenki gauge feels incredibly boring because we no longer have to look at it aside from preventing overcap with ikishoten. Squeenix please, stop the oversimplification of jobs.

Definitely feel this sentiment right here. There is streamlining, then there is oversimplifying or "dumbing down", which is what happened for me and classes I played in WoW over the years. It is not a great feeling to have for classes a player loves to main. I want the Devs the believe in the players more and that even if something seems daunting at first, that we will figure things out. I love samurai so much that I just played it over and over till i could play it and know it like the back of my palm. When i looked at some guides, I had most of the concepts down, just some small ideas I didn't know fundamentally as a player, like slide casting for instance. Once I understood these concepts, it only elevated my execution of the job, and it felt incredible to execute samurai at such a fine tuned level.

This instance with the devs makes me think of what they did with monk in ShB when they removed Greased Lightning Stack management, and made Tornado kick a oGCD. It fixed the issue for monks having a clunky mechanic with GL they had to manage, and that using Tornado Kick was actually detrimental and discouraged to be used (their lv60 capstone ability). However, it made it very boring for the rest of ShB for me. The main difference for when they changed monk was in the middle of the ShB as opposed to Samurai being early in EW. This was their way of prepping for Monk's rework for Endwalker, and I will say is very successful in its rework. Monk has a very fun and engaging rotation, and has a more identifiable class flavor and fantasy.

Now with that said, if they are planning to do something similar to Samurai, I ask: Why? And what for? And of all times, why now? As far as I am concerned, Samurai has been a solid job for most of its life cycle. I know it had some bumps here and there, but nothing as detrimental as this. They would need to show me the concepts and tooltips for future reworks to convince me because right now, I am not convinced. Button bloat is not the problem, oversimplifying is the real problem. I want Kaiten back.

[SlickPaws]

Yoshi-P addressed this while reading patch notes and said they wanted to change up both Samurai and Ninja. They are closely monitoring feedback and may make further changes (or reversions) in 6.2 depending in community feedback.

He also said they were going to make a separate post about their reasoning for the changes, which I'm highly interested in seeing because they really feel out of nowhere, especially when there were several other routes to reducing button bloat than removing Kaiten. He's apparently aware a LOT of people aren't happy.

If anything, this is valid justification for player surveys or public test servers before any proposed changes like this are simply forced into the game while the community is openly up in arms on the forums telling them not to. And now we're going to just have to sit and eat the shit sandwich we were just served up until 6.2 assuming that the feedback is even taken on board. Based on how healers got the "just play ultimate lol" treatment, I genuinely feel like the devs treat player feedback with utter contempt just now and I don't see any of this being walked back in a meaningful way. RIP SAM, 4.0 - 6.1, we knew you well.

To be fair, the Kaeshi only did more damage if you weren't using Kaiten, which you should have been. Kaiten did not buff the Kaeshi versions of the skills because they're not classified as weaponskills. The extra 50% potency on the Kaeshi versions was to make up for that fact, and bring them up to parity with the buffed iaijutsu.

Now that Kaeshi is no longer a thing, their potencies can be reduced to be equal with the iaijutsu.

I do agree with reverting the changes, of course.

By that rationale wouldn't it make more sense to increase the basic potency of the Iaijutsus to make up for the loss of Kaiten and synergise with the auto-crit instead of massively lowering the potencies of the Kaeshi skills?

[YukiB]

By that rationale wouldn't it make more sense to increase the basic potency of the Iaijutsus to make up for the loss of Kaiten and synergise with the auto-crit instead of massively lowering the potencies of the Kaeshi skills?

If they increased them to match the old Kaiten/Kaeshi potencies AND gave them auto-crit our DPS would go through the roof.

Guaranteed crits, not accounting for raid buffs, amount to about 39% extra damage in BiS raid gear with 25% crit and 60% crit magnitude (doing 160% of tooltip damage guaranteed versus doing an average of 115% tooltip damage, 160/115 = 1.3913). If they increased Midare potency to 990 to match Kaeshi, it would be 3168 potency in two hits, compared to what was on average 2277 potency total.

We also don't have to spend kenki on Kaiten anymore to reach that potency, so we have an extra 200 potency worth of kenki to spend on Shinten spam later in the fight.

If they wanted to make Midare hit just as hard on average as in patch 6.0, they should have INCREASED potency to about 710, but this would be a net increase to our DPS because of the extra kenki. If they wanted a Midare+Kaeshi+20 kenki combo to do as much damage as the 6.0 Kaiten+Midare+Kaeshi combo, they should have only reduced potency to 650, or just left it alone. Instead they decided to ALSO nerf the potency of our biggest attacks and redistribute it throughout our combo, reducing our burst damage and synergy with raid buffs even further.

They wanted to address concerns of crit variance, which weren't concerns for anyone not chasing top DPS metrics, and over-corrected so that everyone suffers. And at the same time took away job complexity, identity, and fun.

[SlickPaws]

If they increased them to match the old Kaiten/Kaeshi potencies AND gave them auto-crit our DPS would go through the roof.

Guaranteed crits, not accounting for raid buffs, amount to about 39% extra damage in BiS raid gear with 25% crit and 60% crit magnitude (doing 160% of tooltip damage guaranteed versus doing an average of 115% tooltip damage, 160/115 = 1.3913). If they increased Midare potency to 990 to match Kaeshi, it would be 3168 potency in two hits, compared to what was on average 2277 potency total.

We also don't have to spend kenki on Kaiten anymore to reach that potency, so we have an extra 200 potency worth of kenki to spend on Shinten spam later in the fight.

If they wanted to make Midare hit just as hard on average as in patch 6.0, they should have INCREASED potency to about 710, but this would be a net increase to our DPS because of the extra kenki. If they wanted a Midare+Kaeshi+20 kenki combo to do as much damage as the 6.0 Kaiten+Midare+Kaeshi combo, they should have only reduced potency to 650, or just left it alone. Instead they decided to ALSO nerf the potency of our biggest attacks and redistribute it throughout our combo, reducing our burst damage and synergy with raid buffs even further.

They wanted to address concerns of crit variance, which weren't concerns for anyone not chasing top DPS metrics, and over-corrected so that everyone suffers. And at the same time took away job complexity, identity, and fun.

I wasn't advocating for Midare to go up to 990, I was more thinking of some kind of happy medium that doesn't feel like it's nerfing my biggest attacks. 710 potency seems like it would've been fine to me. I was quite happy with how the class was already, and if they really want to nerf our damage I'd take the hit provided I got to keep Kaiten and some of the complexity. Thanks for the breakdown though. It's kind of what I was trying to say but with way more maths and knowledge to back it up. :P

[Roxus]

If they wanted to make Midare hit just as hard on average as in patch 6.0, they should have INCREASED potency to about 710, but this would be a net increase to our DPS because of the extra kenki. If they wanted a Midare+Kaeshi+20 kenki combo to do as much damage as the 6.0 Kaiten+Midare+Kaeshi combo, they should have only reduced potency to 650, or just left it alone. Instead they decided to ALSO nerf the potency of our biggest attacks and redistribute it throughout our combo, reducing our burst damage and synergy with raid buffs even further.

They wanted to address concerns of crit variance, which weren't concerns for anyone not chasing top DPS metrics, and over-corrected so that everyone suffers. And at the same time took away job complexity, identity, and fun.

Agree with the math here. I think it's easier if they keep Kaiten as it is (without the crit guarantee on the big skills), nothing was wrong with it in the first place. With these changes we are going back to Stormblood damage numbers (visually). They should honestly have just addressed the crit stat itself and the buffs related.

Gonna have to channel my inner WAR here and say that I actually liked the conal.
Which is strange because I hate Overpower. But Tenka Goken's conal was always interesting to me with having to hop in and hop out to position it correctly. The AOE rotation is now basically just going to be standing still in the middle of the pack with no movement at all, outside of dodging the occasional AOE.

I also liked the conal for positioning and such, but if I had to pick something to dumb down this would have to be my choice.

[silentwindfr]

If they increased them to match the old Kaiten/Kaeshi potencies AND gave them auto-crit our DPS would go through the roof.

Guaranteed crits, not accounting for raid buffs, amount to about 39% extra damage in BiS raid gear with 25% crit and 60% crit magnitude (doing 160% of tooltip damage guaranteed versus doing an average of 115% tooltip damage, 160/115 = 1.3913). If they increased Midare potency to 990 to match Kaeshi, it would be 3168 potency in two hits, compared to what was on average 2277 potency total.

We also don't have to spend kenki on Kaiten anymore to reach that potency, so we have an extra 200 potency worth of kenki to spend on Shinten spam later in the fight.

If they wanted to make Midare hit just as hard on average as in patch 6.0, they should have INCREASED potency to about 710, but this would be a net increase to our DPS because of the extra kenki. If they wanted a Midare+Kaeshi+20 kenki combo to do as much damage as the 6.0 Kaiten+Midare+Kaeshi combo, they should have only reduced potency to 650, or just left it alone. Instead they decided to ALSO nerf the potency of our biggest attacks and redistribute it throughout our combo, reducing our burst damage and synergy with raid buffs even further.

They wanted to address concerns of crit variance, which weren't concerns for anyone not chasing top DPS metrics, and over-corrected so that everyone suffers. And at the same time took away job complexity, identity, and fun.

the trouble is right now outside kaiten complain and number, midare and ogi feel week for something you can't throw often. i have a friend blm that can throw 36k dh/crit with his spamable fire spell... when right now my midare only reach 26k... why? i means even with the best skillspeed (2.0 what no one really use) we still need 8 gcd action for 1 midare... that a whole 16 sec (more 17.12 with 2.14). midare and ogi are means to be our hard hitting tool... but right now when we don't have kaeshi it feel week. yes it's auto critical... but it don't change the fact that it's only 600 potency for midare and 800 potency for ogi! really not enough for have the feeling to hit hard and make the iaijutsu something super strong.

i begin even to question why the 1.3 sec cast time for something soo meaningless.
yeah i know we only did loose (from the balance discord math) something like 3dps... but it don't change that something feel wrong... yes the critical is means to replace the kaiten effect... but... what about the midare and ogi that was critical with kaiten? why tenka goken did get nerfed? why i feel they did decide to change stuff without even think about the impact on the feeling of the job.. i means i feel more a samurai in pvp than in pve. when i launch a ogi or a midare in pvp it's punishement for the enemy... it's impactfull and make us feel powerfull... but in pve... i feel like... i hit with a hammer toy. and i'm sure i'm not the only one to feel this.

ps: by the way don't come tell me they can't make good synergy between skill, the pvp rework have for some jobs some insane synergy that feel really strong and rewarding!

[MellowMink]

I don’t understand why the development team doesn’t think more about combining common melee combos into singular buttons like PVP used to do, or like one of Gunbreaker’s newest quality-of-life updates with its continuation combo did; that makes far more sense for reducing button bloat than removing unique skills without offering sufficient replacements.