Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[Xenon_S]

It's so weird! Everyone seemed happy with the Samurai. I don't think I ever heard a single person complain about it. Many/most of the other jobs, yes, but not Samurai. It was so smooth & well constructed from the start. I do NOT understand what they were thinking. Other jobs can feel jumbled or haphazard, or stuck together - but the Samurai didn't. At most, they could have consolidated some long cd abilities - those are annoying on everyone (one for single target, one for aoe - those, I could see smashed into one button without tears)

So, so weird!

The devs were unhappy because they have trouble balancing samurai's damage profile.
Most of Samurai's damage comes from their big hits: Midare, Kaeshi Midare, Ogi Namikiri etc. As such crit variance will affect the performance rather heavily.
This in turn makes the tuning in ultimate rather tricky. Because unlike a savage fight that is mostly full uptime, an ultimate fight has short bursts of phases where you can do damage, and various other transitions and forced downtimes where they run you dizzy with mechanic vomits.
If 6.08 samurai critted a majority of their big attacks within the available damage window, that could make the DPS check trivial. Conversely, a samurai with terrible luck would not be able to reliably contribute to the DPS check.

This is in theory how I interpret the devs' intentions based on current ultimate design and their words from the patch note reading. But I still don't agree with their decision to remove kaiten either way because there are ways to smooth out samurai's damage profile without removing kaiten.

In practice however, the damage resource structure of a job leads to more balancing mishaps than crit variance.
Take NIN for example, most of their damage comes from things on a CD (ninjutsu charges, trick, kassatsu, dwad etc). Losing GCDs only means a loss of ninki generation which is only a small part of damage make up. (take the top p4s p2 nin log for example, bhava only accounted for 9.45% of their total damage, the bunshin attacks adds up to less than 5%).
In a similar boat, a BLM can simply umbral soul away and continue charging polyglot stacks during downtimes.

Meanwhile, GNBs are on suicide watch with the cartridge alignment, MCH and RPR needs to hit their GCD to build up resources for their burst phase (I can hear MCH internally screaming over drill drifts), and every 8 GCD lost on SAM is 1 less midare and 1/3 less shoha.

So in the end, I don't even know. The new ultimate is without a doubt a spectacularly designed fight, but the individual job balancing is... confusing at best.

[KurenXIV]

This is in theory how I interpret the devs' intentions based on current ultimate design and their words from the patch note reading.

Just want to point out that currently, according to the fflogs world race page, out of the top 20 progressed groups for DSR ultimate, the number of SAM is... 0

Well they certainly made balancing easy since no one is using SAM for the ultimate at all now lol.

(Also great insight and I get where they are coming from its just executed so so so poorly).

[darkdyllon]

The devs were unhappy because they have trouble balancing samurai's damage profile.

Yup exactly this.
the devs had no idea (or atleast the team in charge for Samurai balance) how to deal with it, the same that the team wants to slowly go away from crit comps.
I get that there are challenges when it comes to balancing EVERY job around EVERY piece of content, nobody can blame the devs there, but it's THEIR job to make it work regardless, it's not like FF14 literally has that community of "if you communicate with us we'll understand" like when Endwalker got delayed, it sucked (a lot but thankfully i could reschedule my off week) but most were "don't worry about it"

it doesn't help that the people doing the job testing apparently can't become "too good" at their respective job or have to fear being removed from that project. (look at the healer tester, he/she was too good, is now replaced ... to appease the bottom of the barrel players) and Yoshi's stance on more engaging healer gameplay being "if you want more engagement out of healers, go play ultimate"

Hope for the LL of 6.2 they'll adress SAMs outcry, he said it won't be happening sooner which is another bottleneck that should be resolved, especially a game on this scale ... WHERE IS THE COMMUNITY MANAGER WHO IS SUPPOSE TO BE OUR LINK TO THE DEVS?!
why not have an CM for each language (or 1 in many languages atleast, that could feed this info to an translator who then feeds it to Yoshi, who then feeds it to his team, who then feeds it back to him and back to the CM back to us, tada, an feedback loop)
Doesn't help the fact that Yoshi stated that his team watches FF14 youtube content (which is fine on itself) but then asks CONTENT CREATORS to pay someone to translate their video into Japanese so that they can understand it. (drakgamestein did this recently on his video about improving mount farm and it comes off as "we can't be bothered learning another language, learn ours instead")

[KurenXIV]

Yup exactly this.
the devs had no idea (or atleast the team in charge for Samurai balance) how to deal with it, the same that the team wants to slowly go away from crit comps.
I get that there are challenges when it comes to balancing EVERY job around EVERY piece of content, nobody can blame the devs there, but it's THEIR job to make it work regardless, it's not like FF14 literally has that community of "if you communicate with us we'll understand" like when Endwalker got delayed, it sucked (a lot but thankfully i could reschedule my off week) but most were "don't worry about it"

To add to this, I've said it before but its not like this didn't exist oh I don't know . . . for the entire existence of Samurai. Now all of a sudden they were like "oh this is bad . . ." which is insane. They should have had this in mind FOR EW and made SAM different FOR EW and then players could decide then and there if they want to continue with the job.

Instead we all gear up and are having a great time only for this to happen. It's just sad.

[YukiB]

To add to this, I've said it before but its not like this didn't exist oh I don't know . . . for the entire existence of Samurai. Now all of a sudden they were like "oh this is bad . . ." which is insane. They should have had this in mind FOR EW and made SAM different FOR EW and then players could decide then and there if they want to continue with the job.

Instead we all gear up and are having a great time only for this to happen. It's just sad.

Not only did they not address it with EW, they made it WORSE by giving us a 2400 potency one-two punch with Kaiten+Ogi and Kaeshi Ogi. Then their solution to RPR damage dominance (which they should have seen coming long before launch) was to buff Midare/Kaeshi and Ogi/Kaeshi, the biggest contributors to the crit variance issue, by 10% and 12.5% respectively.

If they had given us another oGCD to weave instead of Ogi, and if they had buffed our basic combos instead of Midare/Ogi, we never would have been in this situation in the first place.

The job devs seem so directionless. They keep digging holes, then leveling the whole field to get themselves out of them.

[Quor]

Not only did they not address it with EW, they made it WORSE by giving us a 2400 potency one-two punch with Kaiten+Ogi and Kaeshi Ogi. Then their solution to RPR damage dominance (which they should have seen coming long before launch) was to buff Midare/Kaeshi and Ogi/Kaeshi, the biggest contributors to the crit variance issue, by 10% and 12.5% respectively.

If they had given us another oGCD to weave instead of Ogi, and if they had buffed our basic combos instead of Midare/Ogi, we never would have been in this situation in the first place.

The job devs seem so directionless. They keep digging holes, then leveling the whole field to get themselves out of them.

While the extra charges on Kaeshi and Meikyo were nice at the get-go, the reasoning that's been used in regards to damage variance baffles me. This is entirely a hole that the devs dug themselves into. They are the ones who shunted so much of SAM's damage into the same small window. They literally brought this upon themselves, and their solution is not to re-evaluate changes made very recently, but rather to remove a core part of the job that's been in it since inception?

The mind boggles. I've said it so many times before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again, for some time yet, but to call these changes "half-baked" or "phoned-in" or "tone deaf" is an understatement. There's actual literal ignorance of the job behind this. An ignorance that is almost malicious in it's severity.