SAM players are quitting

[AsiTsurugi]

snip

Alright, I'll take the bait. SAM had no "clearly defined weaknesses"? Have you tried having a castbar in melee range when the boss is actively casting things? Have you tried having to manage two different job gauges in order to better line up your big skills and maximize your damage during your team's buff windows? Compared to the current state of SAM where your "big skills" hit for barely any more than your regular combo negating the aspect of sen gauge management, and the kenki gauge management is not really required since you can fit in as many Shintens during buff windows as you require without worrying about it too much.

And your examples. As a fan of both MNK and DRG (both behind SAM), MNK having no ranged attack is not a weakness given no melee uses their ranged attack as part of any reasonable rotation, except in exenuating circumstances (like before the first trio in P2 of the current ultimate, where it is a mathematical gain to use Yaten+Enpi for SAM). Moreover, MNK always had high mobility to account for disengages and minimizing downtimes in the form of the (former) Fists of Wind, in combination with Six-Sided Star, and the current Thunderclap.

DRG's weaving issue almost never existed due to the 2.49s-2.5s GCD most DRG gearsets default to unless the DRG player is slow on the uptake or just forgets to press the button during the correct OGCD window, so you know, player skill causing issues as opposed to the job's fault or inherent weakness.

Freestyle SAM was a meme because of the people that played it, as opposed to the job. You know, ones that just press whatever they feel like without so much as reading tooltips? Those ones. It never "performed well", nor was it an "optimal way" to play it like you seem to suggest. Now if you mean ad-hoc SAM, that was mostly restricted to ultimates, and required a lot of planning around group buff windows and boss phases and arguably harder to execute than the loop rotation.

I hope this cleared up the misconceptions you might have had about these three jobs.