SAM players are quitting

[YukiB]

There's a marked difference in "The dragoon delays it because of the party buff window" and "It's literally wrong to use Kaiten on anything but Iaijutsu and Ogi". When we speak of "Choice" in game design, it's not about whether the player is initiating an action, it's about whether there's a meaningful divergence of outcomes from those actions.

If your only outcome selections are Pass/Fail, it's not a choice, it's a formality.

Reapers have "The choice" of not alternating their powered up weapon skills.
Black mages have "The choice" of only using ice magic.
Healers have "The choice" of never using damage actions.

See how little that actually flies?

I see that those are all choices with varying degrees of impact on DPS.

I'm not arguing that players should ever NOT use Kaiten by the way, but it was a skill that required player agency to use, and thus provided some small amount of skill expression and gauge maintenance which is now lacking.

Imagine if they made it so RPR could ONLY alternate their gauge skills. The end result would be the same, but the job would be slightly easier to play and lose a little bit of flavor. Imagine if they removed Blizzard IV from BLM and made the umbral hearts passive. The end result would be the same (actually slightly more potency per GCD) but the job would be slightly easier to play and lose a little bit of flavor. That ability to make decisions, and mistakes, makes jobs more fun.

A few percent if you're not performing which if you're "doing what you want" freestyle dpsing is going to drop you into grey.

So the choice to not use Kaiten is not the sole factor in determining a grey parse, but execution of the whole rotation. Thank you for proving my point.