Quote Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim View Post
The reason why Kaiten was different, which is likely why they did the change they did, is because other than pre Lv52 and pre 62 on AOE, there was never a single instance where you DIDN'T press Kaiten -> Iaijutsu, you did always and without question as any of the Iaijutsu's charged with Kaiten was a complete gain over using Shinten/Kyuten and/or using Kaiten on non-Iaijutsu combo finishers. It was so baseline you always did, which they saw as "well if you always do it, why do we even have the option to use it without?" and decided to get rid of it.
Which is why this is a perfect example of SE's tendency to "overcorrect" on potentially-legitimate criticisms — outright-obliterating things, rather than first refining them.

Oftentimes, SE sees "A" is a problem, and then decides to Plunge straight from "A" to "Z" in one go.

Rather than something like:

A — Manually press a separate Kaiten key before every Iaijutsu.

M — Each Iaijutsu now automatically consumes up to 20 Kenki per use to increase its damage by up to 50%.

Z — Completely remove Kaiten, bake its potency into Iaijutsu baseline, and push all Kenki management onto Shinten.

...where "M" would accomplish everything that removing Kaiten supposedly did, while also still retaining an extra layer of Kenki reward and management, as well as the possibility of automatically performing the Kaiten animation that people are attached to.

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This "A to Z" habit is a very strange, impatient design style, and probably a manifestation of too few designers having too many tasks under too much pressure... so there's a tendency to not want to keep too many long-term "plates spinning" in terms of wait-and-see observations.

Also, it's probably seen as more efficient for an overworked/understaffed team to rebalance the Potencies of a Job fewer times total — which may also contribute to not wanting to make incremental changes, and rather try to just "get to the point" that they imagine is the ultimate endpoint anyway (something that we see in a lot of other FFXIV design, where Yoshida frequently justifies it as "Oh, that would have happened anyway" or "Oh, everyone would have done that anyway" — eg, turning Dungeons into rigid hallways, etc).