Quote Originally Posted by Deo14 View Post
4 - "Kaiten is badly designed"

Welcome to FFXIV! Here's WHM rotation:
Glare-Dia-Glare-Glare-PoM-Glare-Assize-Glare-Glare-Glare-Glare-Glare-Glare...

How about SGE rotation, aka the DPS healer?
Dosis-DoT-Dosis-Dosis-Phlegma-Phlegma-Dosis-Dosis-Dosis-Dosis-Dosis-Dosis-Dosis...

You get my point.
This seems to be commonly brought up in response to this, but I think it misunderstands the reasoning behind it.

Kaiten's design essentially split 1 action across 2 buttons, since separating them was ~100% useless in all possible cases. So Iaijutsu was basically a 2-key combo... except it had no tangible effect, other than invisibly increasing your action to the correct Potency.

If you look at other similar "2-key combos", there's some kind of tangible change to the functionality of the affected action.

• Eukrasia + Dosis → becomes entirely different action

• Reassemble + Drill → becomes automatic CDH

• Disembowel + Chaotic Spring → DOT applied, unlocks Wheeling Thrust action
...etc.

Because it was basically impossible to ever not be able to Kaiten (assuming reasonably-correct play), Kaiten was basically just a formality that un-nerfed your artificially-lowered Iaijutsu Potencies, at the cost of an extra keypress and keybind.

This probably made it seem very tempting as something "superfluous" that could be eliminated without much consequence, when a designer zoomed-out and viewed things from a detached, clinically-organised, meta-level perspective.

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Now, you may be wondering things like, "But what about the cascading effect on Kenki usage, diverting even more casts into the already-overused Shinten?"

Or, "Why not first make an effort to differentiate Kaiten more, so that the keypress feels more mechanically-meaningful, such as causing it to also grant extra effects to Iaijutsu?"

Or, "Why not make Kaiten more of a decision and less of a formality, by turning it into something like a Reassemble clone, with a hard cooldown and 2 charges?"

Or, "Why not start out by trying literally anything other than obliterating the action with an orbital Lalafellin space laser?"

These are good questions, but they are beyond the ken of mere mortals to answer.

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My best guess, though, is that overworked, understaffed, overwhelmed designers — who are receiving dubious feedback at best from the community teams and/or a poorly-designed, corporatised feedback-gathering system — are inclined to just rip things out and change them in sweeping, massive bursts that target the "expected ultimate endpoint", rather than bleed time and energy into trying to manage and keep track of more gradual, incremental, fine-tuned changes.

You see similar philosophies throughout FFXIV's current design — Dungeons become completely-standardised "2 pulls → Boss" hallways because "Oh, that's what everyone will eventually just do anyway once they learn the ideal route"... etc.

Maybe part of an internal philosophy like, "Jumping straight to the bone-marrow of a design in one pass is cheaper than iterating successively to get there slowly".