Comprehensive Guide to the Kaiten and 6.1 SAM rework

[vetch]

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.

The tangible effect was to increase gauge management complexity and also to give you a hit of 'job fantasy' via an animation when you used it. Not every job element has to be an 'adds function'. Some of them can be a 'don't screw this up or it's suboptimal'.

C.f. the dungeon changes, where something was very tangibly lost when the design shifted from 'use your judgement to anticipate how much you can safely pull' to 'everyone lick the wall'.

[Eorzean_username]

The tangible effect was to increase gauge management complexity

That's not what I mean by "tangible effect", since it's entirely an abstract HUD / number management which is transparent outside of parsing, or squinting at either gauges or flytext — and even then, since you'd never want to actually not Kaiten, even the potential flytext comparison stopped being relevant over time.

That Kaiten had an effect seems inarguable to me — since yes, you needed to maintain the extremely-mild tension of pretending that the floor of your Gauge was 20 instead of 0 — but that effect was detached from the action execution or consequences themselves, making it decidedly abstract in function.

———————————————

and also to give you a hit of 'job fantasy' via an animation when you used it. Not every job element has to be an 'adds function'. Some of them can be a 'don't screw this up or it's suboptimal'.

Taken out-of-context, this could just as easily be describing Summoner Primals and Gem Charges — a hit of "job fantasy" via an animation, which doesn't add much function, but "feels good", and is suboptimal if you somehow manage to "screw it up".

But anyway, while that's fine, it's also something that designers are naturally going to target when they're dealing with constraints such as an upper ceiling on how many Actions and Keybinds a given design is allowed to have, or attempting to cut down on clutter that the (mythical) "most players" don't seem to engage with much — What you're basically saying is, "This key exists because I like pressing it and it looks cool".

Which is also fine — above all, gaming is a subjective entertainment experience, and an art, not a science. If the playerbase just likes something a lot, and claim that "something" increased their entertainment value, then it doesn't have to make objective, clinical "design sense", and those players aren't wrong for wanting it back.

I just also think that there's been excessive attempts to "lawyer" the developers into returning Kaiten based on over-exaggerating its prior, actual mechanical value, rather than just more honestly stating "We liked it because we liked it, and we want it back because we liked it".

Because I maintain that the Shinten issue was long-standing, has always "needed"(?) to be addressed, and was merely magnified by Kaiten's removal, not directly caused by it (and is not even addressing the seemingly-perplexing change to Senei/Guren costs).