Comprehensive Guide to the Kaiten and 6.1 SAM rework

[Eorzean_username]

There were times when you'd want to purposely spend yourself under the 'safety net' of 20, knowing you'd get back to 20 before KaitenTime, and that is what we call skill expression.

I think that the effect of this is being overexaggerated, as well as the reason to even do it.

I'm assuming you're referring to something like getting an AST card, or burst windows, or openers, where you could push in an extra Shinten or a Seigan if you'd build up enough Kenki before your next Iai (and could guarantee the positional hits to do so).

And sure — but that is, broadly-speaking, fairly niche, and basically irrelevant outside of buff windows (ie, in a hypothetical "cursed comp" with no party support, it would make close-to-zero difference whether you performed Kaiten-budget gymnastics or not).

Meaning that, broadly-speaking, this factor added relatively-little to the Job experience, especially internally; outside burst windows, you would have a small eternity to build back up that pittance of Kenki before your next mandatory Meikyo, especially given the option to slush-up 5-10 Kenki by creeping your combo past a full Sen stack.

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You need to understand that I am not assessing this from the perspective of, for example, a Balance Discord Job Mentor — the kind of players who will hunt down and sniff out every possible tiny adjustment, because it just brings them satisfaction to do so.

I'm framing why, to a developer, certain elements seem trivial or unimportant when considering what to preserve and what to weed-out at a broader design level.

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And the gap closers were useful if they gained you a GCD (in), and could be used to create a 'filler GCD' in the SHB onwards when the 60s loop enforced by Tsubame came around (dash out).

Yes, you've described why gap closers are useful — not why their gauge cost was relevant or interesting.

And that's just a general property of DPS-affecting gap-closers across all Jobs — "if doing something suboptimal with this will increase your uptime and be a larger proportional gain, then do it". The consideration is more-or-less the same, whether the loss is from not spending all charges inside burst, or the loss is from bleeding gauge off suboptimally.

I don't think that this indicates anything interesting in specific about its relation to Kenki as a system, and like Onslaught for WAR, it actually resulted in stubborn and counterintuitive behavior — ie, while everyone else is just using their gap-closers to gap-close, you're technically-pressured to find a way not to (or just eating a loss, in which case the Gauge cost is not particularly-interesting, because it 'just happens').

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As for Yatenpi, what makes that interesting is not the Gauge cost, which is essentially neutralised anyway, but rather how it can jigsaw into your loop, or the rare cases like Shadowkeeper where it can allow you to razor-edge a GCD before some obnoxiously-massive AOE (or etc).

If you removed the Gauge cost entirely, ~nothing would change about it in practice.

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15 and Seigan was literally the skill ceiling of the class, knowing how to use that effectively was what seperated the good from the great.

Unless I am severely-misremembering something, the difference between hitting every possible Seigan and not failed to gain you much beyond what random variance could.

That a very, very small portion of people could make good(?) use of it to try to bank more Kenki going into buffs, and/or squeeze a little more Kenki into buff windows, and/or gain a chunkier boost through a combination of buffstacking and crit variance, was surely satisfying for them — but in terms of what it broadly-added to the Job's Gauge system, I maintain that it was basically a gimmick, and maximising its usage was usually akin to a self-affixed merit-badge rather than any meaningful benefit.

In fact, the removal of Seigan and the shift to raw Kenki from Third Eye actually made proactive awareness of incoming damage both much more significant, and much more rewarding.

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My points here are not trying to say, "Ha ha, see, varying Gauge costs are always pointless!"

It's: "The Kenki system and its costs were honestly never very well-explored nor realised, a lot of it is being viewed retroactively with nostalgia, and that's probably why the SE devs went on a tear ripping most of it out".