I was almost in the mood to play FF14 again

[Raikai]

which made freestyle SAM legitimate playstyle, so my fear is that next in the line of QoL changes are instacasted Iaijutsu, and I'm getting disgusted just thinking about that. After that, fancy skill at capstone, animation upgrade and another active skill, hopefully something that has low CD and uses Kenki, so the Shinten spam stops.

Oh? What is 'freestyle' play? I didn't see this in any of the lv90 guides, but perhaps is just nomenclature.

[Deo14]

Oh? What is 'freestyle' play? I didn't see this in any of the lv90 guides, but perhaps is just nomenclature.

We used to have only single stack of Tsubame and Meikyo, which made it harder to align everyrthing, and also because you got buffs only from 2nd parts of Kasha/Gekko combos, simply said, rotation used to be much more strict in the past. Nowadays, you just need to remember few things to do and their priority and you can just wing it/freestyle it. This might be shocking, but SAM was often considered hard, some people went as far as comparing it to BLM. Which is huge contrast to today's "anything goes" SAM.

Freestyle samurai seems to originate from one singular person, then it got memed on and the legend of freestyle samurai started. It's very hyperbolical example of someone who was really just mashing his button as he wanted, but difficulty of playing SAM has definitely lowered significantly since that time, so we are getting closer and closer to the legendary freestyle samurai. Long story short, my comment was just a hyperbole.

[Absurdity]

Freestyle samurai seems to originate from one singular person, then it got memed on and the legend of freestyle samurai started. It's very hyperbolical example of someone who was really just mashing his button as he wanted, but difficulty of playing SAM has definitely lowered significantly since that time, so we are getting closer and closer to the legendary freestyle samurai. Long story short, my comment was just a hyperbole.

I wouldn't be surprised if that term became a thing in late Stormblood where the high skillspeed shinten spam SAM was a legitimate playstyle that put out competitive numbers while being basically just button mashing.

[Shurrikhan]

I wouldn't be surprised if that term became a thing in late Stormblood where the high skillspeed shinten spam SAM was a legitimate playstyle that put out competitive numbers while being basically just button mashing.

This is a bit of a conflation. Stormblood high-SkS SAM spent a smaller portion of its Kenki on Shinten because Hagakure's resource-per-minute did not scale with SkS. Its portion of damage coming from Shinten was even smaller still, as their dominant secondary stat (SkS) doesn't affect oGCD damage. Finally, though, it wasn't much less complex, as it still tried to maximize Hagakure's resource-per-minute, to only faintly less punishment (since, again, it got less value out of all Kenki spenders except Kaiten) than Crit/DHit builds.

High SkS SAM was competitive... if played optimally. High SkS SAM played by "basically button mashing" was not competitive.