Quote Originally Posted by Dysvalence View Post
Endgame raiding is heavily based around tightly aligning team cooldowns in large burst phases every 2 minutes. SAM's natural rotation doesn't align cleanly with this, and there are two ways to deal with it- using hagakure to throw away part of your rotation so everything fits, or slightly changing your rotation every time, not only for more damage, but also more flexibility with mistakes or downtime where you can't hit the boss.

A key part of that is using meikyou shisui to accelerate parts of your rotation, and entering burst with full sen/stickers but with a partially finished combo, and using that after midare+gaeshi to get a sticker for higanbana instead of using meikyou. Essentially, it lets you easily move your rotation up to 6 GCDs ahead or 2 GCDs back, and you can do so closer to burst. Since you need gaeshi to be the 2nd GCD in your burst, the change complicates the timing for accelerating things, and makes the latter impossible as meikyou overwrites your combo. You have to fall back on using "standard" hagakure looping, and that requires planning 8-10 GCDs ahead and makes it harder to adjust midare timing to take advantage of how it has double the range of regular attacks.
This 100%.

I'll offer a personal example: My group in TOP did not struggle in the 1st phases damage check but we did struggle sometimes in phase 2 during prog. To help with this I started saving 1 charge of Tsubame in phase 1 so that I would have 2 charges at the start of phase 2 that I could use during buffs which helped my group with the phase 2 DPS check. I did not hold Meikyo in phase 1 I needed it to setup my opener for phase 2 and there is not enough time to properly use 2 Meikyo shisui in the opener of phase 2 before the boss jumps away.

If you tie Tsubame-gaeshi to Meikyou Shisui you will kill Samurais flexibility and skill expression

Please square do not tie Tsubame Gaeshi to Meikyo Shisui