SAM gaeshi change severely cripples rotational flexibility and ruins the job for me

[Dysvalence]

but flow-wise that doesn't make anysense at all^^;
here's a Macro that makes more sense:

It doesn't though, you want to start burst with midare+gaeshi as your first two GCDs, and use meikyou for squeezing in more combo finishers and another midare into burst. Even if you pop meikyou before gaeshi, you likely won't use the stacks until after. If anything it's backward.

The other problematic part about all the difficulty being in the input half of the design is that, it eventually becomes total muscle memory even with all the nuanced tricks you guys are using to optimize your rotations. When that happens, all you experience is easy encounters which also go more or less into muscle memory over time. Once you know the mechs of a fight, it just happens naturally. What you are claiming you want is a mindless experience with trivialized difficulty in the content. What standardized rotations lead to is more complex encounter design that actually ends up feeling dynamic and constantly engaging. You can't have it both ways, and it is better for the difficulty to come from the encounter more than the inputs. It leads to more engagement from newer players on top of more enjoyment from veterans who have already mastered their rotations.

You think you know what you want, but you do not.

You do realize those same optimization techniques are invaluable for mistake recovery and adjusting to dynamic situations right? In addition to raising the skill ceiling it makes the job much more approachable to players without insane muscle memory. If you make a mistake you can adjust for it. If you find that your positionals are out of order you can adjust for it. If you die you can reapply your buffs quickly and adjust for it. All of that goes out the window.


You mention From Soft games- it's not the simplicity, it's the flexibility that allows for dynamic encounters. This change reduces that flexiblity and thus constrains encounter design. If you rotation is set in stone, the encounter has to make that possible, and it makes difficulty changes hurt newer and less consistent players more.


And we do know what we want, we have literally every other melee DPS in the current game to show us what forcibly standardized rotations feel like.