Bring Back Kaiten

[Shurrikhan]

Can you clarify how it increases player agency to have an ability that is only used to buff the potency of iaijutsu and something that must be used for every single iaijutsu?

In itself, it doesn't enhance "agency", no. The better way to look at it is that it accentuates skill expression among other, surrounding parts of the kit, helping to tie the Kenki gauge together (alongside the old varied Kenki costs, likewise removed).

since a Kaiten Buffed Enpi is still stronger than a Normal Enpi!

No, unless the difference would finish off an enemy that could not otherwise be finished off without greater waste of relative potency, a Kaiten-Enpi is weaker than a normal Enpi in any sense that matters, for the simple fact that the Kaiten's worth of resource could have been better spent on any normal action (Gyofu for uptime, Kaiten-Iaijutsu, Shinten if overflow, etc.).

if there is no player agency.. where is the Gameplay then? If there is no Player Agency.. why even play the game? why not just write scripts and macros to enable auto-play? You seem against entire aspects of fun, if you ask me.

Hikari's being pretty reasonable here, actually. "Agency" is simply a misnomer for what you're describing; one can understand that you instead mean the closest thing to 'agency" that we may have, but... in XIV, you're playing sheet music and being graded by how precisely close to what is written you can get, not by any potential "value added" or what "new spin" may be possible. If teamplay were more integral, that could better provide a space for seemingly different types of knowledge or instinct rewarded, and if our rotations were less fixed with obvious best answers more would seem to fall to nuance and branching gambles that could potentially be called "agency", but this XIV. Teamwork in this game has increasingly come down to playing in adjacent recording rooms, careful only to follow the same BPM rather than to truly adapt to anyone else.

And while some anchors (fixed, obvious things, like Kaiten before Iaijutsu) accentuate the skill expression surrounding them and could, in the right context, even see some use reminiscent of "ingenuity" while helping to give a job's playflow its easily recognizable flavor, having too much that is covered by those anchors or otherwise inflexibly pinned down can work to collectively stymie any room for what we might call "agency".

For that reason, to my mind, when considering something like Kaiten, just as with Power Surge before it (the last skill to have been given the same warrant for removal, despite wildly different contexts), it's worth considering not just whether it should be kept or removed, but what it could have been to provide as much benefit as possible. Kaiten was pretty flawed, but worked well at least to accentuate the gauge contexts of Shadowbringers and Stormblood. Ideally, though, I would have liked to see it form something a bit less... rote, so to speak. /shrug