Samurai Discussion

[Shayuki]

Eh, I think this is also why we won't even be getting access to the Kenki gauge until lvl 52. Give players all the basics right out the gate and give them 2 levels to learn how to run their basic combos and finishers, then slowly add in the kenki so players can start to learn how to manage it as well. On paper it's a good design process, but there's going to be issues where those who level in the "traditional" sense are going to get a grasp of its intricacies much faster than those who blow through their first 10 levels in PotD.

...

More theory-crafting for next week would be wonderful. SB hasn't even hit yet, and so it's much too early to be discussing 5.0.

On the first point, I've never subscribed to this line of thought, and I don't think I ever will. It's far more useful to level through PotD and have access to all of your skills and to be able to learn how to use all of them instead of only using half of your toolkit and, for instance, when nearing lvl 60 getting to play with an important mechanic for 2 levels. The issue in players not knowing their class well after leveling through PotD is due to them being able to get away with being lazy in there, but as long as you actually put in some effort and actually try to learn, being at lvl 60 the entire time is easily more beneficial than getting your skills one at a time, in my opinion. Of course, the benefit is diminished now that the max level is 70, but it still is there. Though, for Samurai specifically, I don't think it matters a whole lot.


On the second point, plenty of theorycrafting has already been done. One interesting thing is that it seems that Samurai will actually work pretty well with skill speed in comparison to most other physical jobs. The reason for this is twofold:

The first reason is that Samurai has very few cooldown-based oGCD abilities. Pretty much the only ones would be Hagakure and Meikyo Shisui. Apart from those, their oGCD damage is composed of Kenki spenders. Which gets us to the second point.

The second reason is that Samurai gains Kenki faster by attacking faster, which actually causes SS to give Samurai's oGCD abilities a benefit, which it does for no other classes.

Because of this, while I expect crit to still be the most valuable stat for Samurai, I expect Skill Speed to take over Determination, or at the very least not be the worst secondary stat. It remains to be seen how powerful Direct Hit is as a stat.