Samurai's Battle Design

[Eliadil]

Well, the saddest thing is that both playstyle were viable in 4.0. You could play totally selfish and still deal a crap ton of damage, and you could also amplify this even more by timing with the raid buff window. The biggest design mistake devs made with 4.0 Samurai was to make Hagakure give 20 kenki instead of 10 or 15 per sen. The way they designed 5.0 Samurai was basically "more Midare", which is the total opposite of 4.0 Samurai, where using Hagakure on 3 sens was worth more in terms of dps than a Midare.

Imo both playstyle and design philosophy are not really different/incompatible... I just regret that they got rid of the old smooth playstyle that also worked with the raid burst window and gave us instead a 60sec rotation (which doesn't even work all that well sadly).

As for the second question, jobs should always be balanced in terms of party utility against raw damage, not in terms of "which one's the easiest". No matter what peoples say, BLM and SAM aren't that different. They both need to keep uptime, and both have a fairly simple rotation to learn/execute. One's a caster and lose uptime when force to move out of AoEs, the other's a Melee and lose uptime when forced to move away from the boss or when having to do mechanics. Tbh I would even argue that BLM has more tools than Samurai to deal with mechanics/movement. But that's not the point.

Besides there should always be a job that's a little more difficult than others, because there is peoples who like difficult things. However, this doesn't always mean that they have to do everything better. Because if that's the case then nobody will actually bother to seriously play the easiers jobs.

Jobs should always have something of value to others, either in the form of raid utility (Trick Attack is the best example here, even though it's hated and Ninja's in a bad spot, it's the best example of huge raid utility) or in the form of raw dps (Black Mage is again, the best example for this, dealing way more damage than the other jobs to compensate for the lack of utility). Still, things should be balanced correctly even between jobs that offer a few utility and jobs that offers a ton, this is why Dancer will always have a low dps, because it gives so much to the others. To get back to Samuraï, the issue currently is that we have no raid utility at all, and also lack the sufficient damage to be considered on equal footing with BLM.

tl;dr : Samurai was doing both playstyle in 4.0 and I don't understand why they choose to change that in 5.0. And difficult job shouldn't equal to massive damage. Jobs with the highest damage should have no raid utility, jobs with the lowest damage should have the best raid utility possible, in order to keep every job played in every content available.

[Ksajt]

Well, the saddest thing is that both playstyle were viable in 4.0. You could play totally selfish and still deal a crap ton of damage, and you could also amplify this even more by timing with the raid buff window. The biggest design mistake devs made with 4.0 Samurai was to make Hagakure give 20 kenki instead of 10 or 15 per sen. The way they designed 5.0 Samurai was basically "more Midare", which is the total opposite of 4.0 Samurai, where using Hagakure on 3 sens was worth more in terms of dps than a Midare.

Imo both playstyle and design philosophy are not really different/incompatible... I just regret that they got rid of the old smooth playstyle that also worked with the raid burst window and gave us instead a 60sec rotation (which doesn't even work all that well sadly).

While I do agree that the playstyles and design aren't fundamentally different-- as it was easy enough to manipulate your resources to suit your needs-- we also must consider what will be added further down the line. Samurai's original implementation was variable and flexible, and were I a designer that was looking to balance that, I would find it more intimidating when weighing against not only what is coming to other jobs, but also to any and all new jobs that are introduced. The more focused the goal of balance is, the easier it is to attain, maintain, and evolve, especially as more jobs come into the game in the future, so I could definitely understand why they would choose to narrow down what a job is supposed to do; they have to think further ahead than we as players do, after all.

I believe we can all agree-- at least to some extent-- that they achieved their original mission statement. What I wanted to bring attention to was the fact that the mission statement has changed entirely between 4.0 and 5.0, and unlike with most jobs that have undergone role or playstyle shifts like that, we actually have the (both, in this case) statements to read, and there is a clear separation between the two that we should be addressing. Because if, for instance, we don't like Samurai being designed around the idea of receiving the party's buffs, we should be clear on that feedback to help guide future development.

As for job difficulty equating to damage dealt, I absolutely agree. I do also believe that it was said during a Live Letter or some other interview that they do not balance based off difficulty (if I recall correctly, it was because of the lack of difference between Machinist and Bard's DPS, despite Machinist being more demanding). That statement is... somewhat contradicted by the difference between 4.0 Samurai and Black Mage, though, as I do believe it was also explicitly stated that Black Mage's personal DPS was higher to account for the ease at which its rotation can be interrupted. Hm.

[Acidblood]

While I do agree that the playstyles and design aren't fundamentally different-- as it was easy enough to manipulate your resources to suit your needs-- we also must consider what will be added further down the line. Samurai's original implementation was variable and flexible, and were I a designer that was looking to balance that, I would find it more intimidating when weighing against not only what is coming to other jobs, but also to any and all new jobs that are introduced. The more focused the goal of balance is, the easier it is to attain, maintain, and evolve, especially as more jobs come into the game in the future, so I could definitely understand why they would choose to narrow down what a job is supposed to do; they have to think further ahead than we as players do, after all.

While I understand the sentiment, it's a poor excuse to use 'balance' (or even potential future additions) as a defence for worse design. Balance = numbers, Design = gameplay; if you get the gameplay right adjusting the numbers based on feedback / data over time is relatively easy, adjusting the gameplay though, that not only means more design and development work but also rebalancing everything a 2nd/3rd/4th time... and it's not like the simpler design of jobs in 5.0 has led to better balance at launch :/

As for the question of SAM being equal to BLM; as a BLM main (though not a serious raider) I couldn't care less if SAM does the same DPS as BLM, it's not going to make BLM any less fun to play.

Edit: And to answer the question about SAM specifically, I enjoyed the playstyle it had in 4.X and while I haven't gotten around to trying it in 5.X I will always enjoy flexible classes over those with rigid rotations that can only achieve their potential though the alignment of raid buffs... which is one of reasons I like the current iteration of BLM so much.