Samurai - Kaiten Issue

[SpeckledBurd]

Or combine Kenki Mastery 1&2 and give it to SAM at lv.50. Not sure if it's a good idea.

I wouldn't be opposed to it. Right now Kenki Mastery 1 is frankly really low impact and results in you being starved for using Gyoten when you'd normally want to use a gap closer and not always being able to Kaiten your Iaijutsu. The problem is Kenki Mastery 2 is designed around having Shinten as a dump, so it'd either create bad habits where you'd Kaiten combo finishers, waste gauge, or they'd have to move Shinten down to 52 and make Samurai super busted at those levels (not that the devs care about low level job functionality).

The alternative would be to add a trait at level 52 when you get Kenki mastery 2 called "Enhanced Iaijutsu" that adds the Kenki cost to Iaijutsu in exchange for boosting the potency of all the Kenki actions. That ends up being a slight nerf to Samurai at 50-61, but again the devs don't balance around Job feel or damage output at anything but the top level.

My issue with Kaiten isn't even the potential multiple misuses. Though I won't deny that a misused Kaiten basically costs you two gcds, and that stings. As was pointed out earlier, Kaiten will ALWAYS be paired with iaijutsu. This makes iaijutsu rely on multiple resources, and few things in this game piss me off more than skills that require multiple resources to use. Guren and Senei suffer the same as well. As does Third Eye.

Many things can be done to trim SAMs hedges that is for sure.

I hadn't considered it before now because Samurai as a job has basically nothing in the way of oGCDs to weave, but this exact interaction was one of the things I hated so much about Power Surge on Dragoon in Heavensward. You literally just used it on every other Jump and there was no more thought to it than that, and they changed it just by increasing the potency of Jump by 50 which evened out. So just folding the cost of Kaiten onto Iaijutsu just saves a button press and doesn't buff the job or effect the kenki economy in any way, it's a good change.