Samurai 6.0 hopes, dreams, speculation, sky pie.

[Arkdra]

Every other job seems to have one, so why not samurai? Well, besides the obvious answer of samurai at 80 is immaculate, what would, or even could, they add or subtract to or from the job without wrecking it? Well here's a thread for that. Gonna break my screed into 3 sections: abilities culled, QoL fixes, new abilities. We all know things basically have to get culled because my sam bars are at 33 buttons and that is just samurai abilities and role skills. Just no room without culling. Other 2 self-explanatory.

Abilities culled:
1. Merciful Eyes - It sucks. Wrap the healing effect into third eye itself. Maybe Seigan if the spaghetti code would allow this ability to fire without a target while still being an attack, but that's so fiddly and inelegant. Nonetheless, while it's saved my life on rare occasions, I can't see this surviving.

2. Hissatsu: Senei - Button is legitimately pointless. They should have just changed Gurren to do this much damage to one target and probably added damage drop-off to compensate. Or just roll the potency in elsehwere. The animation rules though, please replace Seigan's animation with this animation.

3. Kaiten - I realize this is the only reason there is any friction at all in the samurai kit up until Tsubame, but what does it really add? It's just a matter of being able to remember, "Don't spend kenki unless you have >30 of it" which is not complicated. I feel like it is an unintuitive ability to newbies and it also just makes everything from levels 52 to 62 feel terrible because you don't generate enough kenki to kaiten for higenbana and midare in your opener. I think they need to find a more interesting way to add friction to the kenki gauge than this.

Honorable mention: Shoha. I think the ability is fine, and it's got a sick animation, but I am holding a grudge because it required kasha and gekko potency nerfs and I think I would rather have that potency back to be honest instead of this button that is no thought, just muscle memory.

QoL Fixes

1. For the love of all that is good and holy please just move fuga down to level 15. This more or less also applies to the first ae's for dragoon and ninja as well, and also smn now that I think about it. It's real stupid that some jobs have aoe more or less from the get-go and other's don't.

2. Combine kenki mastery 1 and 2 into 1 trait, give it at 52. Kenki mastery is literally the light switch on the job that takes it from meh, it's ok, to this is a cool and fun job. The level range between kenki mastery 1 and 2 sucks and is lousy and that's a whole expansion's worth of content. Also, if they do delete kaiten, they'd need to move shinten down to 52 to replace it.

3. Enpi no longer breaks melee combo. This is such a no brainer that I can only assume it doesn't do this because if it did it went melt the server or something.

New abilities

I actually don't have anything! Maybe I will think of something later. Right now the only thing coming to mind is a 20 kenki ability on a timer that's just shinten but better to replace the loss of kaiten while keeping the same rough feel of being ashort term thing you need to manage your gauge for, but I kinda hate it. Semi Joke answers of upgrades for kasha, gekko, and yukikaze. Give me more flower petals on kasha, let me drop small moons on people like Fujitora, and I dunno, give yukikaze some cool ice thing from e8s or whatever.

[Eliadil]

Merciful Eye being merged to third eye makes sense when you consider than appart from the now removed aggro reduction, nobody uses it apart to really save your life when 2k hp is necessary.

Senei and Guren needs some merging or just find an way to differentiate both. Giving an aoe component to Senei is good, and Guren could be reworked into an AoE Shoha.

I may be the only one to like Kaiten I think. I don't really see the point in removing it, apart from buffing Iaijutsu up to Tsubame's level of power.

Shoha is funny, because peoples wanted a dps gain so badly on sam that they reworked the ability. I would be... More satisfied if they changed Tsubame tbh. At least to get rid of the (imo) dumb filler part in the rotation, which is the thing that doesn't make any sense, be it for new players or even most veterans. The Stormblood sam rotation was fine, and Tsubame is what changed it entirely, for the better or worse, this I'm still not sure. But hEy WeRe StIlL tOp DaMaGe so I guess it's fine and doesn't need changes.

low-level Fuga doesn't bother me, seeing how strong we can hit at low level even without AoE. But I can understand that for Nin at least.

Kenki mastery fused, this I'm all about it. Kenki is a core mechanic to the job, and it's getting there a bit too late imo.

Enpi not breaking combo should be good as well. But they will probably nerf the kenki gain out of it if they do it, so peoples don't spam it.

As for new abilities, I think we're more about traits than new abilities at this point. If they still intend to keep Tsubame as it is, maybe reducing its cooldown and giving it two charges. I'm all in for a kenki spender as well, something that could combo out of Shinten, or something like it.

[Arkdra]

Charges on tsubame is a pretty great idea, would make it a lot less catastrophic to screw up the timing.

[Ryaz]

I'm assuming that they'll give us an AoE version of Shoha. They like to do that kind of thing when they add resource.

But honestly, Samurai is pretty well rounded and well-designed so I could see them just adding more traits to enhance our current abilities. I could see an extra charge being added to Ikishoten, for example, for even more Kenki spam.

I don't have any issues with Kaiten. Its either I use that or Shinten anyway and it keeps at least a slight skill gap for those who don't properly manage kenki. Plus I love the animation into the iajutsu.

I'm still hoping for ranged attacks to not break combos so Yaten > Enpi would he more feasible.

I'd also like some changes to Third Eye/Merciful Eyes/Seigan to make it feel more impactful. Seigan as it is will provide a DPS increase over Shinten but it's so minor that for something that requires fight knowledge and skill to execute, that it's almost not worth it. You won't notice much difference between someone who use Seigan 10 times a fight and someone who just uses Shinten.

Let us hold Tsubame and not ruin it with another Weaponskill. This will allow a bit more flexibility in our rotation.

[Eliadil]

Let us hold Tsubame and not ruin it with another Weaponskill. This will allow a bit more flexibility in our rotation.

While I profusely dislike Tsubame, I'm not fond of your idea either, because this would basically remove a lot of the skill involved in the job/it's core concept.
Since it was introduced in Stormblood, Samurai was always a job where the most important thing was setting up your big burst of damage. Hagakure made this really interesting in 4.X, and while we lost this interesting aspect for a more frustrating one with Tsubame, the idea is still roughly the same : Adapting your playstyle and finding the most optimized way to deliver that big punch of damage.

I'd like to see an alternative to Tsubame that would involve the same kind of essence, without the frustrating part of cooldown drifting/unintended fillers. Or we dull out Tsubame by making it store Iaijutsu, then we'd need another form of complexity to the job to make up for it.

[Ryaz]

While I profusely dislike Tsubame, I'm not fond of your idea either, because this would basically remove a lot of the skill involved in the job/it's core concept.
Since it was introduced in Stormblood, Samurai was always a job where the most important thing was setting up your big burst of damage. Hagakure made this really interesting in 4.X, and while we lost this interesting aspect for a more frustrating one with Tsubame, the idea is still roughly the same : Adapting your playstyle and finding the most optimized way to deliver that big punch of damage.

I'd like to see an alternative to Tsubame that would involve the same kind of essence, without the frustrating part of cooldown drifting/unintended fillers. Or we dull out Tsubame by making it store Iaijutsu, then we'd need another form of complexity to the job to make up for it.

Well, the whole point for being able to hold Tsubame would be to help with cooldown drift. That would be the only real reason for it, really. To help realign your rotation when things go south.

[Vuk_Varvarasch]

I just want some way to give me enough Kenki pre-pull to charge the boss instead of running in.

And I suppose Enpi not breaking our combos would also be welcome.

[gilmorej]

They could take the dang target requirement off Fuga and Tenka Goken. Just let me AOE in a cone in front of me, whatever happens to be there.

TBH that's my only annoyance with SAM... doing AOE trash because of the way these work.

[Arkdra]

Draggin this thread back up since it didn't look like anywhere else was really talking about the sam stuff we saw and it's appropriate enough for it.

-Not sam specific, but ranged attacks no longer break combos. This is an amazing change for everyone, but it's a much bigger deal for samurai, removing some friction from yaten-enpi use. Wonder if it's going to work out where you want to yaten on cd, but we won't know until we get hard numbers. Still, yaten enpi is just really fun and being able to use it more often is nice.

-AoE combo finishers (oka and mangetsu) can now apply the shifu and jinpu buffs, so no more starting your aoe pulls using mekyo to throw out a couple single target hits to buzzsaw. Great QoL fix.

-After doing Meikyo, your st combo finishers refresh the shifu and jinpu buffs. Presumably Kasha refreshes shifu and gekko refreshes jinpu. I have a suspicion that maikyo'd kasha and gekko will end up applying the buffs too, but this is just a suspicion of mine, was not confirmed.

-After doing 3rd eye and taking a hit, it looked like they gained 10 kenki, which gave them enough kenki to follow up with hissatsu: senei. They did not do a merciful eyes or a seigan and my suspicion is they cut these skills.

-After doing kaeshi: Goken, they did not gain a meditation stack. The iai progression went higenbana > goken > kaeshi goken and they only had 2 meditation stacks.

-A new Ice attack that generated 10 kenki and the ice sen. Based on the graphic, it looked like it was an aoe attack, but nothing about what was shown really explains why we would use it.

-O M E G A M I D A R E!!!!! The coolest ability shown in the entire reveal. The graphic and audio on it are perfect. Could really feel the impact and I wasn't even playing. Hard to know what allows you to do it, but it was kaiten'd, looked like 2 hits, and generated 1 meditation stack. Theoretically possible that it's a full 2.5 second cast time to get off but impossible to say. It was fuckin sick as hell though!

Edit: Rewatched the sam part in the trailer a bunch because I am in love with this skill and I just noticed this might not be omega midare, it might be omega tekka goken, because it has the same ground slash effect that goken has. So this might actually be an aoe move.

Edit 2: The screen shakes when they do big midare, it's so good!!!

Honestly, I loved everything about what they showed. Great Qol fixes, no major changes to a job that I love, and that big midare is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when yoshi p said earlier in the year that they were looking to give every job a flashy ability that really draws the eye in the same way that passage of arms did. Big Midare definitely delivers. If they can remember to move Fuga to level 15 from 26, it will be the perfect job, in my opinion.

[Ryaz]

I agree that the change to ranged attacks not breaking combos is awesome. I always find a well executed Yaten > Enhanced Enp > Gyoten to be satisfying and the only thing that used to keep me from using it is breaking combos.

I'm guessing the ice attack will be a third button in our aoe rotation. They expanded on Drg the same way. We'll see.

Cutting Seigan and Merciful Eyes is fine but I do feel removing Seigan takes away a bit of the Samurai skill ceiling. Nice to get Kenki from it.

The new attack was definitely impactful and they did a good job conveying that.

Overall though, Samurai didn't really get a huge update or anything super flashy or interesting outside of that, but the trailer only shows so much. I think we need to see some actual gameplay to know more.