Thoughts of Samurai Changes

[Shurrikhan]

Shoha 2... gives Meditation stacks a proper use in AoE situations rather than just pressing Shoha and accepting that there's no spender for AoE.

No, Shoha 2 doesn't. Having a Meditation spender that deals AoE damage does (at least, ostensibly).

Do you see the difference?

There is absolutely no need for twice as many buttons just to add the dry-as-dust mechanic of counting whether one's enemy is singular or plural.

There are no focus target damage requirements in this game significant enough to forfeit even 30+% total damage.
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But let's get back to that "ostensible" part. Your AoE is going to balanced either with or without Meditation stacks. If you have an AoE Meditation spender, you lose a bit of AoE ppm (in the form of potency-per-use) from somewhere else.

But not having that AoE Meditation spender means that you don't lose that bit of Kyuten/Oka/Mangentsu/HyosetsuGuren ppm, or you only face its cut of the budget proportionate to 1 in n (where n is your nominal "average pull size"), because it mostly falls outside of the domain of those AoE balance decisions.

As such, you get either free or disproportionately useful focus-target damage. If free, that's just gravy by which to make sure that last enemy doesn't die much later than the rest. If it takes some part of your budget, the ability to make up for the difference in the rate of crits and/or direct hits against the luckiest enemy in the enemy pack is still more than worth it for the pack's time-to-kill.

All an AoE-capable Shoha does is trade managing enemy health pools in AoE pulls for the slight preference not to spend Meditation stacks if there's a large AoE pull coming up before your next Meditation stack gained.

:: Personally, I'd prefer a middle-ground: 50% fall-off. Fewer SAMs would complain about being "nerfed" by Shoha in AoE when they're actually not, but I'd still actually have reason to manage on which targets I use it.