Thoughts of Samurai Changes

[Kazimere]

There are some nice QoL changes for sure, but most of the stuff is just fluff/unnecessary, IMO. Admittedly, Samurai is already at a good place, both in damage and flow, so any improvements at this point are going to be somewhat hard to achieve.

1. Tsubame and Meikyo getting two charges is nice for sure, both for burst and CD drift. It pretty much ends there for me though.

2. I'll admit, when I saw the capstone during the trailer, I was like "hell yeah." It was flashy after all, and who doesn't like flash? Not that another hard hitting ability is bad, but it's just a flashy Midare with some cleave thrown in to soup it up. As it stands, I feel like it's going to be more annoying to use than anything, with us having to use yet another Kaiten for the base version. I'd have liked it more if the base and Kaeshi version were just the same potency, or just get one buffed version and call it good.

3. AoE Shoha is predictable and disappointing. Like, why? I don't know what SoE's obsession with doing this stuff is. This button for ST, and this exact same ability, but with a slightly different animation for AoE. I agree with Arkdra, it should have been a trait adding the AoE portion to it.

4. The AoE Yuki makes no sense whatsoever. Mangetsu and Oka adding their respective buffs on hit was more than enough. That was what Samurai's issue was: having to do ST to get buffs up for AoE. If Fuga upgraded to the new AoE Yuki, great. A little more potency and Tenka in two GCDs instead of three, provided they still left the sen generation. As it stands, it's just an added button for the sake of maintaining its current button count.

It's like SoE said to themselves, "well, we took away Seigan and Merciful Eyes, so we need to add exactly two buttons to replace them!" No, no you didn't SoE.

Edit. After thinking about it more, there are some more things I don't like.

1. I liked Ikishoten being on a 60s CD, but Senei/Guren being on a 120. It gave us a reliable source of Kenki throughout an encounter, and it let us have more Shinten/Kyuten when Senei/Guren was on CD. Personally, I'd have taken a 60s Ikishoten over a souped up midare anyday. That's just me though. They could have implemented the capstone a better way than tying it to Ikishoten. Tying it to meditation stacks and Shoha usage would have been ideal.

2. Tsubame being a separate button from Iaijutsu is meh, but whatever. Unless it's a technical issue, as in they can't separate the CD from Tsubame from the constant state of iaijutsu then it really doesn't make sense that they aren't combined. Again, it's just adding a button.

3. The filler GCDs in the rotation are a known annoyance. We don't know if that is going away either. I'm going to be pretty annoyed if I have to use Yaten>Enpi to maintain CD timers (I don't like using movement abilities for filler or a DPS increase at all). I use Yaki filler right now, and it's just meh as well. I really hope that was on their radar and this stuff aims to mitigate that.

Samurai is still going to be solid, and I have no doubt that it's still going to flow well. It's not like it's in the DRK bucket, and I applaud the developers on how well they maintain this job. Most of this stuff is just annoyances, really. It's definitely not going to be broken or unplayable.