Thread: 6.1 Samurai

I've played FF since ARR. I dont play a healer so I cant comment on their pruning or homogenization but what happened to tanks and many classes going into ShB appears to be the ongoing design philosophy: lower the skill ceiling and the skill floor as much as possible. Any friction felt by the player or any decisions they have to make that come from their class should be removed. Look at what happened to DRK or tanking in general. Aggro doesnt even exist anymore, its just something that happens while you do your very simple dps rotation.

Is Kaiten the most important ability in the game? Does it require incredible amounts of gameplay and planning to use? No not at all, but what makes gameplay fun or class design good is not simply the amount of buttons to press or the complexity involved, but the subjective feel of the overall kit itself. Kaiten requires some minor attention paid to the kenki bar that eventually becomes passive, as the rhythm of the overall rotation becomes second nature. Its main purpose (at least now that kenki is in surplus throughout the rotation) is to give you the feel of winding up for a big swing.

Many have argued that its simply a button thats pressed before every Iaijutsu/Namikiri but by that token, why do ANY damage buffs exist? Why not roll buffs into potency of other abilities. Heck, why do we have to press Hakaze to start every combo. We sure press that button a LOT, why not simply have one button for each sen and thats it. The value of a button press is not solely in its utility, because if utility is all that matters, then the perfect class design is a single button that plays your class for you or you can hold down. The very purpose of having a variety of skills and abilities that interact with eachother is for providing the player with "fun". If buttons feel bad to press for the majority of players its bad design, if they feel good it is good design. The evaluation need not be more complicated than that. The difficult part is in the class design.

As fun is subjective the best thing for the dev team to do is to make each class as unique as possible, give players as many different flavours of gameplay as possible. Try to raise skill ceilings as high as possible while lowering skill floors as low as possible. Does a casual player who doesnt research their class have fun? Do they feel rewarded playing the class? Does a player that puts time and practice and research in get rewarded with higher results proportionate to their skill? Do they get to make decisions in gameplay that feel good and improve outcomes?

Continued: Homogenization and simplification of classes addresses the skill floor, lowering it further and making the game more accessible. It does however lower the skill ceiling and in the case of skills like Kaiten, reduces the fun many players have while doing so. This is a product of classes being designed to have a single rotation - a single correct way to play them. Good class design has branched decision making and priority based gameplay. A more casual player can stick to a rotation and be rewarded, a better player can diverge from that and do more. Alas, FF designs dps classes to largely be played a single way. Hit your 1 2 3 rotation and use your oGCDs on CD or when they line up. Ultimately, I am not optimistic about there being more nuanced class design coming to the game in the future, it simply is not how they view design. I do however hope they dont remove whatever flavour already exists in favour of keeping the skill floor as close to the ground as possible.

I've played SAM since it came out and XIV itself well before that, the direction this game is going with class design and identity is getting more disappointing as it goes on. It's hard to see the logic behind removing Kaiten, instead of consolidating other buttons that were added 4 months ago(!) so they can have AOE damage with falloff or combo from other actions (Shoha II, Ikishoten+Namikiri.) It mostly shows a lack of understanding. I don't personally know a single SAM player that wants this, and I would suggest to CBU3 to perhaps re-evaluate their thought process on melee job balance and changes.

tl;dr Removing Kaiten is a bad change and I'm unhappy with it. Don't touch it at all, or revert it.

Ya I love senei's animation so I'd be down for it being an upgrade to shinten.

Yes, please do NOT remove Hissatsu: Kaiten, rather upgrade Ikkishouten to Ougi Namikiri or make Shouha upgrade to Shouha II
Hissatsu: Kaiten makes Samurai much more satisfying to play, not to mention the opener will be so empty without it. As a Samurai it feels good to weave stuff and constantly pressing buttons. Please don't take that away from us.

+1 for KEEPING Kaiten

Everything that needs to be said on button bloat and APM bloat has already been said, there is no legitimate reason to remove this skill over various others if needed.

Random idea to free up 2 hotbar spaces without having to merge Shoha/Shoha2, Guren/Senei

Take guren and senei off the hotbar

Have Ikishoten grant a proc that upgrades Shinten into Senei, and Kyuten into Guren for 1 use

And while we are on that, please have third eye proc open eye which upgrades shinten into seigan for 1 use also.

I find it funny in a story where hermes agonizes over the loss of life, the devs seem gleefully indifferent towards deleting skills and their animations.

Originally Posted by Xenon_S

Random idea to free up 2 hotbar spaces without having to merge Shoha/Shoha2, Guren/Senei

Take guren and senei off the hotbar

Have Ikishoten grant a proc that upgrades Shinten into Senei, and Kyuten into Guren for 1 use

This just another of nearly half a dozen solid solutions to Samurai's supposed problems instead of deleting Kaiten lol.
There isn't even a DOWNSIDE to doing this.

Originally Posted by Xenon_S

And while we are on that, please have third eye proc open eye which upgrades shinten into seigan for 1 use also.

I find it funny in a story where hermes agonizes over the loss of life, the devs seem gleefully indifferent towards deleting skills and their animations.

The issue with Seigan tho is that I've heard of Yoshi P talk about "Animation Data" in one of his interviews for the Endwalker media Tour (I believe it might have been from Drak Gamestein or Woops with their questions regarding either Monk or Dragoon).
The idea I got was that there was a technical limitation to how much unique animations can be present in the game (and I assume it's files).
Reintroducing Seigan might be counter to that technical limitation, even tho which would not break the game by itself, but tacking on more and more animations from all these different jobs would just need a wholesale purge.
This would result in something like going through your crowded drives to delete stuff because you don't have enough space to install something new, instead of being proactive and deleting something after it's run it's course.

Yoshi P is aware of our outrage as he mentions it on stream. We cannot let this issue disappear. These are bad changes made by out of touch devs