Hello, I have been playing this video game since 2.0.
I have pretty much spent most of my time playing melee jobs. I have watched them all get easier over the years. It is unfair for older players to have invested so much time learning and mastering jobs we find fun and entertaining, only to see them turn into brain dead rotations that require no effort or mastery.
Let's talk about Kaiten & Kenki.
Hissatsu: Guren/ Hissatsu: Senei
- 2 minute CD's, one for aoe/ single target
- Should be tied to one button to reduce useless bloat
Hissatsu: Kaiten
- One of the three primary uses in any content, typically always paired with Iajutsu.
Hissatsu: Gyoten
- Annoying niche button that is used almost STRICTLY for gap closing
- You should avoid pressing this button at all costs unless gap closing is your only option, as its a waste of 10 kenki
Hissatsu: Yaten
- Button that no one should probably ever be pressing
- Too slow and moves you nowhere and is a waste of kenki
- oGCDs responding too slow on this game after you press a GCD, and it is therefore not reliable
- Great button to throw off your hotbar for space
Hissatsu: Shinten/ Hissatsu: Kyuten
- These two buttons are essentially tied together, one for single target, one for multiple, should be one button
- Soon to be the only real use of kenki
So, we can deduce from this quick analysis that the only three typical uses of kenki is for Guren/ Senei, Kaiten, and Shinten/Kyuten.
For the typical gameplay loop that has its climax at 2 minutes, we simply press Guren/ Senei at 2 minutes, and we get more than enough gauge from Ikishoten, so we can remove that from our thought.
For the entire gameplay loop then, we only really use Shinten and Kaiten.
So, once we remove Kaiten, kenki turns purely into a all you can Shinten buffet.
This is too bland, and I might as well go swap over to monk and do the dragon kick only rotation so I can just have an easier time doing a 1 button focused "rotation" where literally all I press is dragon kick except for when I need to refresh twin snakes and demolish.
Let's talk about guaranteed crits.
This automatically puts samurai at the bottom tier in a raid/ any sort of serious setting alongside warrior if you have a certain job comp. This is ironic because of the obvious intention to include all jobs to be relevant and strong, but if you mix this and warrior in a comp with DRG/SCH/BRD/DNC, then you're losing quite a bit of damage. This is a change the game is not ready for until they remove crit/ dh rate up buffs from the game. SE obviously has to balance this game with the intention people are going to get rates up, which would be irrelevant for Samurai after the changes.
Tl;dr
Kaiten is the only complexity current SAM has, and will have poor synergy with jobs that give crit rate up if it has guaranteed crits.