Walk it Back: Hissatsu Kaiten

[Caduagm]

that they not only don't care about player feedback, but that their job design team is incredibly out of touch.

Yeah, they don't care at all about player feedback... Healers are the absolute proof of that.

[Absimiliard]

Not gonna lie. I'm actually pretty pleased with this change. In this one instance, the pruning was mostly warranted. It is not an ideal solution, but it is one that works. Dragoon, on the other hand, I am rather concerned for. >_> Its entire identity is having an unreasonable number of abilities, and all of its abilities serve a purpose. I don't know what they intend to prune from it, but RIP.

[Edweena]

Not gonna lie. I'm actually pretty pleased with this change. In this one instance, the pruning was mostly warranted. It is not an ideal solution, but it is one that works. Dragoon, on the other hand, I am rather concerned for. >_> Its entire identity is having an unreasonable number of abilities, and all of its abilities serve a purpose. I don't know what they intend to prune from it, but RIP.

Removing Kaiten affects Samurai mechanically like merging High Jump / Mirage Dive on DRG, if not more. As it is now with Samurai we don't even have to track our UI element of Kenki anymore (both Shinten and Shoha light up when you can use them) since we'll just be dumping it ASAP on Shinten, no questions asked.
The only minor intricacies still present are the tiniest bit of pooling for the 2m buff window (RIP Trick Attack's 1m buff window), but even then we still get 50 free gauge just like that, so the difference between a Samurai that pools and one who doesn't is minimal.
This change invalidates our resource to the point we're better off having charges for the abilities like Bards do with Raind of Death / Bloodletter OGCD's, in a very scorched earth kind of way.

[Quor]

Not gonna lie. I'm actually pretty pleased with this change. In this one instance, the pruning was mostly warranted. It is not an ideal solution, but it is one that works. Dragoon, on the other hand, I am rather concerned for. >_> Its entire identity is having an unreasonable number of abilities, and all of its abilities serve a purpose. I don't know what they intend to prune from it, but RIP.

That doesn't hold any water though. If lowering the absolute number of keybinds used then there are so many better options to choose from. Common suggestions are the use of a trait to upgrade Shoha to Shoha 2, adding damage falloff to preserve the aoe potency as-is; changing Ikishoten after use into Ogi Namikiri, which will further change into Kaeshi: Namakiri; using a trait to upgrade Guren to Senei, with the same damage falloff treatment as Shoha 2; and consolidating Jinpu/Gekko and Shifu/Kasha into a single button. Any one of these would be a better solution to lowering SAM keybinds than removing Kaiten.

"But it's not about the number of buttons but rather the number of actions" some people have said, citing a "mistranslation" of SE's own slide (that SE translated no less). Well, that doesn't hold water either:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...oat-on-Samurai

The tl;dr here is that, as of 6.0, SAM is using about five Kaiten's a minute, aka 5 casts of Kaiten per minute. Translating that Kenki into Shinten's you get 4 casts per minute. Taken in the grand scheme of CPM on a SAM, you're lowering the casts per minute from 45-46 down to 44-45. In the course of a six minute fight, SAM will press six fewer buttons than they did before, which functionally amounts to nothing. The tradeoff for this one-less-cast-per-minute is a complete gutting of any resource engagement with the job and a dumping of the skill ceiling down to the floor (and the floor into the sewers). Any fun the job had, any sense of satisfaction for carefully planning out and managing Kenki usage, however small it may have been, is now gone. The term for this is "skill expression." SAM does well enough without proper use of Kaiten, but proper use of Kaiten let's people who take the time to practice find a way to be better than the average. SAM was great because it had a low skill floor, but all the nuances baked into various parts of the job allowed people who wanted to push themselves to do so. There really was no greater feeling than going through a fight knowing you never wasted a single point of Kenki, that every Kaiten was done perfectly, exactly when needed, with no clipped GCD's, misaligned raid buffs or cooldowns that were sat on. That's going to be gone on Tuesday, and until they bring it back I'm not going to stop.

[Kolsykol]

Kaiten was easily one of my favorite skills in the game... It felt so good to use and weave in -_-.
This change was met with such overwhelming negativity from basically every forum and content creator, take a damn hint devs please...

[DreadfullyAwful]

Walk it back. This is a terrible change. The devs clearly are out of touch with the jobs they are balancing