Thank you SE for addressing Samurai's burst window issues.

[Zacheris]

Looking past the initial shock, I've come to the conclusion that Samurai's guaranteed crits, disregarding the as of yet unknown potency changes, are a very healthy change not only to the job but to the party buff meta as a whole. I have multiple reasons that I'll go over in excrutiating length, starting off with simply how it will feel while playing.

As many of you reading are keely aware, Samurai is a job that has a few facets to its "identity". One of them is the big single skill numbers that it churns out regularly. For a lot of players, seeing a massive number pop up on the enemy is satisfying. Ever since Stormblood we've seen Samurai gushing over how high they can hit with Midare and now Namikiri. What's not so fun however, is seeing those big numbers fail to be BIG, because you didn't land a crit or direct crit. I've played with many people who've complained about their awful RNG completely screwing them over. From a simple emotional standpoint I believe players will find these crits very satisfying, especially with the potency adjustments to offset the loss of Kaiten.

Ensured crits don't just improve the "feel" of using these skills, they also smooth out the damage over the long course of a boss fight, particularly in Savage and Ultimate settings. With the harder focus on 2 minute windows we've been seeing from the development team, it's more important than ever to have good luck during these burst windows. The modifiers for crits, direct hits, and especially direct crits scale enormously, especially so while under the effect of raid buffs. I believe the high scaling in general should be addressed by the balance team but that is another post altogether. Warrior has proven the stabilizing effect of guaranteed crits, with the much lower damage variance compared to all other jobs including other tanks. Performing well due to skill is satisfying. Not performing well due to poor luck is frustrating. Going forward, balancing these two concepts will go a long way, and this change is a step in the right direction.

On a very different note, Samurai's new gauranteed crits will also serve a role in stopping a "stack buffs on the strong guy" meta. I used to play a game called Maple Story where this was a very pervasive problem. While it isn't present to the same degree as that game, I see it here with Samurai. Though Black Mage's personal damage is just as high it is more spread out, allowing them to contribute roughly equally in burst windows. Samurai however concentrates a lot of its damage in burst windows. Other jobs gain a disproportionate amount of damage with their buffs if a Samurai is in the party, compared to for example a Reaper. rDPS is misleading in this sense. While it does reflect the damage a Samurai does, it does not show the damage their party gained from the higher personal damage. I ran some numbers out of curiousity and I'll share them in the next post

[Zacheris]

Comparing rDPS gained from Reaper vs Samurai for varying jobs. Top FFLogs parse for each job was used for consistancy in skill/performance.

Buff job | rDPS from: Samurai | Reaper
Dancer - SAM: 1443.1 | RPR: 1169.0
Bard - SAM: 500.1 | RPR: 310.9
Ninja - SAM: 277.4 | RPR: 176.2
Scholar - SAM: 213.8 | RPR: 124.4
Astro - SAM: 515.2 | RPR: 488.2
Monk - SAM: 176.5 | RPR: 117.6

The rDPS given to a party of Tank/Tank/(SAM or RPR)/NIN/BLM/DNC/SCH/AST:
Samurai contributes 2449.5 to their party's raid buffs with an nDPS of 9861.1, totaling 12310.6 party damage contribution.
Reaper contributes 1957.8 to their party's raid buffs with an nDPS of 9241.1 and 424.7 from Arcane Circle, totaling 11623.6 party damage contribution.

An equally skilled Samurai brings up to 687 more dps to their party than an equivalant Reaper. By gauranteeing crits on samurai's biggest moves, it ensures at least the crit buffs aren't being sandbagged if a job other than Samurai is taken. Ideally Samurai's potencies will be adjusted to be 500 less dps than they are now but uncentralizing the need to have them in a party for scholar, dancer, and bard will go a long way towards ensuring all jobs remain competitive with one another.


I realize how long this post is and I apoligize, but I wanted to apply adequete reason and logic to combat the fearmongering I see going on right now. I implore anyone concerned over these changes to consider everything I've typed. I believe in time it will be seen as positive when the dust settles.

[Awkward]

Great thread, wholeheartedly agree with everything. So many people only look at rDPS due to it being the default metric and ignore the giant elephant pad in the room. Samurai has been the dominant meta job for years already to the point where 100% of all speed runs feature one and it's basically a lock in any optimized setting with the remaining jobs in its role competing for the privilege of buffing it. Speed runs are essentially just samurai crit fishing and repeating and it's incredibly stale. This is also a balancing nightmare as every single job except 1 of each role offers what amounts to essentially the same exact thing making it so jobs like samurai are essentially a lock and whatever job has the weaker raid buff is vastly underperforming(reaper). It also makes it much harder to balance machinist as both bard and dancer have the strongest/most raid buffs which directly benefit from samurai's ridiculous damage pad, so machinist is now vastly underperforming.

[SlickPaws]

An equally skilled Samurai brings up to 687 more dps to their party than an equivalant Reaper.

I'm going to have to dispute this on the basis that SAM requires far more skill to play at a high level than RPR does. If both the SAM and the RPR are 'equally skilled' then both of them are eating glue and forcing crayons up their nose, but only one of them is doing any meaningful damage. That is to say that RPR is braindead easy to play which simply means that SAM has to work harder for it... And if we're putting the work in, why not be rewarded with the higher numbers?
As far as I'm concerned - and I'm not alone in this based on the fact that 12 out of 20 threads on the first page are "Don't remove Kaiten!" threads - Square can keep their guaranteed crits and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. While they're at it, they could do with nerfing Reaper a bit so that I can't do nearly as much DPS as a SAM by slamming my face against the keyboard and hoping for the best.

[Awkward]

Samurai was a sticker collecting job to begin with and now its only minor resource management is being removed so this is a moot point anyway as it's now also a paste eating job. This isn't a fighting game and no job is difficult anyway. I hope you enjoy your gimped job lol, you definitely deserve it.

[SlickPaws]

Samurai was a sticker collecting job to begin with and now its only minor resource management is being removed so this is a moot point anyway as it's now also a paste eating job. This isn't a fighting game and no job is difficult anyway. I hope you enjoy your gimped job lol, you definitely deserve it.

Show me on the Kenki gauge where the Samurai hurt you.

[Awkward]

Show me on the Kenki gauge where the Samurai hurt you.

The only thing I can point to is shinten since that's the only thing it even has haha

[Zacheris]

snip

Difficulty is subjective. Case in point, I find Samurai easier than Reaper because of how many skill stacks Reaper keeps track of, while the Sen collection is muscle memory with filler being a non issue. I find Ninja more difficult than both, but that isn't a reason for it to do substantially more damage. That creates issues where certain jobs will get locked out which you of all jobs should be acutely aware of. That's bad for the game and the community as we've seen before.

[Zacheris]

It also makes it much harder to balance machinist as both bard and dancer have the strongest/most raid buffs which directly benefit from samurai's ridiculous damage pad, so machinist is now vastly underperforming.

It causes bard and dancer to lose roughly 200 dps each, but they compete with Machinist, not all dps. Bringing all phys ranged in line is fantastic and not repeating the problem of Stormblood piercing debuff is even better. I'm glad they've learned from their mistakes.

[SlickPaws]

Difficulty is subjective. Case in point, I find Samurai easier than Reaper because of how many skill stacks Reaper keeps track of, while the Sen collection is muscle memory with filler being a non issue. I find Ninja more difficult than both, but that isn't a reason for it to do substantially more damage. That creates issues where certain jobs will get locked out which you of all jobs should be acutely aware of. That's bad for the game and the community as we've seen before.

Gatekeeping in the hardcore scene will always be a thing regardless of the game and the classes. People were locking SMNs out of raids early in the expansion because the new summon animations were too big, which is petty as hell but it still happened.
Conversely though, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary with SAMs getting arbitarily locked out of high level content because auto-crits mean less synergy with DRGs, BRDs and SCHs because who needs crit chance when you're getting 100% chance anyway? The more auto-crits they put in, the more they're really just implementing secret nerfs to things like Battle Litany or Chain Stratagem. As far as I'm aware - and I could be wrong, so feel free to correct me - FFXIV doesn't turn extra crit chance into extra damage, so whether it's 100% or 150%, you're still going to be getting the same damage on the attack regardless. And if nothing else, removing Kaiten for the sake of just throwing on auto-crits just feels bad.

As far as the difficulty goes, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I found RPR mindnumbing to play and all I really need to do is hit whatever button is flashing to do the big numbers.