Removing Kaiten: Who Asked?

[YukikoKurosawa]

Literally who? Who asked for this in either the NA or JP communities? Name a single person, a single basis for justifying the removal of such an iconic ability.

[Quor]

The answer is "no one." No one asked for this. People, at various points in time, had mentioned something to the effect of "hey, SAM has a few too many skills, maybe some of that sweet hotbar consolidation could happen, like what you guys did with GNB and their savage combo" but no one had ever asked for the removal of any skills. The addition of Ogi Namikiri was generally seen as a positive once people realized that Merciful Eyes and Seigan would be gone. Yes, it sucks to lose that little bit of extra survivability for solo situations, and optimizing damage via Seigan procs was a fun top-end challenge, but the addition of Ogi meant that our now-two-minute cycle flowed more smoothly. So in the end, Ogi was a big plus and the only way it would have been better is if they had found a way to keep Seigan in the game.

Conversely, Shoha 2 was met with a "that *might* be cool but..." reaction because it really begs the question of "why not just upgrade Shoha to Shoha 2 instead of giving us an entirely new button?" In short, any conversation about "skill pruning" was focused around the absolute number of skills a SAM had alongside the seemingly-wasteful additions that came in the form of Shoha 2 and Senei, not the frequency in which buttons were pressed. And it certainly never included "gutting the core resource engagement of the job" as a possibility.

I said this once before but this particular move feels like a rookie developer mistake. Someone new on the team, cutting their teeth in an environment where they have little-to-no experience looked at the "metrics," did some "math," and came to the conclusion that "nothing" would change - numerically speaking - if Kaiten were removed and the lost potency was "baked in" to the skills at a baseline. In short, it's a bean counters mistake, looking exclusively at spreadsheets and numbers while failing to understand the nuance that comes from the underlying challenge and enjoyment of properly utilizing Kaiten.

And of course many people use the stupid argument of "it's just a button you press, it's not hard," to which I say that pressing Kaiten may not take more than one brain cell but that's still one more brain cell than it takes to mindlessly spam Shinten. Any challenge, even a relatively insignificant one, is welcome. Particularly in light of how SE seems to be on a race to the bottom as far as dumbing down jobs.

[Acece]

Literally who? Who asked for this in either the NA or JP communities? Name a single person, a single basis for justifying the removal of such an iconic ability.

I remember one guy at the start of endwalker did, so one guy.

[Quor]

I remember one guy at the start of endwalker did, so one guy.

Yeah but nobody likes him. Not after what he pulled.

[DreadfullyAwful]

Out of touch devs making changes for the sake of change. Bad job balancing. Walk it back

[wereotter]

Do they really need to be ASKED to make changes to jobs?

ROW/TK Monk says no. No they don't.

So you put on your big kid pants, suck it up, and deal with it. Change jobs if it upsets you that much. Very rarely have they reversed course on decisions like this.

[DreadfullyAwful]

Do they really need to be ASKED to make changes to jobs?

ROW/TK Monk says no. No they don't.

So you put on your big kid pants, suck it up, and deal with it. Change jobs if it upsets you that much. Very rarely have they reversed course on decisions like this.

I dunno, the outrage for Kaiten's removal is massive from both ENG and JP players. Yoshi even mentioned it on stream. They are even going to make a post attempting to justify it, as it seems 'button bloat' wasn't the reason even though it was previously stated. I think if the outrage continues, it'll be walked back

[wereotter]

I dunno, the outrage for Kaiten's removal is massive from both ENG and JP players. Yoshi even mentioned it on stream. They are even going to make a post attempting to justify it, as it seems 'button bloat' wasn't the reason even though it was previously stated. I think if the outrage continues, it'll be walked back

The outrage for removing positionals on monk was pretty huge too.... but they're still not restored.

The original statement, as I read it, had nothing to do with button bloat, but to even out samurai damage across multiple runs. Where previously the damage differential if you did or did not get a crit could make a massive difference, now it won't. It's still a weak reason since I'd sure love my Phantom Rush to be a gaurenteed critical hit to even out my damage, but that's the reason they gave.

Heck, this isn't even the first contraversial change to just samurai. I dropped it and haven't looked back when they removed hagakure and forced samurai to do more iajutsu.

[waterboytkd]

The outrage for removing positionals on monk was pretty huge too.... but they're still not restored.

But that was massively split, too. There are a lot of folks happy with the removal of positionals. And, unlike the Kaiten debate, there were actually good arguments on both sides of the positional debate. The only argument for removing Kaiten is keystroke bloat, which was never a big complaint in the Sam community (number of hotkeys, yes; number of buttons pushed per minute, not really).

The original statement, as I read it, had nothing to do with button bloat, but to even out samurai damage across multiple runs. Where previously the damage differential if you did or did not get a crit could make a massive difference, now it won't. It's still a weak reason since I'd sure love my Phantom Rush to be a gaurenteed critical hit to even out my damage, but that's the reason they gave.

Agreed, although, it's worth pointing out that the auto-crit is what's really doing the lion's share of work between closing the gap between a parse's floor and ceiling due to RNG. Kaiten could have stayed with an auto-crit mechanic (it would have just required pushing the potency a little lower).

Heck, this isn't even the first contraversial change to just samurai. I dropped it and haven't looked back when they removed hagakure and forced samurai to do more iajutsu.

The brightside here is they did reverse the Hagakure removal. So maybe, we can look forward to some kind of reconciliation in this situation, too.

[Lyth]

I think a lot of this drama wouldn't have kicked off had there not been a new melee dps introduced this expansion. It creates a sort of buyers remorse where players have to constantly justify why their job is superior to the new one. Players harped on endlessly on the forums and on reddit about how more skill SAM took to play than any other job, with the expectation that they would receive even bigger dps buffs to push them further ahead of everyone else. It backfired because then the dev team immediately began looking at ways of simplifying this 'overcomplicated' job to make it more accessible. And it's not the first time we've seen this exact sequence of events play out.

The playerbase defines the problem, not the solution.