After reading the patch notes, I guess I won't play SAM anymore

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Then they can tweak the potencies, or add auto-crit to Kaiten (which won't affect Kaeshi's, meaning group crit buffs still have strong value with SAM's while simultaneously smoothing out damage). They had other options but they chose to gut the job by removing Kaiten and adding unnecessary auto-crit.

I don't find kaiten disappearing "gutting", and Sam was my favorite job in ff before it released in XIV, which I then mained until 6.0. And I wasn't bad at it. I'm no 1%, but I did fairly well in most of the tiers I did.

Different opinions and all that.

[Quor]

I don't find kaiten disappearing "gutting", and Sam was my favorite job in ff before it released in XIV.

Different opinions and all that.

And many people, myself included, don't find the new "Shinten gauge" we're getting to be particularly interesting or engaging. As others have said elsewhere, while Kaiten may have only required one single brain cell to use correctly, that was one more brain cell than spamming even more Shinten. Especially if you keep in mind what SE said about wanting to shift SAM away from Shinten spam at the beginning of ShB. Yet here we are now, back to spamming Shinten more than we have ever since, for less comparative damage to boot.

None of that sounds or feels good to me. So much stripped away in a single patch, how can it be described as anything *but* gutted?