Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[Roxus]

I want to start off by saying this isn't really about the numbers, because in a vacuum it's relatively the same outside of parties who utilize crit buffs. This isn't accounting for the fact that you can still crit before when comparing before and after patch 6.1.

I am a Samurai main who has played the job since its release alongside Stormblood, while taking it into every new experience possible. I have seen and played many changes to the job, and this is by far the worst.

The first thing I want to address...is Kaiten. I have absolutely no idea who or what convinced the team to remove this ability. I would say it is largely iconic to the Samurai's gameplay. I don't need to "try it" as the patch drops. I have simply tried my regular rotation without the ability, and frankly speaking, is the worst feeling I've ever had with the job. Think of when you get synced to level 50 content. That's what it basically is. If the argument is action bloat, well it didn't really change since you now replace it with Shinten...or the now neutral Gyoten/Yaten. The upside(?) is that now you don't need to think about saving Kenki for your finishers.

Another issue is the potency of Kaiten was spread out into the regular rotation, further homogenizing the values and putting less emphasis on your finishers. We had the Hagakure gameplay removed only to reintroduce it into a much simpler form now. I won't speak for others but Shinten is one of the most lackluster animations I've used on Samurai and to have to do that again is not my idea of fun.

Why are we heading down a path where all skills will eventually contribute equally to your damage, what is the point of building resources and spending them when the payoff is lackluster? If not equally, significantly less impactful in both ways. Why is there this incessant need to generalize the jobs so hard? I don't mind some but this is outright disruptive. You can remove large damage variance while keeping the identity.

I dislike that every buff/change sees our regular rotation buffed, instead of our finishers. Why are they even called finishers at this point? I also don't see the logic introducing these changes to Samurai but not Black Mage as well. To clarify, I am somewhat of a fan of being given the guaranteed crit, but the downsides have outweighed the positives to this for me personally.

The only finisher that saw a positive with these changes was regular Higanbana.

Incremental changes is a good strategy and safe, but with how often the balance changes come out it isn't good/fast enough and leaves many jobs in a state of discontent until months or even years later. Changes need to be made faster if this is how they plan to balance jobs, and bring out hotfixes if they are necessary.

While we are on the topic of giving QoL to Samurai I'd like these addressed:
Why are Ikishoten and Ogi Namikiri/Kaeshi Namikiri on separate skills?
Why does Tsubame-Gaeshi still not scale its recast with skill speed?
Why does Meditate not refresh Fugetsu and Fuka?

TLDR: Consistency good. Method bad. [If you MUST remove Kaiten, the skill animation should replace Hagakure. Redistribute the potency to finishers.] I take this back. Not even that would change how awful it feels to play right now. Bring Kaiten back. Revert to 6.08 Samurai. Still not asking for a buff.

This is my message to the devs after trying it out:
提案された通り、木人を叩こうとしたことがあります。
回転は退屈で虚しい。
居合術の火力は、通常のコンボと同等です。
真天はあまり考えずに使うようになりました。
ゲームはプレイヤーのためにあるのか、開発者のためにあるのか。
侍を返せ。

Great tooltip.

Friendly reminder that cast bars were justified to allow us to have bigger hits. This is no longer the case as Iaijutsu are just pathetic, hitting not much higher than your regular skills.

Also I know I haven't touched on Tenka Goken, but that was a given. The fact it has five swords in its name still with this weird change, potency nerf, and not even giving the guaranteed crit...lol.

Hold YoshiP to his word. Please keep continuing to give feedback that this is not okay. The only beneficial changes were to Third Eye and Meikyo Shisui. Everything else needs to be reverted. Change it back.



Extra: There now exists a meme rotation similar to Monk. You can spam Yukikaze and Hagakure as the primary rotation with Shinten. What a joke.

[Aikaal]

#RevertPatch6.1Changes

[DreadfullyAwful]

With these changes, the devs are confirming they think the majority of us are incapable of learning complex rotations and can only follow the shiny buttons

[SlickPaws]

While we are on the topic of giving QoL to Samurai I'd like these addressed:
Why are Ikishoten and Ogi Namikiri/Kaeshi Namikiri on separate skills?
Why does Tsubame-Gaeshi still not scale its recast with skill speed?
Why does Meditate not refresh Fugetsu and Fuka?

Gonna throw in a:
Why is the potency for Midare Setsugekka and Kaeshi Setsugekka now exactly the same?
Why is the potency for Ogi Namakiri and Kaeshi Namakiri exactly the same?
Why bother giving us a part-2 to our burst attacks and not have them do any more damage than the original?

I don't give a crap about auto-crits, I want the old potencies and Kaiten back.

[Ryaz]

Yoshi-P addressed this while reading patch notes and said they wanted to change up both Samurai and Ninja. They are closely monitoring feedback and may make further changes (or reversions) in 6.2 depending in community feedback.

He also said they were going to make a separate post about their reasoning for the changes, which I'm highly interested in seeing because they really feel out of nowhere, especially when there were several other routes to reducing button bloat than removing Kaiten. He's apparently aware a LOT of people aren't happy.

[Quor]

Yoshi-P addressed this while reading patch notes and said they wanted to change up both Samurai and Ninja. They are closely monitoring feedback and may make further changes (or reversions) in 6.2 depending in community feedback.

He also said they were going to make a separate post about their reasoning for the changes, which I'm highly interested in seeing because they really feel out of nowhere, especially when there were several other routes to reducing button bloat than removing Kaiten. He's apparently aware a LOT of people aren't happy.

That's a start. Now it's up to us to finish it. The changes need to be reverted, full-stop. I'll live with a circular Tenka Goken. I won't like it but I'll accept that there are plenty of people who might prefer the braindead all-circular aoe GCD combo. Fine, I can compromise on that even if I hate it. But the potency nerfs? The auto-crits? They Kaiten removal? All reverted, 100%. Not some of them reverted. All of them. SAM was perfectly fine as it was in 6.0, and if their stated issue of "action" or "button" bloat is still a problem then the community has brainstormed nearly a half dozen ways to address it that don't involve the removal of core job mechanics.

[YukiB]

Gonna throw in a:
Why is the potency for Midare Setsugekka and Kaeshi Setsugekka now exactly the same?
Why is the potency for Ogi Namakiri and Kaeshi Namakiri exactly the same?
Why bother giving us a part-2 to our burst attacks and not have them do any more damage than the original?

I don't give a crap about auto-crits, I want the old potencies and Kaiten back.

To be fair, the Kaeshi only did more damage if you weren't using Kaiten, which you should have been. Kaiten did not buff the Kaeshi versions of the skills because they're not classified as weaponskills. The extra 50% potency on the Kaeshi versions was to make up for that fact, and bring them up to parity with the buffed iaijutsu.

Now that Kaiten is no longer a thing, their potencies can be reduced to be equal with the iaijutsu.

I do agree with reverting the changes, of course.

[SlickPaws]

Yoshi-P addressed this while reading patch notes and said they wanted to change up both Samurai and Ninja. They are closely monitoring feedback and may make further changes (or reversions) in 6.2 depending in community feedback.

He also said they were going to make a separate post about their reasoning for the changes, which I'm highly interested in seeing because they really feel out of nowhere, especially when there were several other routes to reducing button bloat than removing Kaiten. He's apparently aware a LOT of people aren't happy.

If anything, this is valid justification for player surveys or public test servers before any proposed changes like this are simply forced into the game while the community is openly up in arms on the forums telling them not to. And now we're going to just have to sit and eat the shit sandwich we were just served up until 6.2 assuming that the feedback is even taken on board. Based on how healers got the "just play ultimate lol" treatment, I genuinely feel like the devs treat player feedback with utter contempt just now and I don't see any of this being walked back in a meaningful way. RIP SAM, 4.0 - 6.1, we knew you well.

To be fair, the Kaeshi only did more damage if you weren't using Kaiten, which you should have been. Kaiten did not buff the Kaeshi versions of the skills because they're not classified as weaponskills. The extra 50% potency on the Kaeshi versions was to make up for that fact, and bring them up to parity with the buffed iaijutsu.

Now that Kaeshi is no longer a thing, their potencies can be reduced to be equal with the iaijutsu.

I do agree with reverting the changes, of course.

By that rationale wouldn't it make more sense to increase the basic potency of the Iaijutsus to make up for the loss of Kaiten and synergise with the auto-crit instead of massively lowering the potencies of the Kaeshi skills?

[Roxus]

I am in agreement with what everyone here is saying. I don't post often because there is little in the game I am truly discontent with. These changes just made me feel the need to speak up. I am interested in hearing the rationale but I have a feeling I know what is going to be said.

[YukiB]

By that rationale wouldn't it make more sense to increase the basic potency of the Iaijutsus to make up for the loss of Kaiten and synergise with the auto-crit instead of massively lowering the potencies of the Kaeshi skills?

If they increased them to match the old Kaiten/Kaeshi potencies AND gave them auto-crit our DPS would go through the roof.

Guaranteed crits, not accounting for raid buffs, amount to about 39% extra damage in BiS raid gear with 25% crit and 60% crit magnitude (doing 160% of tooltip damage guaranteed versus doing an average of 115% tooltip damage, 160/115 = 1.3913). If they increased Midare potency to 990 to match Kaeshi, it would be 3168 potency in two hits, compared to what was on average 2277 potency total.

We also don't have to spend kenki on Kaiten anymore to reach that potency, so we have an extra 200 potency worth of kenki to spend on Shinten spam later in the fight.

If they wanted to make Midare hit just as hard on average as in patch 6.0, they should have INCREASED potency to about 710, but this would be a net increase to our DPS because of the extra kenki. If they wanted a Midare+Kaeshi+20 kenki combo to do as much damage as the 6.0 Kaiten+Midare+Kaeshi combo, they should have only reduced potency to 650, or just left it alone. Instead they decided to ALSO nerf the potency of our biggest attacks and redistribute it throughout our combo, reducing our burst damage and synergy with raid buffs even further.

They wanted to address concerns of crit variance, which weren't concerns for anyone not chasing top DPS metrics, and over-corrected so that everyone suffers. And at the same time took away job complexity, identity, and fun.