Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[xAFROx]

As an AST you could give a DRK ewer and watch them clean up shop, alas both AST and DRK have changed too much for such a thing

I miss the card identities from old AST. Why they're all just 6 or 3% damage now is beyond me, but I was just starting to level it when that happened and decided 'nah, I want more thinking involved'

[SieyaM]

I miss the card identities from old AST. Why they're all just 6 or 3% damage now is beyond me, but I was just starting to level it when that happened and decided 'nah, I want more thinking involved'

The reason for the change in card effects is because certain communities within the game would only play balance, which was a DPS boosting card, and declared all other cards useless. This community was listened to and the card effects have all been turned into the balance.

[BalinS]

Like many here, I dont usually post on the official forums. The recent changes to SAM have made me want to speak up. 6.08 SAM felt great. It rewarded proper resource management with "big booms". The kaiten animation was by far the best flourish before an iaijutsu and just made SAM feel great to play. True, SAM dps numbers are largely unchanged (except for a meager 3% nerf), but it's not about the numbers. The changes are completely unacceptable. If action bloat is the issue, the changes listed through the forum replies are a great starting point. After reading through I noticed no one mentioned a, in my opinion anyhow, useless action. The action that literally takes you out of the fight for 15 seconds for very little gain, Meditate. Meditate at one point worked well for phase changes, but not so much anymore. Iaijutsu give stacks of meditation, all weaponskills give kenki, Meditate just seems like an extra button that doesn't matter anymore.
Just my 2 gil.

[xAFROx]

Like many here, I dont usually post on the official forums. The recent changes to SAM have made me want to speak up. 6.08 SAM felt great. It rewarded proper resource management with "big booms". The kaiten animation was by far the best flourish before an iaijutsu and just made SAM feel great to play. True, SAM dps numbers are largely unchanged (except for a meager 3% nerf), but it's not about the numbers. The changes are completely unacceptable. If action bloat is the issue, the changes listed through the forum replies are a great starting point. After reading through I noticed no one mentioned a, in my opinion anyhow, useless action. The action that literally takes you out of the fight for 15 seconds for very little gain, Meditate. Meditate at one point worked well for phase changes, but not so much anymore. Iaijutsu give stacks of meditation, all weaponskills give kenki, Meditate just seems like an extra button that doesn't matter anymore.
Just my 2 gil.

Meditate is primarily something to do during downtime. But I will agree that 9 times out of 10, you're probably about to cap meditation stacks when that occurs.

Not saying it isn't useless, just mentioning what it was intended for, like Anatman on monk or..... actually, that's also a bad skill and I don't think there's anything else like it that channels other than dancer's improv.

....damn, what a useless skill in most cases. But I still like pressing it. It gives me focus and makes me look cool for being still

[geebster]

I created a forum account to discuss the SAM changes in the week before they were released. Sadly it seems they arent earnest about taking player feedback, or about posting that long form explanation post Yoshi said they would about SAM/NIN. Many people who dont play SAM have voiced their position that "well they've done this to other classes in the past (healers, DRK, SMN, etc) so SAM players shouldnt whine about the changes". This is wholly illogical. If it was wrong to ignore player feedback in the past on those changes and the outrage those caused, then surely it continues to be wrong to not take player feedback into consideration. FFXIV is a GAME and is meant to be played for FUN. If player enjoyment is affected negatively by a change, dev stubbornness and refusal to address, discuss, or fix said issues is a PROBLEM. Blizzard did this all the time - they "knew better" and made changes players didnt want and refused to change them back. However, Blizzard at least does blue posts - long form posts explaining and discussing changes with players. We havent seen that from SE. If players are having less fun and its a widespread issue, they should properly explain what problem they addressed, why it couldnt have been done a plethora of other ways, and what they plan to do about it moving forward. Implementing an unpopular change then giving radio silence on the issue, stubbornly sticking to your guns over and over again is not a recipe for long term player retention or trust.

People seem to forget that for nearly 2 decades Blizzard was a beloved, trusted dev that players put so much faith into. Changes that seemed or felt bad were chalked up to "well the devs are doing their best, they are good guys, so lets not act like the sky is falling". People loved the devs until...they didnt. I really really like YoshiP and the devs, but that love and trust isnt an infinite resource. At some point they will have to do a better job of actively discussing and addressing concerns with players and not making pronouncements from on high, or there will come a time people will stop giving them tons of rope and leeway to work with.

[Runeslayer]

You know, on paper this specific change wouldn't have garnered as much pushback as it is if you think about it, and I was sitting here thinking about why. Is it just because the SAM players are the most vocal? I thought perhaps, but eventually my thoughts ended up at:

No, this is the logical conclusion of a grander longstanding issue of class homogenization and simplification across the board. This is merely the dam bursting.
That meme of the grim reaper knocking on doors gutting jobs before it is a wholly accurate portrayal of how I see this entire situation.

Job after job has been retouched and reworked to the overall detriment of what people enjoyed about the job in the first place. Summoner now has flavor but it's mechanically uninteresting and I've heard that flavor doesn't feel earned. Dark Knight is neither mechanically nor visually interesting, and until recently had to work against its own design just to perform well. It performs well, but it feels like crap doing so with baffling design choices that remained for YEARS. Samurai is currently going through this fiasco, with the removal of kaiten and autocrits the iaijutsu has lost much of it's impact and whatever kenki management SAM had had been practically wiped away in favor of 'hit poke button when light up' low IQ playstyle.

I even hear that Dragoons are fearful they'll be next, as their class is probably as good as it'll get with the 6.1 changes and they really don't need much more. 6.2 has me and other DRGs I know DREADING the potential gutting.

Yoshi P, I know that you and your team try and work hard to please everyone...in pleasing everyone, you please no one though and hints have constantly been dropping that your balance team doesn't clearly understand what your players like about your jobs. Defend the designers all you want, shift blame onto yourself, but you need to step back and really take a look at what we're all saying.

[Roxus]

Good day all. Topics of interest today are the following: Reaper population and discussion dwindling, Discussions of FF16 and speculation on if it is impacting FF14, realization that we are paying the monthly sub to be testing the changes on the live server, and some random kit reworks people have thought of. There are posters who have posted before expressing their discontent with the changes every day.

[Theodric_Thorne]

Good day all. Topics of interest today are the following: Reaper population and discussion dwindling, Discussions of FF16 and speculation on if it is impacting FF14, realization that we are paying the monthly sub to be testing the changes on the live server, and some random kit reworks people have thought of. There are posters who have posted before expressing their discontent with the changes every day.

Thanks for keeping us posted on the general temperature of the JP forums with regard to this issue, it's encouraging to know they stand with us.

Feels like all we have to do is anxiously await some kind of response and see whether SE walks this back, or doubles down on it.

[xAFROx]

The reason for the change in card effects is because certain communities within the game would only play balance, which was a DPS boosting card, and declared all other cards useless. This community was listened to and the card effects have all been turned into the balance.

And here I thought the only card that wasn't used was uh... which one granted TP? Spire? I thought that was the one no one liked.

But since we're talking about AST, I miss the idea of how flexible it could be with its two modes of diurnal and nocturnal sect. Neutral sect survived but I don't get why they needed to remove half of the jobs kit when it was just tied to a stance you choose before combat.

And on the topic of SAM, I don't log in frequently, but the few times that I do, I typically go dps because I'm too lazy to play tank a lot of the time, but currently my only jobs at 90 are GNB and SAM, and it feels really odd trying to keep track of what I should be doing. I don't know if I should be pooling my kenki for more shinten in spurts or spamming it incessantly at low kenki values, but I'm unironically paying less attention to the fights with a button gone.

I'm having tunnel vision by looking at my bars and resource, using Hagakure more frequently and am only using Midare infrequently. Before I used to build those like no one's business and now it's a 50/50 if I even use it or burn the Sen for kenki.

Am I playing as the devs intended yet? It seems a bit more in line with the change to Tenka Goken that I'm eating unnecessary hits just to make use of as much of my kit as I can remember to.

[Quor]

And here I thought the only card that wasn't used was uh... which one granted TP? Spire? I thought that was the one no one liked.

The issue with AST basically boiled down to how "pre-pull" could last multiple minutes if the AST got "unlucky" and didn't have a spread Balance (which meant one Ewer or Spire to be Royal Road'd and one Balance) ready to go with a Balance in reserve. If you got unlucky then you'd have raid group sitting there for minutes waiting for the AST to get the perfect setup.

The other cards weren't bad per se but they had their own issues. Ewer was nice to have in your back pocket for MP regen but in an ideal situation you didn't need that. Spire was generally not needed outside of Royal Road because most jobs had TP management plus MCH and BRD had a TP regen ability they could use. Arrow was actually pretty baller on BLM but basically useless on anyone else because it fucked up their rotations. Although I did take a personal bit of perverse pleasure in putting an enhanced Arrow on a MNK and watching them bottom out on TP moments later since they would have something like a sub-1.5 GCD.

Spear was also pretty great once it was changed to enhanced crit but when it was a CD reduction thing it was weird to use since it only worked if you use it on someone before they used their CD's. Since CD usage is pretty much pre-planned to line up with buffs using Spear typically was more trouble than it was worth as it would mis-align everything.

Bole was neat in concept but ultimately never panned out. You see it's spiritual successor in WHM's Aquaveil, which functions in basically the same way. But as a card you juse maybe used Bole for the enhancement boost via RR and that was it.

So this left the Balance, which was the straight damage boosting card, and when Spread via RR you were looking at a 15% (or 10 later on, iirc) boost to everyone in the raid, which was absolutely huge from a dps perspective. Ewer and Spire had value for enabling the Spread function from RR while Arrow, Spear and Bole were basically re-drawn or outright discarded unless you could leverage a Bole to boost a Balance and give that to your best dps right before burst phase. Since the ideal combination used by the playerbase was generally Spread Balance, SE just said "ok fine, here" and made Divination with AST while making all the regular cards just various amounts of +dmg%.

On the one hand this kinda sucked because the unique flavor of Arrow and Spear (when it was CD reduction) were pretty neat. But the practical usage they ended up bringing were negligible and hard to manage even when useful due to the RNG nature of the cards. So people leaned into Balance as the only card and Spread as the only RR effect because it was how you got the most consistent bang for your buck. SE made changes that reflected the trends of the community at large, but AST lost a bit of itself in the process.

It's hard as a player because I can see and understand the perspective SE is coming from here, but when you look at the path that led from what AST was to where we are now with SAM and other jobs I just can't support that sort of simplification anymore.