Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[Noraiga]

I don't main SAM, just casually take him out time to time.
I tried out 6.1 SAM. No surprise. It's trash... Hot garbage, like this change have to be the worst change in a job ever...

I'm not even trying to exaggerate here, i barely played SAM before and at least it was fun but now... He gonna stay forever in the shadow realm for me, this change is worse than the cut that DRK got with the removal of Dark Arts.
More exp, more job become tasteless.

Remove "Sen ei" and "Shoha"
Bump "Guren" and "Shoha2" damage, easy fix IF it was just to remove button bloat and fixing Midare+Namikiri damage...

[xAFROx]

Just want to point out that currently, according to the fflogs world race page, out of the top 20 progressed groups for DSR ultimate, the number of SAM is... 0

Who would've thought that gutting a job's party synergy and making it to be unfun to play would turn off even the top end players. /s

Shocker. Yeah, I knew it'd be low, but I didn't think it would be so low as to be at 0. That's actually kind of funny. I hope that's a good enough show to prove no one who actually cared about the job is happy.

[ShanaShirayuki]

Just want to point out that currently, according to the fflogs world race page, out of the top 20 progressed groups for DSR ultimate, the number of SAM is... 0

Who would've thought that gutting a job's party synergy and making it to be unfun to play would turn off even the top end players. /s

So much for balancing SAM for Ultimate, or whatever objective / excuse the devs were going for.

[Xenon_S]

Fun fact follow up

YoshiP's expectation, as stated in a pre-6.1 interview: There will be a drastic change in a job's playfeel, I trust the ultimate players are skilled enough to adapt to them within the 2 weeks leading up

In reality, the players: lol screw that you killed the job's party synergy and fun factor, why would I play something that is gutted and unfun in ultimate?

Link to the interview in JP: https://www.famitsu.com/news/202203/31256409.html
Link to rough translations: https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...y_and_content/

[cjbeagle]

There will be a drastic change in a job's playfeel, I trust the ultimate players are skilled enough to adapt to them within the 2 weeks leading up

Maybe they should drastically change jobs whose players are begging for it instead of one that was already great whose players loved it.

[Ceridwen]

Maybe they should drastically change jobs whose players are begging for it instead of one that was already great whose players loved it.

It's so weird! Everyone seemed happy with the Samurai. I don't think I ever heard a single person complain about it. Many/most of the other jobs, yes, but not Samurai. It was so smooth & well constructed from the start. I do NOT understand what they were thinking. Other jobs can feel jumbled or haphazard, or stuck together - but the Samurai didn't. At most, they could have consolidated some long cd abilities - those are annoying on everyone (one for single target, one for aoe - those, I could see smashed into one button without tears)

So, so weird!

[cjbeagle]

It's so weird! Everyone seemed happy with the Samurai. I don't think I ever heard a single person complain about it. Many/most of the other jobs, yes, but not Samurai. It was so smooth & well constructed from the start. I do NOT understand what they were thinking. Other jobs can feel jumbled or haphazard, or stuck together - but the Samurai didn't. At most, they could have consolidated some long cd abilities - those are annoying on everyone (one for single target, one for aoe - those, I could see smashed into one button without tears)

So, so weird!

Exactly - I could see some minor experimental changes to try to make some incremental improvements, but knowingly implementing "drastic change" to something that's already primo is just reckless and irresponsible.

[AluneTempest]

I don't expect anything more positive coming from the SAM until the next expansion that will probably give a complete rework in it because they DESTROYED the samurai that everyone already liked and absolutely NOBODY asked for these changes.

I understand that they have future plans for SAM, but we will have to wait almost 2 years to finally have fun with the job?

I can't understand why they didn't postponed these changes in the samurai for patch 7.0 because in this they could delete things and add much better things and make the job more fun but no, just deleted and not put anything to compensate.

[Xenon_S]

It's so weird! Everyone seemed happy with the Samurai. I don't think I ever heard a single person complain about it. Many/most of the other jobs, yes, but not Samurai. It was so smooth & well constructed from the start. I do NOT understand what they were thinking. Other jobs can feel jumbled or haphazard, or stuck together - but the Samurai didn't. At most, they could have consolidated some long cd abilities - those are annoying on everyone (one for single target, one for aoe - those, I could see smashed into one button without tears)

So, so weird!

The devs were unhappy because they have trouble balancing samurai's damage profile.
Most of Samurai's damage comes from their big hits: Midare, Kaeshi Midare, Ogi Namikiri etc. As such crit variance will affect the performance rather heavily.
This in turn makes the tuning in ultimate rather tricky. Because unlike a savage fight that is mostly full uptime, an ultimate fight has short bursts of phases where you can do damage, and various other transitions and forced downtimes where they run you dizzy with mechanic vomits.
If 6.08 samurai critted a majority of their big attacks within the available damage window, that could make the DPS check trivial. Conversely, a samurai with terrible luck would not be able to reliably contribute to the DPS check.

This is in theory how I interpret the devs' intentions based on current ultimate design and their words from the patch note reading. But I still don't agree with their decision to remove kaiten either way because there are ways to smooth out samurai's damage profile without removing kaiten.

In practice however, the damage resource structure of a job leads to more balancing mishaps than crit variance.
Take NIN for example, most of their damage comes from things on a CD (ninjutsu charges, trick, kassatsu, dwad etc). Losing GCDs only means a loss of ninki generation which is only a small part of damage make up. (take the top p4s p2 nin log for example, bhava only accounted for 9.45% of their total damage, the bunshin attacks adds up to less than 5%).
In a similar boat, a BLM can simply umbral soul away and continue charging polyglot stacks during downtimes.

Meanwhile, GNBs are on suicide watch with the cartridge alignment, MCH and RPR needs to hit their GCD to build up resources for their burst phase (I can hear MCH internally screaming over drill drifts), and every 8 GCD lost on SAM is 1 less midare and 1/3 less shoha.

So in the end, I don't even know. The new ultimate is without a doubt a spectacularly designed fight, but the individual job balancing is... confusing at best.

[KurenXIV]

This is in theory how I interpret the devs' intentions based on current ultimate design and their words from the patch note reading.

Just want to point out that currently, according to the fflogs world race page, out of the top 20 progressed groups for DSR ultimate, the number of SAM is... 0

Well they certainly made balancing easy since no one is using SAM for the ultimate at all now lol.

(Also great insight and I get where they are coming from its just executed so so so poorly).