Quote Originally Posted by elioaiko View Post
Personally SAM fell off for me after the additions of more charges to unnecessary skills so you can get more "booms".

Adding more Meikyos, Tsu charges did nothing for expanding SAM. Removing Kaiten only reinforced more Shinten spam to control your Kenki.

I'm not going to touch on Hagakure vs Ikishoten because clearly one had more thought put into it.

If they didn't know how to expand SAM, they should have just opted for more QoL changes rather than "we know you like a lot of boom so we're adding more of that," and creating more of a messy rotation that isn't satisfying because you see it so often.
This is an important bit. I think the major root of the SAM "spike" damage problem lies in how we're forced to dump everything into a two minute window instead of having it spaced out more evenly. The lows are much lower if you don't get those juicy direct crits but the high's are much higher if you do, so this creates that damage variance they are so concerned about. The addition of charges on Kaeshi and Meikyo just locked SAM into a 120s rotation instead of it's 60s rotation from ShB, and since every raid buff now falls in that same 120s cycle there is so much more damage to be gained when a SAM pools charges for raid buffs.

That should have been factored into their calculations, but either it wasn't or else they didn't think it would be that big of a deal. Hell, with the way things have gone recently I half expect them to believe that the player base would have treated the charges as something to help keep the CD rolling. "Easing" the pressure to absolutely use Kaeshi on CD as soon as it came up again. But if that's the case then whoever made that decision doesn't know how the game works; raid buff alignment with big damage CD's has been the name of the game since Coil. In short, the devs created the very problem that they're now trying to fix, but instead of walking back the changes that resulted in the problem they've taken a chainsaw to the job and called it balance.