Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[Quor]

I went back in the forums history, before I joined the Forums. Apparently a ton of " Do not remove Kaiten " posts to be found. And the more thread posts I read, the more angry I got... the amount of players ignored, I can't describe the frustration nor the frustration of all those players ignored. We're going full circle, posting about why Kaiten should not have been removed, a massive mistake by SE to have done this.

Yeah, anyone who played SAM seriously understood that removing Kaiten wasn't going to feel good. Plenty of us even went the good faith route and took Kaiten off our bars pre-6.1 to give it a try, and yeah, it was just all Shinten spam. Very one dimensional, very boring, just like we were used to when alliance roulette would give us CT only with an extra button tacked on. And this was before we knew that we'd be getting potency cuts or that Tenka would be changing.

But they still went through with it. For the first time in a long time I have no faith in this dev team as far as job balance goes. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on a lot of stuff, such as tank homogenization ("the complexity would come from the fight!") and healer dps kit minimalization ("they'll introduce more difficult healing challenges once things are balanced!" but now it's clear that the goal isn't fun for the player base, it's apparently to ease the work load for the devs. I don't begrudge them wanting to work smarter instead of harder but what they've done here is just pure laziness, and it's clear that said laziness has been the guiding force behind job balance for quite some time now.

I no longer have that faith in this team, not from a job balancing perspective. 6.1 is, by all accounts, a good patch. The story is great, with lots of fun, interesting beats to it, balanced with a good mix of serious stuff, comedy and some great character background. The new pvp is quite entertaining, the 24-man and 4-man are on-point, hell, even the new Prae and Ultima Weapon fights are fun and engaging in a way that addresses a long-standing criticism about the lack of "intermediate" adventurer training. Even DRK and WHM are doing well for themselves as far as balance goes, with some great (and long-awaited in the case of Blood Weapon and LD) changes.

But then the NIN, MCH and SAM changes (or rather for MCH, the lack of real changes) rear their ugly heads and I just find myself wondering who on earth could have approved these. Was it Yoshi P.? Did he really know what he was giving the OK to? Did he care? Is it just that he's woefully ignorant? Did he trust his subordinates too much and believe that if they put something on his desk then it was good to go? Is he just fucking incompetent when it comes to anything not-BLM? I've never felt the need to ask questions like this before because I always had faith. A hard-earned faith that the dev team won over a long period of time, starting with their rescue of 1.0 and turning it into 2.0. It's a faith that I've built up since I first helped out in the 2.0 alpha, and while they've made mistakes they've generally done right by the players in correcting them.

I hope my faltering faith will be restored. I hope Yoshi P. and his team will see the mistakes that they have made, not just with SAM but with so many other jobs. This drive towards simplification needs to stop. Healers need more engaging DPS kits, tanks need more engaging moment-to-moment gameplay that isn't boss-reliant, various DPS jobs have long-standing issues that need to be addressed and SAM absolutely needs to have 100% of the changes done in 6.1 reverted back to 6.08, if not even further (I would love to see Kenki gain based on correct positional returned to us instead of boosted positional potency like it is now).