Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[KYuuma]

I understand people are getting angrier, but don't throw insults at the developers, it won't get your point across. Reminder to give them the feedback they asked for.

Not throwing insults at them will also result in your points not getting across. It's FFXIV, none of your opinions matter to these devs when it comes to anything that isn't ultra casual.

Also, speaking politely for the past few years got healers nowhere.

[Beddict]

That's what I've been told, too - that the Kaiten removal has something to do with making future changes easier.

This is correct. Yoshi-P did a read through of the Patch Notes when the servers were down for maintenance and he spent some time talking about SAM. You can find the translation here with a followup post immediately below it here. The two big standouts I found from the read through were the following statements:

and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move

However, as for opinions, Of course we do and indeed read those properly, including those that think it's not right to over standardise jobs or comments like "you overdo yourself when it comes to our only trait or the optimization elements we have". We do indeed want to push it for as much as we could, and we are very well aware of people who understand this, as well as people who are already used to what they have now and people who told us not to do anything unnecessary. We really get that but in order for the expansion to continue and for each jobs to continue getting new actions, and whenever we think of trying to maintain the individual characteristics of each job, we found out that this "optimization" is quite tied and connected to the irregular element that was created in the past, and if we don't work to address this we can no longer build upon the existing elements and improve things further, and it'll land us in a situation where we can no longer steer ourselves forward.

So, Yoshi-P feels that Kaiten is an ability that is heavily restricting the design space for SAM and will make it difficult to develop the Job further in the future. Which sure, maybe there's some merit to that, I'm not a SAM main and can't be assed to do a deep dive into the Job to find out. However, I can clearly see that ripping out a part of a Job's kit and telling players "it's for the future" is fucking stupid because now there's a hole in the Job and a bunch of pissed off players. This is the kinda shit that should've come in 7.0 with the new abilities he's telling players to look forward to. Gutting the Job from 6.1 to 7.0 while offering nothing in return is such a bad idea, and it's embarrassing that a dev team that brags about "playing the game" and "listening to players" can fuck up so badly.

[cjbeagle]

I am not a high end player, so technically, I am not heavily impacted.

I'm not a high-end player either, and I see what you mean - the gear we got for samurai becoming obsolete isn't as big of a deal for us as it is for someone who is into cutting-edge raiding.

That said, losing our favorite way to interact with content is still incredibly impactful, especially if none of the other jobs come anywhere close to what we liked about samurai. I lost my main - I haven't found a new one - I just don't have a main anymore.

[KYuuma]

This is the kinda shit that should've come in 7.0 with the new abilities he's telling players to look forward to. Gutting the Job from 6.1 to 7.0 while offering nothing in return is such a bad idea, and it's embarrassing that a dev team that brags about "playing the game" and "listening to players" can fuck up so badly.

7.0 they will nerf SAM again. You can come back to this reply when it hits. I can guarantee you 100% that they will f it up in one way or another.

These devs have lost all my goodwill and confidence in a single patch.

[Quor]

So, Yoshi-P feels that Kaiten is an ability that is heavily restricting the design space for SAM and will make it difficult to develop the Job further in the future. Which sure, maybe there's some merit to that, I'm not a SAM main and can't be assed to do a deep dive into the Job to find out. However, I can clearly see that ripping out a part of a Job's kit and telling players "it's for the future" is fucking stupid because now there's a hole in the Job and a bunch of pissed off players. This is the kinda shit that should've come in 7.0 with the new abilities he's telling players to look forward to. Gutting the Job from 6.1 to 7.0 while offering nothing in return is such a bad idea, and it's embarrassing that a dev team that brags about "playing the game" and "listening to players" can fuck up so badly.

Exactly this. Roll the changes out when they are good and ready, during a new xpac release, after preparing the community. If he had said "hey, we know you like Kaiten for a variety of reasons but due to how the ability worked it was hard for us to expand on the job for future expansions, so we are removing it but in return SAM is getting X, Y and Z" then yeah, people would have been upset at the removal of Kaiten but with the upfront nature of the declaration I think people would have been willing to give Yoshi P. and his team the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the change would have been shit, maybe it would be ok, maybe it would have been awesome, but it for sure wouldn't have been done suddenly in the middle of an xpac cycle right before a major new end-game content release when player job satisfaction and job performance were both high.

I really just cannot fathom why they thought this change was a good one to do at this time. Putting aside my personal feelings for Kaiten I'm fine with changes to a job for the better long-term health of the game but not only was it implemented in the worst possible way but the reasoning that underlies it now just feels lazy. Further exacerbating this issue is that we received no less than three other reasons behind the removal of Kaiten, all of which the community put in the grave within 24 hours. It just felt insincere to me. Like yeah, it's button bloat but you could remove so many other things and in fact we've been asking for that ever since Shoha 2 was introduced. Oh but it's not "button bloat" anymore it's "action bloat" only SAM has less APM now in EW than it did at the end of ShB and removing Kaiten just lowers our overall APM by 1 so nothing worthwhile is accomplished. Ah but yes, the damage variance, addressing spike damage, very big problem you see, only there are way better ways to accomplish this that don't involve gutting SAM and turning it into a Shinten-bot. Oh but really it's that Kaiten is a difficult skill to "design around" so we're just going to remove it instead of coming up with a more elegant solution that preserves the feel and gameplay. Also we're going to remove it with not even a week's-worth of warning in the middle of an xpac right before Ultimate is released while simultaneously destroying the synergy between SAM and half the other DPS in-game.

So whereas before I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt *now* I'm wondering why the hell did they give us this ridiculous song and dance about "action bloat" and "button bloat" and "damage variance" only to say "ok, really, Kaiten is just a bitch to design around" at the end of it all? My trust is gone now, at least from a job balancing perspective. This could have been handled so much better, timed so much more appropriately but it wasn't and for what purpose? It is such a tone-deaf move, so uncalled for, that thousands upon thousands of paying subscribers are now feeling unease about the state of job balancing in this game.

[CelestiCer]

It is sad to see people dismiss " Kaiten " merits without good reason or any of the negative 6.1 changes, Tenka Goken cone included.

Ctrl+F searching the word " Kaiten" in the FFXIV discord, I see numerous players invalidate the opinions of SAM main without really any counter argument other then " will you just stfu / I don't understand the outcry / It's no big deal / I like the simple changes ". This whole atittude of " you're burdening my space with your opinions basically ".

We give proper structured opinions and feedback
- Perspective with Experience
- Numbers in Damage and Performance
- Our voices in mass
- Better alternative solutions and suggestions

Yet the main counter argument is " will you just stfu ".

We have (long time) Samurai mains voicing their feedback and concerns... to be outright dismissed so easily... really? Nothing pre-6.1 or post-6.1 SAM changes will affect any Non-SAM Mains, it shouldn't have them complain so badly about us complaining what we hold dear... Are we supposed to give our feedback less loudly? please hush so the Dev's can actually hear you... okey ugh no? what?

Then again... I am trying to understand human stupidity here which is... which...well that's my own fault lol the more players are for oversimplicity? the more it gives Dev's the incentive to just outright " kill " Intriguing Job design gameplay. Not visual... " Gameplay ".

[AziraSyuren]

So, Yoshi-P feels that Kaiten is an ability that is heavily restricting the design space for SAM and will make it difficult to develop the Job further in the future. Which sure, maybe there's some merit to that, I'm not a SAM main and can't be assed to do a deep dive into the Job to find out. However, I can clearly see that ripping out a part of a Job's kit and telling players "it's for the future" is fucking stupid because now there's a hole in the Job and a bunch of pissed off players. This is the kinda shit that should've come in 7.0 with the new abilities he's telling players to look forward to. Gutting the Job from 6.1 to 7.0 while offering nothing in return is such a bad idea, and it's embarrassing that a dev team that brags about "playing the game" and "listening to players" can fuck up so badly.

This is also what they did to Dark Arts for presumably the same reason and they didn't expand upon the job much from there. It's hard to be optimistic with that in mind. The only difference is that they didn't have the audacity to remove DA mid-expansion.

[Roxus]

Hey all.

With Ultimate coming up, discussion has been speculating these changes were to balance Ultimate and not the actual jobs. This discussion extends to Ninja as well.

Another discussion point is "MMORPG". Most don't think FF14 deserves to have "MMO" included anymore.

The points he brought up on stream during the patch note reading were not detailed, and Samurai was mentioned as an afterthought. They don't even know what they're doing with the jobs and if you watch the video you can see he was hesitating. There wasn't much meaning to his words and it was more to save face. As for the person commenting on etiquette, you can harshly criticize this game without personally attacking them. Feel free to call the design what it is, but not the designers themselves.

[cjbeagle]

Re: the Yoshi-P quote "and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move."

I would love some elaboration on how Kaiten was restricting their design space. I suspect it's because it buffs the next weaponskill by 50%, which makes designing around Kaiten necessary anytime they introduce a hard-hitting skill that would be worth using Kaiten on.

Change Kaiten to only affect Iaijutsu and Ogi. Solved.

How else could it be restricting their design options? Are they trying to introduce some new kenki spender? Great, replace Shinten.

[Ajhian]

How else could it be restricting their design options? Are they trying to introduce some new kenki spender? Great, replace Shinten.

That's what I'd like to know, in what world is designing around Kaiten so difficult. You already exclude abilities that are affected by Kaiten, so what's holding you back from restricting kaiten from affecting things that just aren't solely Iaijutsu as you said. IF you wanna add more Kenki spenders and reduce button bloat, you can just wrap skills into one like Ogi/Kaeshi are, hell you can wrap Ogi and Kaeshi into Ikishoten since they're only useable after you press the button anywas. They could rework Shoha to just be one upgraded AOE ability instead of having 2 damn Shoha's.