Yet another Samurai main making a forum account for the sole purpose of adding to this thread. I could easily write an essay about my experience with SAM as it changed from early ShB to now but instead I'd rather summarize my most pressing feedback since others have gone way more in depth about both the mechanical/damage output aspect of the job and how it actually feels to play.

- Kaiten being removed was justified with concerns about "button bloat". Again, others have suggested much less impactful and iconic skills to be combined if the goal was to remove one button from the job's main toolkit. Even if you ignore Shoha/Shoha II and Senei/Guren (because those only matter in AOE situations) you could still make Ikishoten turn into Namikiri (which already turns into Kaeshi Namikiri). This doesn't happen for Iaijutsu/Tsubame-gaeshi either so they also could be combined into a sequential single button press.

- Kaiten being removed 'makes sense because it was a button you always press' was something I previously thought was a better justification, but it really doesn't when playing the class now. Basically instead of pressing Kaiten before each Iaijutsu you now press Shinten/Kyuten whenever possible (or save up Kenki to spam in a burst window if you want to optimize it.) This was also the justification for things like Enochian and Blood of the Dragon being changed to traits (which I agree with) but the difference is those were buttons you would literally only press once as long as you were doing your rotation fine (or after transition/untargetable phases.) And as a friend of mine said, "this game is full of buttons you always press!" With this logic why doesn't SE remove Ikishoten, increase Kenki generation and put Namikiri on a 60s CD?

- The compensation for Kaiten's removal being potency increases across the board and making Iaijutsu skills always crit is mediocre in practice. Ostensibly this is to help smooth out the high-end damage range due to crit luck, but the result is a weird situation where a basic GCD crit direct hit can do more damage than Midare now. Yoshi-P apparently said that the auto-crits will allow for more freedom in design and prevent party composition from being too fixed but all this did was make SAM stop synergizing with crit comps, leading to the other melee DPS looking even shinier. Also, if button bloat can be "fixed" with potency changes, why not just remove Namikiri and add its potencies to our basic GCDs? Why not just calculate the potency over a minute and remove every skill, replacing them with a 60s CD that does that potency???

Anyway this turned into a rant so tldr: SAM morphing into one button murder hobo, DPS rotations less complex than Fell Cleave spam by 8.0 and that's bad