I've never felt compelled to make a forum post. I set up my account specifically for this. Kaiten was a core part of SAM, but I decided I'd give it a shot. I ran the new dungeon and an experts. It feels like trash. It isn't satisfying.

Ninja's identity isn't just the Ninjutsu buttons like Hyosho or Raiton, it's the Mudras you have to press to get there. Mudras are just 'the buttons you press before Ninjutsu', but removing them would be idiotic. Kaiten is the same. It's the flourish an anime character does before they do the cool iaijutsu move. The sound, feeling, and literal, visual aspect of Kaiten flowing into Iai or Ogi was essential to job identity. Weaving Kaiten was the thing you had to learn for SAM, like learning Mudras for Ninja.

SAM requires no thought. I might as well remove the kenki bar from my screen, because god knows I don't need it anymore. Press shinten when the button lights up. It's that easy. Save-for-20 wasn't much, and neither was knowing to press shinten at 45 for a safe kaiten afterwards, but god damn it was something. It was what SAM had. It added a little spice of braincell usage that made pulling things off satisfying. It wasn't even hard. Without that difficulty, there is no satisfaction. Midare is just an animation that sounds kinda cool, and ogi namikiri is just that button I press every two minutes that does look cool. But looking cool and being satisfying are two different things. SAM is no longer satisfying. It doesn't matter how cool it looks. And even then, it actively looks less cool in the first place, without Kaiten.

Give Kaiten back. Give Kaiten the auto-crit for all I care, and keep the more stable DPS. We have five unnecessary buttons. I counted. Shoha-shoha2, iai-tsubame, senei-guren, iki-oga, and throw shinten-kyuten in there for good measure. These could all be merged. Five whole buttons freed up. And the job does not change. Kaiten is one button that has stirred up considerable backlash from the community. Removing it has not made my action bloat go down, it hasn't made the job easier, and it hasn't made almost anybody happy. I pray to god all of this change feedback makes it through to the devs, because SAM feels like trash to play. It went from my melee main to dissatisfying and therefore boring with a single button gone.