Do these devs even play their own game?

[HolyReign]

That's incredibly reductive.

Sure if you break it down to simply the effect, then you are correct, but Kaiten had more subtle implication. Since you needed Kenki to cast it, it meant you had to manage your kenki to make sure you had enough going into your burst phase to buff all your Iaijutsus. Now, you have Ikishoten to give you the Kenki for your 2 min Kenki spender, so the only real use for Kenki is Shinten. There's no longer any need to manage kenki cause it's only real use is now a single skill. They could remove Kenki and just give Shinten a stack system and it'd be the same as the current state of SAM.

Couple that to the feel of using the skill, which a lot of player enjoyed and I can definitely see why SAM mains are upset. The EW changes to kenki cost and the removal of Seigan already dumbed down Kenki management, but this latest changes completely gets rid of it, which means a lot of layers of complexity some SAM players used to enjoy have been removed.

Sounds like removing the skill, made the job a bit less complex to play, which with people who equate "Difficulty." with "Work." seem it would please more people, than upset. SE has been doing this to a lot of this games content, making it easier, making it so newer players find it less stressful when playing a game, and more uplifting for those who want nothing more than to login and enjoy a laidback experienced opposed to managing points.

[rewd]

Ok, regardless, 2.0 summoner was a poison DoT mage with the summons feeling tacked on.

Each expansion after started leaning more heavily on the summoning aspect, but they kept adding more and more clunk with the different systems not really being connected. The summoning always felt like a secondary part of the job. There aren’t many jobs in the final fantasy series as iconic outside of jobs like white mage, black mage, paladin and dragoon.

That being said, the expansion stripped away most of the original class/job, while not adding enough to make it a unique job.

Ok, and the SMN that was reworked to become 6.0 SMN was the 5.X one. What an iteration of almost a decade ago has to do with anything, I don't know.

This job doesn't need more disinformation.

[Manofpassion]

Sounds like removing the skill, made the job a bit less complex to play, which with people who equate "Difficulty." with "Work." seem it would please more people, than upset. SE has been doing this to a lot of this games content, making it easier, making it so newer players find it less stressful when playing a game, and more uplifting for those who want nothing more than to login and enjoy a laidback experienced opposed to managing points.

Depends on the move really. Imagine if sage had kardia removed and it just autoapplied to the tank with the highest enmnity. Or if astro had their cards gutted even more, or if warrior lost fell cleave. For better or worse, the game developers have designed moves deemed iconic by the community, intentional or no. Gutting trick or removing kaiten just shows how out of touch the devs are in that they don't even know what moves the players like imo. But if some forgettable moves were removed, say idk, curing waltz or anatman, there will be a lot less uproar. If the designers didn't want players to get attached to a move, then quite frankly they shouldn't have added it in the first place. That is their error, not ours, and they are the ones we are paying to balance this stuff and let us have fun.

Furthermore, if they want to make the classes easier and more approachable, there are many things higher on the priority list. Machinist's and ninja's ping problems. Freecure and enhanced benefic being just actual traps for new players. Pneuma being a poorly designed hot despite it being a 600 potency heal for whatever reason. The list goes on. I don't have much sympathy for the devs faffing about and changing jobs that no one asked to be changed instead of actually fixing their game. We're asking them to do their job properly instead of wasting their own time and resources. The general manager of ffxiv needs to be fired imo, what a waste of their own budget, especially if you consider that ninja and Sam will probably have to be changed again in a later patch. They're pissing away their own money lmao

[Kazamaiya]

So, because I'm not in a panic over this skill being removed, means that I am detached and exhibiting uncharacteristic feelings that I should have, because every gamer is under the same mindset, and varying opinions aren't a thing?

But I am interested in what makes you feel that Kaiten being removed, has ruined SAM gameplay? Because to me, no longer having an ability that increases the players next weapon ability's potency, hasn't fundamentally ruined the job's gameplay.

Now if I was around back in SHB days, and I played SCH, and they removed a multi-functional ability that was both a DPS skill and Self-Heal, then yeah, I'de be annoyed.

Comparing the two abilities, one (ED) provides damage, healing and a more engaging dps rotation for a job that has very little damaging options to a skill (K) that allows someone to hit harder with single follow up attack.

Apples and Oranges.

Fundamentally and numberwise it hasn't changed all that much. However, the job's feel, suspense and impact has been reduced to a lot of people. Kaiten has always been sort of seen as an iconic ability for Samurai, having a cool animation to wind up your next big hit, managing the resource and doing it just right.
It FELT more satisfying to pull off, couple that with the change being quite sudden, the reasoning we got from the Developers being quite shoddy (as there were better and easier options of reducing this button bloat), messing with the muscle memory some people have had for about 5 years, removing a satisfying way of managing your resource (as the resource management has been reduced to spamming one button instead of actually having to think about it), and to top it all of, the changes (not just the removal of Kaiten) makes the job less desirable in higher end content due to it no longer having synergy with other classes in the game which provide crit buffs, along with nerfing our big hits a very substantial amount.

The suspense is gone, the management of resources is gone, the cool animation is gone, the rotation has lost something, the numbers on the big finishers have gone down quite a bit too so it's less satisfying

Above all, the job just FEELS less involved and FUN than it used to be. It's a lot more about how it FEELS and not just the function of the skill.

Also to note on your belief that the Devs will fix things, they won't know what to fix unless the community gives them feedback and it has time and time again shown. Primary example being Living Dead, which took almost 7 years of people constantly criticizing the fundamentally frustrating and broken skill before they finally did something with it in this patch.

[Grimoire-M]

Sounds like removing the skill, made the job a bit less complex to play, which with people who equate "Difficulty." with "Work." seem it would please more people, than upset. SE has been doing this to a lot of this games content, making it easier, making it so newer players find it less stressful when playing a game, and more uplifting for those who want nothing more than to login and enjoy a laidback experienced opposed to managing points.

I don’t even play the job and I understand it’s about flavor just as much as anything else. Job-specific mechanics are one of the primary ways to accomplish that. Kaiten at its core was more unique than any other Kenki ability.

Dumbing down the game by making all classes play the same and all fights work the same makes the game less interesting overall. Surprise, people like variety. Some of us just recognize that applies to more than just glamour and graphics.

[Quor]

Yes I've never played this game, I just made a Forum account last year, just to make things up.

That Job and Level is just a classic magic trick, smoke and mirrors and nothing more...

It's like walking up to a person with ice cream on their face, and saying, "You've never had ice cream before."

Good grief.

Functionally, you have barely beat the tutorial.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...564/class_job/

There's your Lodestone character profile, sorted by job and class level. You have Bard at 51 and that's it. Maybe you have an alt character, maybe you don't, but as of now it looks like you're lying to us about the experience you have because you haven't even beaten the ARR post-patch quests much less seen how SAM plays at the end-game. Or even at all, since SAM has not been unlocked for you yet.

In short, what you are saying in this thread is a poor attempt at trolling.

[Engaru]

I guess a big indicator as to if the devs play their own game or not should have been the Healer changes for Shadowbringers, 1 button for DPS, 1 for a DoT and and AoE is pretty much all they have now.

If they really want to simplify the buttons for controllers so badly they could've just made it optional to have things like your 1-2-3 combo on 1 button or 3 separate buttons, just give people a choice and don't just remove fan favourite skills from jobs willy-nilly.
At this point I'm not entirely unconvinced that they choose skills based on a number of notes on a dart board and just threw a dart on there blindfolded to see what needs to go next.